By Shakti Salgaokar

Do you see the highlight on News Feed and the triangle on the Top Story? Nothing wrong with that, you say?

Those are not aligned… and it is irritating me to no end! It is terrible design. Why Facebook, why!!

There is nothing I can think of saying right now. Nothing at all. Thank you for pushing humanity forward, Steve. RIP

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important thing I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life, because almost everything–all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure–these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart. ~Steve Jobs

My email notifications for Facebook are already switched off. Therefore, by sending me a mail (that ironically saying they won’t send me too many mails), have they just spammed me?

What a paradox!

Here goes:

Ok so to start off with this phone is really no threat to the iPhone or for that matter even the Samsung Galaxy S-II but I would say it’s not bad considering the price tag. So here is what I like and I don’t like.

WHAT I LIKE:

1) This phone comes with Nokia’s new OS and a good processor which is quite efficient. The phone hardly ever lags so forget about hanging (it just happened that once when I tried connecting it to the computer and I still don’t know why it hanged). You can easily run 4-5 different things on the phone at the same time. Maybe it becomes a little slow with a low battery but it’s hardly anything really.

2) The thing that I and others really like is the uniqueness of the design of this phone. It’s a hassle removing the SIM card and the Memory Card because of the drawer like mini storage place given to it but once you get used to it, its pretty easy. Yes it’s a little bulky design-wise and a little difficult to hold sometimes but the look and feel pretty much make up for it.

3) The touch screen is brilliant. The colours are fairly vibrant and the black background looks classy. Considering the phone is almost 10-15k cheaper than the iPhone, the touch really does its job fabulously well. In fact, when I compared the touch of this phone to the iTouch – which has the same touch screen performance as the iPhone – it actually gave it a good run for its money.

4) The audio playback of this phone is also pretty good. I only used the normal earphones that come with the phones and the sound was nice and clear (again even when compared to the iTouch). The video playback, all though may not be as good as some of the other touch screen phones, is fairly decent. But then again this phone only has a screen with 360×640 pixel resolution compared to higher resolutions in other phones. Also even the loudspeaker is fairly clear and audible.

5) The QWERTY keypad is pretty easy to use. Even though I didn’t like it initially because it wouldn’t bring up the word I would want first, I did grow into liking it eventually. Swype technology is really fun [ed: I installed it before giving the phone to him] but even the normal typing mode is not a hassle at all once u get used to it.

WHAT I DONT LIKE:

1) My first and biggest complaint is the battery life of this phone. It barely lasted me 6 hrs and considering that I’m not all that heavy a phone user I’m guessing for a phone addict the battery life would come down considerably. With an audio output so good this is a real disappointment as I would barely be done listening to 3 songs and I could see the battery indicator beginning to drop.

2) The camera also is a real downer. It comes with an 8 megapixel autofocus camera but the clarity really is not that great even with the flash. It tends to absorb a lot of the light outside and makes the picture look terribly hazy, same with the video mode. Even the photo editing option is really no good compared to older Nokia phones like the N86.

3) The browser is fairly quick and efficient but what I don’t like is that it is while browsing that the bulkiness of the phone really gets to you. If you are browsing through Facebook or googling something which takes a little time you begin to feel the bulkiness of the phone and all of a sudden you won’t be comfortable holding it and browsing simultaneously. The same is the case when searching for an app in the Nokia Ovi Store.

4) The second biggest complaint I have is the kind of applications available. Let’s just put it this way that if the applications in the iPhone and Android are a rich man’s breakfast, Nokia apps are a poor man’s meal. Even some of the in-built apps like the CNN video browser and NatGeo videos app are fairly primitive as they reach a dead end after a given time. The graphics for the games are also nothing great. The games which come with the phone (Galaxy on fire and Asphalt 5) look a tad bit pixelated most of the time.

5) The in-built memory is only 512MB but it does come with a 8GB memory card.

I had a fun time with this phone and its a shame we have to return it back. THANKS NOKIA!!

The biggest reason for this really fast adoption seems to be that Google owns more touch-points to the internet than Facebook and Twitter combined! The Google+ notifications currently work on YouTube, Gmail , Picasa, Blogger, Maps, Android, Chrome and Analytics. All of these properties are HUGE heavyweights in themselves. Facebook and Twitter just have their individual websites.

WHAT ABOUT BUSINESSES ON GOOGLE+

Historically, Google has always favoured its own properties when deciding search engine ranking – remember Blogger and Knol?

Here in India, I am already starting to see a few businesses join Google+. While these are early days, I am interested in seeing if they take a different approach from the 4-posts a day engagement activities on Facebook Pages. I am willing to bet that Google has already started to measure how we are interacting with each other on Google+.

Google can start Business Pages in the future. When that happens, Google can start tracking mentions of the business, see what pages from the website are more popularly Shared and do basic Sentiment Analysis to measure if the content is positive or negative. Then decide SERP rankings based on this analysis! In this scenario, businesses will jump over each other to get onto Google+.

Incase you didn’t know, Google already does this with your tweets. Facebook however, still remains the largest Black Hole of the internet – a place which still cannot be crawled by search engine crawlers. Any engagement/ interaction here still does not have any impact on SERP.

I am not predicting that Facebook and Twitter are going to be dead. Companies in the future will spend more time and resources in BEING SOCIAL across platforms than DOING SOCIAL on many platforms.