Digital Musings

Netscape Navigator - Rest In Peace.

After a long haul of 13 years, AOL has finally decided to discontinue any further development and technical support for Netscape Navigator, the first commercial browser on the internet. The support would be ON till 1st Feb ‘08. AOL, the owners of Netscape have decided to develop Netscape as an advertising business instead of the development and maintenance of the software. The software would be available for use, but there would be no further security or software updates. The small pool of users who still use Netscape are advised to download and use Mozilla FireFox instead.

“While internal groups within AOL have invested a great deal of time and energy in attempting to revive Netscape Navigator, these efforts have not been successful in gaining market share from Microsoft’s Internet Explorer,” Netscape Director Tom Drapeau wrote in a blog entry Friday.

The decline of Netscape navigator started in 2002, when Microsoft saw a huge potential in the Web Browser market and started giving out Internet Explore, as a bundled package with the Windows Operating System. Netscape initially developed on a platform called as Mosaic, the internet very first browser, that could display both images and text at the same time. It went through various updates, and the latest version was Netscape 9.0. However the present Netscape version was just a skin of Netscape on the Firefox platform. This showed that AOL had stopped working on development of the software further.

The Web Browser Usage statistics for November 2007 are:

Browser usage in Nov 2007

[Stats Source:W3Schools]

As we can see, Netscape isn’t mentioned in the list of browsers being used. The current approximate usage of Netscape Navigator is about 0.6%.

I would actually miss Netscape Navigator, as I currently use it to experiment with all the Firefox add-ons and various tool-bars. If I find them useful, I incorporate them in Firefox. But now that Netscape would stop any further security and software updates, many of the add-ons wouldn’t work with Netscape navigator.

However,AOL has decided to keep the archived version of Netscape Navigator online and Netscape website would continue as a online portal.

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Posted in Internet, News | 3 Comments »

Get AVG 7.5 Pro Version for free -Also the AVG Free and Pro versions compared.

Looking to get the AVG Professional 7.5 anti virus for free?…Read on…

Computer-Active along with Girsoft,the company behind the highly popular Anti-Virus AVG, is giving away free copy of AVG Anti- Virus 7.5 version, for free. AVG is one of the most popular and successful Anti-Virus softwares on the internet, largely because the free version of the AVG Anti-Virus has a very good track record of PC security.

The AVG Pro version costs $29.95 for a yearly subscription. This news got out on the internet quite soon and a lot of guys started the download. This has slowed down their servers almost to a stand still. The file size is 37 MB, so might take a bit of time as the servers have slowed down, due to multiple simultaneous downloads. Our friends at Ghacks, recommend using a download manager to download it, as if the download breaks in between, you would need to start all over again. They have also mentioned, if you are having a hard time downloading the file, some mirrors have been posted at Cybernet news which is a respected site. These download links however point to RapidShare and MegaUpload, so download it from these links if you are comfortable with these file sharing websites.

I have used AVG pro edition before and currently have the Free version, after the License expired. So now, I can move back to full version, hopefully for one full year or two, but they haven’t mentioned this in the promotion. However when I compared these two editions, I found the Free version quite competitive to the Full version.

A complete comparison between the Professional and Free edition is given below.

AVG Professional VS AVG Free Anti Virus:

When you look at these features carefully, you can see, there isn’t much missing in the Free version and hence its so popular.

Few features that can be deemed as missing are:

1)Technical Support: Free version doesn’t get tech support, but there is enough help in the Forums.

2)Update Servers: Updates for Pro version are though High speed servers, and Free version are left out to non-priority servers. But hey, thats not much of a problem huh!

3)Language Support: Language support for Free version is only in English, again not much of a problem!

4)Windows 64 Support: Support for Windows 64 bit isnt available - Well if you have Windows 64 bit, its better to get the Pro version, especially now that its free!

5)Intrusion detection: Detection of potentially unwanted Programs isn’t there…If we get AVG to do that too, What would the Anti Spyware and Firewalls do…again not much of a disadvantage.

