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Showing posts from April, 2011

Why SMS is limited to 160 characters?

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Why 160 why not more? Have we ever asked ourselves why SMS length is fixed to 160 characters only? SMS is the oldest application to be used in GSM phones. Currently it has more than 3 billion active users. It’s an age old application but we are hardly seeing any modification/up gradation with the advent of new technology. Yes we did see the upcoming of MMS but SMS remained the same. Ever wondered why 160 characters? One day while going through some bookmarks in Delicious , I found an article on the same. I found it irresistible to share and go this way… Alone in a room in his home in Bonn, Germany, Friedhelm Hillebrand sat at his typewriter, tapping out random sentences and questions on a sheet of paper. As he went along, Hillebrand counted the number of letters, numbers, punctuation marks and spaces on the page. Each blurb ran on for a line or two and nearly always clocked in fewer than 160 characters. That became Hillebrand's magic number -- and set the standard for one of

Google +1

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It’s pretty easy to enable +1 Button. Open a browser and sign into your Google account. Then search for Google Experimental or just type in the following URL http://www.google.com/experimental/ . You will see “+1 button”. Click 'Join this experiment'. Now navigate to http://www.google.com and search for any item. You should be seeing a +1 button next to the search result.  This button will not be enabled for http://www.google.co.in . Initially I thought it’s Google version of Facebook “ Like ” button.  But after trying it out I felt it sucks! Big Time! I search for some stuff and get the Google results page. How could I rate the result with my “+1” without actually going through it? Also the preview of the search result (another feature which Google introduced recently) doesn’t empower me to do so. So if I am actually interested in marking a result “+1” then I have to open one of the result, read it and then religiously go back to the Search Result page and Click “+