Perspectives

Remember a little while ago, Google did India ? Now, it adds australia to it’s kitty. And this time, it is not just the map, but search (Geocoding) and driving directions as well. Australian maps are sweetly inter operable, that is, you can get to it from the .au site or the .com site. The header div in the Australian site is atrociously large (atleast on firefox) and hence the map div is quite small.

I am assuming the .au site is tolerable down under, because from here, it is quite slow. Another thought is, now that they are slowly making many corners of the world map-able under the same destination, shouldnt the frontpage be different for each of us? That is, if my IP is from India, Shouldnt I be seeing the India front map with sample queries for Indian addresses ?

Also, If maps.google.com.au is beta, and if the same map data is available via maps.google.com, how is that not beta ? Incidentally, the route to the Google’s sydney headquarters is itself turning up incorrectly.

By the way, here is an australian sample query for driving directions “2000 to bondi beach”. What kind of a place is 2000 ? Does it exist on the X/Y Plane? Or we are travelling back in time from the year 2000? I wonder!

But that apart, I noticed they are strangely blending something like the web results with the local search results. For instance, every second result for a query such as “undefined” is getting back stuff from I dunno where. Not from web search. Not even from Groups search. Do you have any idea ?

But once again, beautiful colors and gradients and the icons seem to merge well. The experience between US and AU maps is also seamless. Talking of seam, Check out the wonderful MCG(Melbourne cricket Ground) here

Pontiac underground
Originally uploaded by shivku.

Here is another Meta site (Should I say Mashup?) from Yahoo! Do you own a pontiac? Do you adore it ? Hate it? Wanna know what G8 brings with it ? Have videos? Images? Or do you have some time to kill ?

Go visit the Pontiac underground , a Special to all those Pontiac lovers from Yahoo! Autos. One of my close friends, anand played a big role in bringing this out. Congrats to him and to the entire Yahoo! Bangalore team.

Go drive.

I took this picture a real long time ago, From one of our Yahoo! offices in Bangalore. After an agonizing wait, Yahoo! India Ourcity is out and is doing good. Many people have already covered this and you could check it our for yourself and conclude about it’s worth.

What is cool is, this product was a hack to begin with and was taken to completion in style by my friends in Bangalore. It is a beautiful example of the hack culture that is catching up inside of Yahoo! and you can expect many more of these meta sites (Should I say , mashups?) out of Yahoo! in the time to come. Ourcity will also add your city (Chennai, Mumbai et al ) soon, so wait and watch.

The picture above exemplifies the sort of thing we are trying to do here as Yahoo! India. We are trying to get closer to India, closer in a way that you would love. Did you notice Yahoo India Frontpage now carries content in about half a dozen Indian languages ( Tamil, Hindi,etc ) ? There was a time when I used to disagree on localization of content in India. My claim was not all that incorrect either. Read on.

There are about 300 million Indians who can read and write in English. Technically, they should be able to consume Indian content in English too. We probably have about 50 million people online in India. The power users will be much less. So, we have scope for another 100 million people (Not sure how many years that will take) easily before we can claim the growth is hindered by language. I put forward this idea to Jimmy Wales when he was in India a while ago and he sort of seemed to agree.

But, since then, I have a different mind set. I am starting to see that Tamil content makes a lot more sense and carries originality when read in tamil. It instantly becomes closer to my heart and I somehow tend to like it. Maybe, it is just that I am not used to reading tamil online and the novelty of that fact attracts me. Maybe, I am unintentionally trying to improve my tamil reading skills. But one thing that changed my perspective was, I was introducing “The Internet” to my mother the other day and one of the first things she asked me was “Can I read Mangayar malar ( A tamil ladies only monthly ) online?”. That was a killer. I had to change my mind.

Either ways, I am pretty excited about this entire development. And I hoping more and more people will volunteer to not just translate content in a local language, but create real content with the end audience in mind. An article about Brad Pitt makes very little sense in Hindi, you would agree.

Computer for sale.. Send me a note
Originally uploaded by shivku.

This is my home (Chennai) computer, roughly about seven years old. It is a pentium celeron something Mhz, has about 30 G HDD and a 64 M RAM, comes with a CD ROM read/write and I can give you that white Numeric 0.5 Kva UPS for free. Price very negotiable. Let me know.

Tip: Why not buy this and gift it to your people at grandmother’s place in your hometown?

More For sale items coming soon…

Here is a killer feature. The good part of the blogosphere and the entire user controlled web is that, one pays little or no money to get PR. You have to be close and dear to the user. And if you are, people do the PR better and faster than you ever will. The virality is a win-win situation for both the User and the businesses. It works very well for the big G, decently well for Yahoo! and Microsoft, but is a dream come true for those small websites and services who cant afford to spend a whole lot on gaining traction. Here is one of that story.

Now, MapmyIndia could (I am sure they are, though! ) just concentrate on getting every road and building into their map. Alternatively, they could put their existing data to the best use. And that is what they are trying to do now. Are you throwing an open invite for your birthday party? Are you blogging about recent tensions in bangalore? Or maybe your last trip to sikkim? You can do it all with the map right there.

Super! So, btw, I lie here somewhere…