Hello Kirti : Fun

Late Friday, early Saturday...watching ripped youtube videos?!

kirtid — Sat, 17 Mar 2007 10:57:00 GMT

Not having a television can get boring sometimes. Given the status quo, I sought entertainment value on the internet, YouTube primarily. In the light of the latest Viacom suing YouTube scandal my Friday evening entertainment seemed particularly relevant. I watched television shows "clipped together" with no commercials.

Any catch?

Breaks were between swapping video clips to continue and my ability to search for them successfully although it did a good job of recommending clips to me in order. Not very seamless, but hey, I did not have an "Ambien" ad with its zillion side-effects to put up with.
The quality of video and audio was exceptionally poor, which was granted given they were uploaded by amateur TV junkies wanting to share their favorite TV shows.
And a delay of perhaps some hours after the show had been telecast live before I could watch it.

Am I complaining? Not really...I may not need a television after all...unless YouTube meets the Napster fate. All the contentious content is on YouTube servers and not on its users' machines making it more susceptible to the "copyright infringement" charge.

The moral implications? No deep analysis, but some points that come quickly to mind...

On a personal level...

I will not be able to buy the products whose commercials were shown during the breaks? I am a channel-swapper so breaks don't bring any profit to the media companies with a viewer like me. Seems like I did not really cause a dent in their advertising revenue in any significant fashion.
I would not see advertisements for products I would ever buy in the first place, so my watching the advertisement would not have made any difference to the company in any conceivable way.

On a larger scale though...

Will the companies be able to provide the same content if they are unable to generate ad revenues given a majority section of viewers will be watching clips online?
Is it fair to consume content without remunerating the content generators in some form or the other?

The answer? Dilbert's "Sanitation Engineer" says that "Water will find its own level" and using the much revered Darwin's evolutionary know-how, "Survival of the fittest". It is hard to say what is right or wrong because the answer changes depending on what your own stakes are. Who will win? The stronger and the smarter one...

Slide Shows and more...

kirtid — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 13:56:00 GMT

While I was authoring the slideshow extender in the AJAX Control Toolkit I happened to find a very interesting company that actually does *just* slide shows for a living, called Slide, of course with more bells and whistles. There is a Redmond based company called SmileBox which does something very similar as well.

They both overlap in the core aspects, i.e. being able to create a custom slide show to transition smoothly through a set of pictures. But what I found particularly interesting was Slide allows you to pull your pictures from your MySpace, Flickr, Facebook accounts and many more data-sources. There is a caveat though. You need to login and provide your respective account credentials, which they claim they will not use. That being said, it is a cool picture aggregator (It reminded me of Meebo which is the IM webclient). It leverages the fact that people are inherently lazy and do not want to upload pictures to ten different sites and makes for easier and faster adoption. You can then just copy the html and paste it into your page/blog. The cosmetic theming aspect adds particular flair to the slide shows. You no longer need to be a Flash expert to create cool, custom, personalized greeting components and share them with your friends and family easily.

I had thought about this over two months ago when we were deciding on what our MIX07 plans were going to be. A project like this to evangelize the WPF/E technology, Microsoft’s version of Flash++, would be awesome. But it did not fit into our team’s charter…sob sob. Anyways, taking it to the next level, imagine though that the components are user driven. I, as a developer, could create programmable WPF/E components that could be used by end users in collages (greetings, scrap-books, diagrams, slideshows etc.). The API’s supported by the component would be exposed in UI via reflection and users would be able to add that to their site and customize them. This would be much easier to achieve in managed code which WPF/E will support.

In short a “Create my Web Art or Wiki art” style web application that

Allows for a controls to have a generic platform where they can be uploaded.
Allows for the control API’s to be exposed for manipulation in a generic fashion
Allows for overlaying of controls on a canvas to form more complex components (generating xaml on the fly)
Allows for storyboard settings and mutual interaction between components on the canvas

This would then be a forum for both budding wpf/e developers wanting to showcase their work and allow end users to generate fun interactive yet complex xaml components from a medley of pre-existing work. Could somebody be doing that for a living? I am sure they are already out there…

Till then I will continue improving the Toolkit Slideshow. Suggestions/Comments are most welcome.

My first blog post!

kirtid — Sat, 03 Mar 2007 04:02:00 GMT

I have several reasons to feel excited today.

I have been working on the Ajax Control Toolkit for almost 4 months now and we had a major release last night. It is action packed with localization and theming support, compressed javascript for smaller dowloads, xhtml compliance and two new Controls: listsearch, authored by Damian Mehers, one of our toolkit contributors, and slideshow (that I have authored).
It is Friday, so it is officially party time!
And I am writing my first blog post after much procrastination over the last 4 months.

The list might get modified over time but I think it would be a good idea to put up front what I plan to write in this space...

Tips/tricks on using the Ajax Control Toolkit.
Working on a Shared Source project at Micro soft! Could it get any more exciting?!
My experiences as a Program Manager at Microsoft.
Any technology related stuff that intrigues me.

...And not lose sight of my goal to keep my readers informed and entertained.

Have a great weekend!

Kirti