The web has always been hailed as the great leveler, as it allows equal access to information. But information has greater relevance if available at the right place and the right time. Shortening this gap between information-need and answers is the goal of  search tools, which fall into the following categories:

Search Engines: It all started with Archie Veronica and Jughead in the pre-web days, reaching their present form in Google, Bing and ask. Their basic function being the ability to crawl, index and search the web. In other words a an “algorithm” decides what matches our queries and presents the results.

Decision engine (specialty search or activity based search): Although Bing would want to call itself a decision engine, the real decision engines are, specialty search sites like expedia, priceline or amazon. A user goes to these sites to to make a decision or perform a certain task. The UI is designed for specific interactions, as against a generic interaction paradigm in the case popular search engines.

Knowledge engines: Websites like Wolfram Alpha, can provide complex answers to knowledge based questions , instead of just links  to website.

Social engine / Help engine: Real time help engines like Vaark , malaho and Yahoo anwers take search to the next level. Instead of connecting people to information, they connect people with others who have knowledge about the subject. This is more true about serveries like aardVark which gather information on people’s expertise and learn with time.

This is not to say that the relevance of search engines is less, but now their role has been restricted to stuff that is not real time and information that we expect to be common enough to be documented somewhere. But as social engines learn and build on accumulated interactions, the paradigm for searching information would surely change.  People would have the choice to ask real people or ask a web repository.

Where would Wikipedia fit ? Would it be an answer engine or a social engine ?

oh its her again. reply or not, Its a mess, either ways . why the hell did I leave my gtalk status online !

…unwanted chat pings, feeling awkward while closing a conversation, don’t know if ur reply will be missed as they log out.

Well that is what i call the transactional mental burden of an IM (gtalk, yahoo cha, AOL messenger ).
DM (direct messaging) on microblogs (twitter, identi.ca, yammer..) wins on all counts- no one will ever “miss” a direct messages, they have their own repository, there is no urgency in replying ( a real emergency would warrant a phone call not an IM or a DM) and I can remain in my zone away from the unwanted pings.

On top of it I am not tied to the chat client – I can access my microblogger from websites, browser apps, desktop apps and even over the phone. None of it is a push, i.e. microblog when I like, where I like.For an added plus – everyone in the twitter stream is a contact I can chat with ! I dont need to search for their email addreses to add them to the chat client !

So here is what DM’s trum IM’s in :
1) location / device independence
2) response time flexibility
3) scalable friends list
Though I think spam is till an issue with DM’s but Its is much less embarrassing than the unwanted pop-up at the wrong time!

And if you really really need to talk to me call me .

Have you switched to a DM only mode yet ?

While brainstorming about monetizing models in social media for a prospective client, we wavered to a discussion on business models that exist in the web2.0 world. I wanted to jot them down for comment and critique:
1. Freemium: Give away a Basic version of the software/service to users/”prospects” for free. Those prospects become customers, buy purchasing more space, superior service and/or enhanced features. There are three kind of upgrade transactions out there:

• Time based subscription, with recurring payments at monthly, quarterly or yearly periods
• Utility based billing, with payments related to bandwidth usage or number of transactions
• lifetime subscription, with a one time payment for a license
• limited trial, with the complete product or service available only for some limited time and continued usage is contingent to payment  ( no “free basic version” , makes is slightly different from the other freemium models)

2. Free

• Advertisement supported: Applications with a targeted user demographic or a large user base
• Branded promotional web-applications
• Donor supported

3. Broker: Charging a percentage fee on the transaction from a third party, for a service .

4. Merchant: Selling data/products that were sold offline. This can further be divided into click and mortar, virtual & catalog merchants.

5. Affiliate: leveraging the existing customer base of an affiliated partner to sell ones product or service.

did I miss something ? do they overlap ?

The turban has long signified an inquisitive learner and an attempt to be in harmony with the the changes in the world. While the “new urban” is defined by technology.

This blog is home to my inquisitions on marketing, design and technology in general, and social media in particular.
Hence the name, urbanTurbanGuy a turbaned perspective on the “new urbanity”.