6)Schedules: Scheduled Update and Scanning isnt flexible in free as its in Professional version. Not a big concern.

7) User Defined Tests: Well If you are good enough to understand User defined testing, you would go for the Pro version any way!

8)Resident Shields: AVG Resident shields absence is a bit of concern, but things can be managed, if you don’t frequently visit Warez and Crack sites.

9)Alternate update server: Well we can always update later in Free version. In Pro however, you have alternate download servers. useful in a Virus attack situation. Kinda rare though.

10)Tests results analysis: Professional gives advanced analysis, Free version just gives Basic reports.

I think after comparing and analyzing these features,one can say AVG Free Version is up to the task. The professional version, is for guys who are more in the favor of complete peace of mind.

So would you go for the Professional version, now that its free. Or stick to Good old AVG Free edition?

Posted in Internet, News, Popular, Software | 13 Comments »

New Google Reader Feature criticized-Deemed as invasion of privacy!

Google has an incredible collection of user data. You trust Google with your name, contact information, address book, phone numbers and if you trust google with your eyes closed, your financial data as well. When you are online, almost certainly you would log in to your Google account to use their services better, so they have record of your online activity, which sites you visit, which ads you click on and which products you read about. This helps them target better ads and you see the ads are most relevant to you. There is no arguing, on the internet, which is such a huge place in itself, providing you with targeted content is a commendable job. Everyone has accepted it and many swear by it.

Privacy advocates have been opposing the Google-DoubleClick merger and Microsoft appealed to the US Senate panel to stop this deal from going through.As far as online privacy is concerned, you may not want to disclose your name for personal or business reasons, or not show your online activity to anyone else. You may like to share stuff with friends, but there are also things that you would rather keep private. So if at this moment Google jumps in and discloses one part of your account to all your contacts? Not even bothering to ask you, just lay it out in the open.

So How did Google breach your Privacy?

What I am talking about here is the new Google reader feature that allows you to share your feeds with your friends. I think its a good feature, if you have a network of friends, who read similar stories and news. Its adds a bit of Social Flavor to the Google reader.

But what if you are using a Google account that you have used to interact with several people, just for correspondence?
3 days ago I corresponded with “some guy” about”something”, that doesnt make him my friend, and since I have exchanged mails with him, Google assumes he is a friend and adds my shared data to his feed reader. In a way he is reading stuff he isn’t supposed to and gets an idea about my online activity! This is the major complaint by many Google Reader users.This invoked a lot of criticism from some readers.

Some Comments on the new feature:

The Google Reader Help started a thread, where the Google reader users vented out their anger. Felipe Hoffa has recorded some interesting comments in his Slash Dot Journal. I found a few amusing so I have listed them below:

“This is a terrible idea, and a violation of privacy, and it contradicts your own documentation”. “Please don’t turn the best feed reader on the web into the shittiest social network on the web.”

“Please fix this and let us OPT IN to who we want to share with. PLEASE. Don’t make me leave my Google Apps!!”

“I have parents, relatives, business associates, all who use Gmail, in my contact list, and the only way to not share with them is to remove the contact? That’s INSANE.”

“I find the “social networkization” of Google’s services unattractive, and unfortunately, I can’t really opt-out of them.”

“I’m complaining because the articles I shared with my wife are now shared with my entire contact list, with no warning. In fact, this is precisely the worst sort of violation of privacy.”

Whew! There may be many reasons why anyone wouldn’t want to share, stuff one subscribers to. The main reason for this very vocal criticism was that Google brought this feature in as a surprise, with no opt out option.

Google has a very good reputation dealing with the privacy of their users.Its number one on my “Internet’s Most trusted Companies List”. They have been known to fix privacy related glitches in a blink of an eye, and have always worked hard towards maintaining the user privacy. But a new feature recently launched by them, really rocked their boat.

