thinking is contagious

Another weekend project! http://bit.ly/n24juc

What is this?

Don’t you hate sending emails that you didn’t really mean to? Well, this app is a proof of concept of an idea I had to keep that form happening. You can pretty much send an email to someone and if you choose to, just retract it and the recipient will not see the content of the email you send them.

What does this form do?

This form will simply send you an email from me with the subject line and body that you entered.

How?

Ideally, there would be a place (either on my website or somewhere else) where you can unsend the email but for the purpose of this demo, the email you receive will have a link where you can retract the email. Simply hit that link and refresh your email window to see how the retracted email would look.

Welcome to BOL!

If you haven’t already, please visit the Chrome Store and install BOL extension - http://goo.gl/fV1zU

What is BOL?

BOL is a Google Chrome Extension that allows you to talk with other visitors to the sites that you like to visit.

How can I use BOL?

Just go to the chrome store (http://goo.gl/fV1zU) and install the extension to your browser. When you visit a site that you would like to talk to about, simply click the microphone icon next to the address bar and click ‘Discuss’. Allow permissions to access speakers and talk away. A badge on the microphone will update itself every time you visit a site as an indicator of how many people are discussing that page right now.

Why make BOL?

Comments, message boards and threads are so 90s. Why write about something when you can interact with the rest of the world live, right now! All of us are passionate about things. A band, movie, game, article, political party or even an individual’s Facebook profile. BOL makes it easier for us to discuss these topics with other individuals who share the same interests.

Why call it BOL?

Bol is a hindi word which means ‘to speak’.

What’s next?

BOL was originally made as an entry to Twilio’s Contest. It takes advantage of their Twilio Client services. As of now, the UI & UX of the extension isn’t where I’d like it to be; not to mention the overall product. As I gather feedback from the users of this app, I’ll make adjustments and continue to improve it.

If there’s anything I pride myself during my time at Tech, it’s the awards I won at the Hackathons I participated in. Both of my hacks were very well received by both, the judges and fellow participants but the one I worked on during the Facebook Hackathon attracted many follow up requests for a formal launch.

While I would love to crank out a formal Social Jukebox app with a better UI and a lot fewer bugs and crashes than the current version of the app, I’m afraid that my current schedule won’t allow me to do so. With that in mind, I decided to share what I did to develop the app and write about what I learnt from that process so that maybe someone else can pick it up and run with it. Read the rest of this entry »

Yahoo! indeed is the king of email. With close to 100 Million unique visitors to email accounts every month (more than 2x as much as GMail; more than AOL, GMail & Hotmail combined), it definitely is solving the need of a large population which keeps returning. But good business today doesn’t necessarily mean that business will be good in the future. Other email providers are catching up and it isn’t a good sign when a new communication service being developed by one of the most visited sites on the internet  (hint: Facebook) is considered to be a ‘GMail killer‘ and not a ‘Yahoo! killer’.

Read the rest of this entry »

Ever since my first semester at Tech I’ve wanted to maintain a blog of things that interest me. Mainly technical stuff that I found to be of outstanding value to my knowledge base. Well, after 5.5 years of trying and failing and retrying Read the rest of this entry »