Author: SeeJay

SeeJay http://seejay.net http://twitter.com/seejay https://github.com/seejay http://newsbeat.io

Welcome to User Centric!

U-S-E-R(This is the post I wrote introducing UserCentric in the official blog at blog.u-s-e-r.com)

Hey all! Welcome to the first official post on the User Centric blog! So… what exactly is User Centric??? I truly am glad you asked!

You know all those little complaints/ideas we share on social networks such as twitter, facebook etc. about the products/services we use, and get lost in the sands of time? of course you do! User Centric is the one place that you can share all those micro reviews and unlike normal social media sites, your user experience reviews will be organized nicely based on #Tags.
So what is the difference between traditional product review sites and User Centric? Three words, Ease of use! Most of us don’t have the time to write lengthy reviews on things that we use. But something that we all do is post micro reviews on social networks. We complain about the flaws in products, we post our ideas on features that we wish to see in our favorite products, Why not collect all our micro reviews on a product and organize them in one place so others can benefit from the tips we share? That is exactly why I built User Centric.
What we needed was a system that makes product reviewing fun hassle free! That is why I designed User Centric the way it is now. All you have to do is write your reviews starting with the product name as a #tag.
Review anything you use, one point at a time… Becoming a semi-pro product reviewer has never been so easy! 😀

You can check my reviews page on User Centric at http://u-s-e-r.com/seejay to see how organized UX reviews look like.
We are currently on private beta so if any of you want to grab your preferred username early, you can use the beta code “KyXnrTz” at the signup page. Just don’t tell anyone else! 😉
~SeeJay

Don’t mess with my Internet!

sobrave
The greatest thing about the internet is the fact that it belongs to all of us! No matter who you are, where you are from, We all have the freedom to choose where we’re headed! But now, the U.S. Congress is considering legislation that could seriously damage the fundamental structure of the Internet.
Tech giants like Wikipedia, Mozilla, Reddit, Google, and many more who actually care to protect the internet are against this. But obviously, there’s a bunch of money hungry politicians who are working towards this legislation in favour of a few organisations who think they’d rather break of the Internet than fixing their business models. This is downright evil! and should be fought against with all our strength!
This is why all of us who care to protect the internet should spread the word around and educate people to fight against the legislation of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA) Because if any of these get passed that would mean the end of the Internet as we know it.
Don’t let anyone mess with your Internet! Join the battle against SOPA/PIPA
(Picture courtesy of reddit)

How Dropbox Won

A couple of days ago, I came across something very interesting Dave Winer shared on twitter. It was a link to the application Drew Houston, the Dropbox founder submitted to YCombinator for their Summer 2007 cycle. I opened it out of curiosity and found it very interesting and thought provoking to read. Here’s is the answer from the application, to the  question: “What is your company going to make?”

“Dropbox synchronizes files across your/your team’s computers. It’s much better than uploading or email, because it’s automatic, integrated into Windows, and fits into the way you already work. There’s also a web interface, and the files are securely backed up to Amazon S3. Dropbox is kind of like taking the best elements of subversion, trac and rsync and making them “just work” for the average individual or team. Hackers have access to these tools, but normal people don’t…”

The moment I read this I realized how well Drew saw the future of his product way before even anyone else sees it. He had a very clear vision what the product is and how it’d help to solve what he waned to solve. And looking at the success of Dropbox, it’s obvious that he has executed his plan precisely. This sure is a winning mix. I’d be surprised if a product fails to achieve suceess with the founders having this kind of insight about what they’re going to do. I’m sure Paul Graham had his winning smile when he saw this one… well, here’s exactly what came to his mind when going through the Dropbox application Y Combinator received that summer…

125 points by pg 452 days ago | link

What happens when I read this:

File syncing. Superset of backups, which people will pay for. Good. Single founder. Bad. But at least he’s looking for more people. Went to MIT, 1600 SAT. Probably fairly smart. Wrote a poker bot. Now I’m starting to get interested; has the right attitude. Description of the software sounds plausible but generic. Maybe it’s good, but who can tell. But little sister uses it; that’s impressive. Scroll down to what he understands that competitors don’t get. Wow: very concise and unequivocal. I’m now basically sold. Scroll through the rest. No red flags. Did not make the usual joke single founders make when asked how long the founders have known one another. Good answer to what might go wrong. A-. (Would be an A with a cofounder.)