Google has a very well defined privacy policy. You can read it here. It clearly states that, “When you sign up for a particular service that requires registration, we ask you to provide personal information. If we use this information in a manner different than the purpose for which it was collected, then we will ask for your consent prior to such use.” Although Google hasnt actually violated privacy, because there isnt any defined rule under which this data falls, the closest description about sharing of your personal data in their Privacy Policy is here.

But The Google Team has come out with an answer, unfortunately after about a week of criticism, but things will get back to normal now. They have introduced a feature via which you can better manage who sees your shared feeds.

You can now share the various tags under which you have saved the feeds, or can choose to keep them private.

Also, you can now, clear all you shared items or, can move them to a specific tag, which you would like to share from now on.

This isn’t actually a privacy violation, except for a few people, who would not like to share items on their feed reader. And now with these new features, they can control, who can see their feeds. So I guess, Google actually saved the day by responding to these complaints quickly. Enjoy using the Google reader, Its one of the best online feed readers around!

Would you be concerned if the feeds you read are shared without your consent? Do you think Google invaded your privacy by making all you feeds public?

Posted in Google, News, Online Services, Social Networking | 6 Comments »

Digg For Sale: $300 Million, Any buyers?

It was in November that I first read about Digg.com being put up for sale.However this rumor quickly died down. But now after about a month its come up in the open that Digg is has put up a price tag of $300 million and has hired Allen and Company which specializes in Media deals to find buyers.

Allen & Company traditionally uses an “event” to do what it terms “direct research” on potential buyers and sellers, then inserts itself as banker. You can read more about how they do it, here.

I found the news about Digg being on sale, quite amusing as recently I have read a lot of stuff about Digg, that tells me, lot of people, specially top diggers, are unhappy with Digg. I am a regular Digg user but haven’t been a very active member.Maybe I started using Digg, when it has passed its golden period.

There have been many strong reactions all over the blogosphere about this proposed sale. Some of the Top Diggers I know have actually opposed this sale and suggested anyone who might be interested not to buy Digg. Tamar of Techipedia.com, is one of the Top 40 Digg users. You can see the list of Top Digg users here.

On Digg community is everything:

Like any other social networking website, on Digg you can form your own community of fellow Diggers, who have similar taste as yours and share news and stories. This was the initial idea behind Digg. Although now a days, instead of a wide range of users opinion, some top users can drive a story to the front page where it gets maximum attention. So the reigns of a particular story or website and the consequent traffic generated is in hands of some Top Diggers.

From Democracy to Oligarchy to Autocracy?

Digg has always been seen as a reliable source of informative stories, mostly about technology, with the backing of user generated content. This was the “hit” formula which made Digg so popular. Its was all Democratic atmosphere. Later, as Digg became more and more popular, it was targeted by spammers to gain traffic. The quality of content went down. Also many of the Front Page stories were the ones submitted by a specific set of Top Diggers. A few guys started influencing the content which wasnt exactly “bad”, as most of these guys were hardcore Digg users, and mostly brought forward good posts. But not all, submitted quality content. As it is true or all social networks, popular Diggers got more friends and had a good following, due to which stories submitted by specific users got more exposure than others and some good stories were left behind. As some like to call it, It became an “Editors Playground”

Digg has some rules about how the content is submitted, and if a users submits a potential Front Page story, he should get the proper credit. Thats the reason for the Duplicate Story Filter. Now these rules are for all users new and old alike. But is the owner of the website exempt from them? Read on, to know How Kevin Rose is actually free from these rules!

Digg’s Popularity Decreasing?

Since I started using Digg seriously, I have seen its traffic decrease steadily and the traffic related ranks go down. Does this mean Digg is becoming less popular? Not necessarily, some may argue, but there has been a lot of discontent in the Digg community and lot of users have stopped using Digg. Some have taken refuge with other bookmarking sites like, Mixx and ShoutWire. Digg receives less traffic, as compared to same period last year. The graph from Alexa.com shows the trend.

