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Why the Summify shutdown pissed me off?
Before I left on my trip last week TechCrunch reported that Summify announced that it was being bought by Twitter. I had started using Summify for a few weeks now and it was my goto place in the mornings to catch up on popular news. Earlier, I used to weed through my Twitter feed but having a service that filters and curates content is wonderful. So, while going through the TechCrunch story I started thinking…Wow, that is awesome for the founders and the VCs that have invested in the company.
If Twitter can use the Summify engine and build the service into Twitter then that would be fantastic.
I read some more and noticed…
This sounds like a talent acquisition on Twitter’s part — in other words, the main purpose of the acquisition was probably hiring the Summify team. Some of Summify’s feature have been immediately disabled, it’s no longer accepting new users, and in a few weeks, Summify says it will shut down the current product entirely. Meanwhile, the startup will be moving from Vancouver to San Francisco to work out of the Twitter office.
My reaction was - damn, these guys sold out to Twitter and don’t care about their users. Something here was not right. Sure, if Summify went belly up then the service would be shut down. But, willingly killing the service is not cool.
This got me thinking about what we would do if someone wanted to buy out DeskAway. If DeskAway is getting a bigger, better home then why not. If they are going to kill the app then a big NO NO. If they are going to pay me to kill the app - then even a bigger NO NO. That would be complete injustice to our users who rely on the service each day.
Luckily, we are not investor-backed (by choice) and do not have the pressure to sell or go IPO. Definitely, not at the cost of our current users.
If Twitter bakes Summify into its service then this acquisition makes a lot of sense. Until then I am going to check out News.me.
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On traveling and being offline
My wife and I are huge travel buffs (we usually try to take off every 4 months). Traveling is our passion - we catch ourselves planning a trip while we are on our current trip. It is just our way to make sure we lead a well-balanced, exciting life - especially since we live in one of the world’s busiest cities, Mumbai. After every few months, the city and the Internet (since I run a web biz) just gets to you.
We recently just got back from Dubai and I feel completely rejuvenated - though it was a bit hectic with our fourteen-months-old daughter (life revolves around her now :)) the rejuvenation I mention is basically being disconnected from the online world.
During my trip…
1. I didn’t get a local SIM with data.
2. Hence, I didn’t have data services while we were away from the hotel (mostly all day).
3. Checked my mail at the hotel twice - once in the morning and once late evening.
4. Pushed out a few twitter messages for things I was excited about e.g. Starbucks (sadly we don’t have one in India), Caribou Coffee or car spotting etc.
5. No Facebook.
6. No tech reading. I have a fully loaded instapaper account but I just didn’t feel like diving into tech, web, social media etc.I am back and feel completely fresh. Best of all, I don’t think I have missed a thing except (my friend Manish pointed out) for the recently over-the-top Apple results.
So, it seems that most of the time we are either wasting time either obsessively checking our mail, social networks or reading articles (and thinking it is work). Try to go semi-offline for a while - even during weekends. This therapy is something that is badly needed in today’s 24/7 connected world.
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A look at my re-designed business card in the form of a tweet. I wanted to design something different, bold and unique - basically non-corporate-ish.
The color in the above photo is a bit different than the actual color on the card.
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Why I moved from Posterous to Tumblr…
This blog was with posterous for 2 years now. They are a great publishing platform and the DeskAway blog is still hosted there. Over the weekend I was reading Joel’s blog (BufferApp founder) and started looking at all the stuff that he had on his blog - Social widgets, disqus comments, the slide etc. At first I thought he was on WP. I DM’ed him and he told me that he was on Tumblr.
Ironically, this blog was initially hosted on Tumblr (sometime back in 2008), then moved to WP and then to Posterous.
I checked out Tumblr once again and checked out what they had to offer. I read a few articles that compared Posterous with Tumblr. A few of the top reasons for this move are the following:
1. Javascript: Tumblr’s support for Javascript. This is huge since you can add cool widgets (latest tweet, social icons etc.) to your site.
2. Disqus: since Tumblr supports Javascript, adding the disqus commenting platform was a no-brainer.
3. Themes: Tumblr, by far has much much better themes than Posterous.
I spent a few hours choosing and editing my theme. BTW, Tumblr’s HTML editor rocks. Here is a picture while I was updating some styles:
I used Posterous’s autopost feature to move my blogs overs to Tumblr and then went through each blog post and updated the post date. Once everything was good to go I updated the A Record with my Registrar and waited for a day to have www.sahilparikh.com point to Tumblr.
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Software is important stuff; it keeps the world moving. No car, no television set, not even a modern toaster works without some code. Take corporate computer programs away, and the economy comes to a grinding halt. In some cases software has changed how humans behave; spreadsheet programs, for instance, have redefined more than one job.
— The Economist