Very interesting indeed. It seems PG sure knows when he sees a killer idea and a brilliant mind behind it.
The application is full of very interesting questions like “What do you understand about your business that other companies in it just don’t get?”  and brilliant answers from the Dropbox founder. It’s really worth a read if you are a startup minded person and I strongly suggest that you answer yourself to this application for any products you are building.
Oh and btw, If you haven’t used Dropbox yet, Trust me! you have no idea what you are missing.
-SeeJay

The Reader

Wow! it’s been a long while since I typed anything here… 🙂 this is definitely a record duration and no, I’m not gonna start ranting on how twitter killed blogging for me or anything… to be frank, I didn’t even tweet that much, I did a little bit of tweeting, definitely not as much so that anyone would call me an addict of twitter… So a couple of days ago I actually went and changed my twitter bio from “microBlogging addict”, to “Information addict” 🙂 Err… an Information addict? you’d ask, yup! that’s what I am…

I finally realized what I spend most of my time on… I read! :-S I read like freaking all the time… I even get my dinner in front of the laptop reading some ebook or something from HN or reddit or slashdot… or some nerdy site with some awesome stuff you’ve probably never heard of.
So yeah! that’s what I do… I read, and I know things! 😉

23 years…

So here I am, back on blogging after a long silence. But this long break was not because of the fact that I didn’t have anything to write. I think its fair to say that it was because I had so much to say that I couldn’t really figure out how to manage them all in to this little blog of mine. There were so many interesting things happening around me. They’ll always be in my memories. (Naah! I’m pretty sure I won’t forget them. So no! you won’t be reading them here hehe!)

Also its been a crazy semester. Just finished the last paper of the 2nd year final exam yesterady and I think I’m feeling kind of relaxed now. It’s funny, when I looked forward at this moment few weeks ago I never thought I’d be able to happily blog about the end of the exam 🙂 But it went really well and I’m pretty satisfied with all the papers I had to answer. Considering all the crazy things I went through in the past few months I should be glad to be able to blog about it like this…

Anyways! yes! It’s my 23rd birthday today. I’m not quite sure what I’m feeling right now… But when I look back at the last round around the sun, I notice something different than the ones before. I see that I have learned so much about life on this ride. I saw how some things that seem to matter so much in our lives has no real meaning… I saw how easy it is for people to completely ignore the things that really matter in life… I saw how unexpected life can be… I realized that we should not be having too much expectations in life.

And also a really good outcome of all the problems I faced is that I got to make out the people around me. I realized who really cares about me, and who… well, lets say “doesn’t give a sh*t what happens” 😛 Not that I’ll be treating the latter party differently(being angry with people for too long is NOT something I’m very good at) But its good to know that they will not be there for me when I need them. I was glad to see that there were people who believed on me. People who cared about me even when I was not in the usual “guy who saves the day” mode. And I pity the poor souls who tried to enjoy the show when I was down. Hope they’ll be able to stick to the mentality that they did the right thing. 😛

So after all these incidents I’m still doing pretty fine to start the next year of my life. And this time with a little more knowledge about life 🙂 there’s a saying “You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face.” There were many of those moments in the past few months and I really gained strength from them. I will be facing good times and bad times as usual but I’ll know enough not to worry too much about any of them. I was having a great life with pretty much everything I really needed. I stupidly forgot that truth about me sometimes and I’ll try my best not to do that mistake again… because now I know, It’s good to be me! 😀
C.J.

Playing with pligg

So I had this idea for a small (i guess) project which uses a digg like voting system. So I installed the pligg cms and tried playing with it for some time and after two days I decided to go with its well known drupal based competitor drigg. Of course pligg is a good cms and I don’t necessarily mean to suggest that anyone shouldn’t use it. But it was a little too messed up. Atleast for me. 😐

The things I didn’t like in pligg includes the not so clean code, which requres to change dozen places when you need to do something as simple as switching a theme, The not so active development of the cms, unlike drupal which has a very powerful developer base. The not so open karma calculation, which obviously gonna be a PITA later on. And the not so friendly user support which is “known” not to listen to its users 😛 (which I did NOT experience btw)
So I switched to drigg and I’m glad I did 🙂 it’s drupal based and you can feel the cleanliness of the code 🙂 of course if you choose to do the manual installation it takes some time to configure the the modules needed to get drigg up and running, And you’re gonna need to know the basics of drupal, but it’s all fun and I don’t think it would be that hard to learn, even if you are completely new to drupal.

So now I’m tweaking the site and I might write a post on getting drupal+drigg up if I have enough time. And yes! of course I’ll reveal the project i’m working 😛 and if you people have any interest in Free Software you might even like it heehee. but that’s yet to see… 😉