I dont know if this is a technique to pacify the Digg users who have been banned, or a Publicity stunt, but the Mixx.com community has a section named Digg Refugees. TechCrunch has an interesting post about it here. This is also one of the reasons why Kevin Rose is having difficulty finding interested buyers at the price tag he has specified.

Kevin Rose: Where art thou?

I have always seen Kevin Rose as an idea guy. After all he came up with something as innovative as Digg. Kevin is considered as a poster boy for the Web 2.0 crowd with his name listed in the Forbes Top 25 Web Celebrities list. There has been a lot of account banning activity in the past few days, and a lot of people are not very happy about it. Is all this happening with your knowledge,Kevin? What happened to the community spirit?

As Tamar as quoted on her blog:
Just remember, Digg and Kevin Rose: you built the platform. We, however, built the success. You can turn your backs on us if you want to, but don’t expect to get things done the way you want it to be.

Tamar has written about how her friends who were hardcore Digg users got their accounts banned and why she is losing faith in this system? If you want o understand how healthy a website is, ask its users and they would tell you whats happening. At present they diagnose Digg not to be in healthy spirits.

Another interesting fact that she brought fore was, How the account of a 17 year old kid was banned because he created a Digg-FaceBook group saying its an attempt to launch an attack, and after a few days Kevin himself created a FaceBook group which got more than 1000 votes. The story with screen shots can be found here.

Digg, Auto Bury: Reality or Myth?

Now this is one scary feature on Digg. There exists a list on the Digg servers which has names of sites and their urls, which would get buried after submission. Digg has always denied about censoring content. They say its a user driven website and only other users can bury Digg stories. So is it your jealous competing blogger who is burying your stories or, its the system thats stealthily working against you?

Here are some interesting stories about Digg’s auto burying system . One of the most read blogs about Copywriting, Brian Clarks CopyBlogger is on the list. He has written about it saying Ding-Dong-Digg-Is-Dead.

Another famous Blog Pronet Advertising attests to this fact with evidence, that Digg is censoring content.

Dont get me wrong, I have been an active participant on Digg since last few months, but its now I understand the system properly and have started communicating with other Digg users. No wonder Digg is so addictive. Its a really cool concept, and if you get involved and give enough time to it, you would get hooked as well.

With all this going on would an interested party go for it and buy Digg or seeing all this commotion in the community that drives it, stay away?

So What is your opinion?

As a user driven website, Digg has really taken a path which leads to absolute Rule and only the content that they want would go to the Front Page. I think this would really suck as the whole democracy idea totally takes a backseat. Do you think this might change in the future or something can be done about it. After all we are also a part of the Digg community, would you see it deteriorate like this?
Please let everyone know whats your opinion in the comment section!

Digg is a phenomenal revolution is UGC, that has opened an entire dimension to the world. But the fact remains that there is just an inequity that haunts it.Reddit and Netscape as well had these problems.

Digg is great in that it is positive, but the bias towards top users and friends have left many great stories with just a few diggs because the submitter did not have many contacts. Do you think these are the problems plaguing Digg?

Posted in Internet, News, Social Networking | 8 Comments »

New Feature in Google Reader: Share Feeds with friends on GTalk

Do you use the Google Reader? Do you have a lot of friends on G-Talk? Then you  might find this interesting. Today when I opened my Google reader a new pop-up came up telling me now its possible to share my feed items with friends on GTalk. I have been using the Google reader for quite some time now and I have seen it evolving and integrating features like getting its own search option, providing the feed count via Feedburner ( a good feature to track number of subscribers to ones blog) and Google Reader International versions ( French and Japanese).

If you are new to this whole sharing business, let me explain it in brief. Google Reader automatically creates a public page for any items that you mark as “shared.” You can also choose to create public pages for your starred items, or for items you have marked with a particular tag. If you decide to share some feeds with your friends, all you need to do is click on the share link at the bottom of the post and the icon turns orange indicating that now the feed is being displayed on the shared page, and is visible to friends on your Gtalk list. To view which posts have been shared till now, you can click on the shared items link (on left sidebar of the reader) and it would display your public page, with the shared posts.

Also, you can decide while setting up the sharing feature, which friends can see the public page. If its shared, it doesn’t mean everyone on the list can see that page. If you like you can share information just with your close friends or co-workers. If you want a fresh start you also have an option to erase previous sharing history. How about that?

This is an interesting feature and can be put to good use, if you have a decent social network, especially on IM clients.
I had written about growing one’s social network through IM Network some time back, and I was able to get acquainted with some really famous bloggers like Daniel from DaliyBlogTips, Fred Peters from Newestonthenet and Maki from Dosh Dosh. Also I have a lot of fellow bloggers who share a lot of stuff common to our niche through various social networking sites. However if one is on IM, you would get to share stuff in real time.

I just cant stress enough the importance of being on top of things in your niche by being the first one to blog about a certain topic. Yesterday I wrote about the Yahoo Shortcut WordPress plugin, immediately after it was released. Now that post ranks 11th in Google results along with blogs like Weblog Tools Collection and Read Write Web and I have received more than 300 unique visitors to that posts already.

Now a days, the RSS feeds have penetrated almost every aspect of the internet and now they are making their way into Instant Messaging, the original social networking tool. I have always been an IM fan as I like to do things in real time. So I guess this would be quite useful for me to share stuff with my fellow bloggers.

Can you think of any other use this can be put to? Would you start using this feature?

Posted in Google, News, Online Services, Social Networking | No Comments »

Gmail adds two new features - Group Chat and New emoticons

Today when I opened my Gmail Inbox I saw a new red link indicating addition of two new features on Gmail. One is Group chat and other is graphic emoticons.

Group Chat Feature:

This feature would allow anyone to start a chat with one of their contacts and then invite any number of people to join in.To start a group chat click on options at left bottom corner and select group chat. Similarly,to invite a person one needs to click options on left bottom corner of the chat window and select the option add a person to this chat.
There is no limit to the number of people that can join in. If you have 5 people in the group chat from your friends list, each one of them can then invite people from their list. So this can become something like a big chat room.

New Gmail Emoticons:

Keeping the popular trend in mind, Gmail has now adopted new set of emoticons. Previously Gmail only provided the regular smileys, though they were animated, they didnt look pretty. Now they have added an options to send emoticons. Two sets of different emoticons have been provided. One Circular and one Square.

The images above show the Original Gmail smiley set and the Two new Circular and Square Smiley sets added to the service. I am sure these two features may add some flavour and activity to our usual G-Talk sessions! Say Cheese -

Posted in Google, Innovation, News | 4 Comments »

New avenue to monitize content - Ads in Adobe PDF by Yahoo.

Adobe and Yahoo Publisher Networks have announced a new advertising avenue for Publishers called as “Ads for Adobe PDF Powered by Yahoo!” Till date Adobe had not included any ads in their pdf platform. If a publisher wanted to include Ads, he would need to manually put banner ads and then publish the PDF file. But now with this new advertising network, they can get contextual ads in their PDF documents.

So how does it work?

According to Yahoo Biz News, publishers first need to register an account and then upload their PDF documents to the Adobe website. Once processed, they can then download the document from Adobe, but now the PDF document is Ad enabled. Now when the document is opened, it would serve contextual ads, through the YPN.

To see an example of a PDF Document with Contextual Advertising visit Cnet

Good News for E-Book Publishers:

This is actually a good news for Ebook publishers. Now they can serve contextual ads instead of traditional ads in their E-books or E-Report. One good feature is if anyone prints the document the ads don’t get printed. Oh yes there is one limitation, with which not many people would be happy. This is only limited to US based publishers with English content. I hope they remove this soon and make it available for everyone.

According to Reuters: It’s already been in private beta; the public test is expected to last for several months. So I don’t think this would be available to everyone soon. It would be interesting to observe how this new platform performs.

Do you think serving Ads in PDF files is a good idea?

Posted in Advertising, News, Yahoo | 9 Comments »