Have i forgotten to blog, or is this one of those posts again that  will say the obvious “OMG” the last time i update my blog was in 2009. Well what can i say i love to write but never get time to do so.

Celebrating 5th Birthday for this Blog

Stepping back in time when i started to blog i used to feel quite alone in the world of blogger. 2005 was the year when i started to blog and this blog has been living since then, yes its a neglected one but it does hold allot of my brain dumps from 2005 during the course of time some got deleted and some got classified. And a complete element of surprise is that today i just opened the blog to moderate comments and maybe write something and while writing this post i browsed back to first post which was published on April 23rd, 2005 and thus making this post the 5 year anniversary post for this blog.

Well i have been blogging for 5 years though not regularly else this blog might have been famous and i have no intentions of  even making any promises to do it regularly.  In 2005 i used ask the question “What is a blog” in interviews and the response was quite shocking no body knew it but now i am glad people do come up with answers and the no of blogs have grown beyond limits i guess. I had the opportunity to meet many people in the last few years whom i only recognized and socialized because i knew there cyber brains “their blogs” or their twitter ID. Its funny n scary to.

Things have changed allot from designing websites and user interfaces i have moved on, some time i do wonder what actually do i do ? Brain storm on social marketing campaigns, review designs, write functional specs for high end publication systems, visualize systems and yes manage teams of engineers and designers. Its exciting lots of learning and of course lots of stress comes with the package. I haven’t thought about whats next and so far my ideology of not trying to sneak ahead and moving with the flow has worked yes it has risk elements but you learn to live with it and let the element of surprise exist within.

Seems like this post has served its purpose and lets hope for another one next year.

Google did it again, well i heard about it an year back in news when an engineer at Google had figured out a way to track exact location of a cell phone user without the authorization or knowledge of cell phone network carrier. It did seem like hoax and still does because if Google can do such a thing without the knowledge of cellular network carrier then its a big privacy concern as Google is not CIA and its not a Govt entity as i am sure Govt. and Intelligence agencies can do that without our permission but if a private company does it then its violation of my privacy. BBC does talk about it and you might want to read it as well.

Any how getting back to the new product Google just launched called Google Latitude. As the name suggests Google Latitude helps you track your friends location either via web or thorough your cell phone.  For cell phone users first you have to install Google Maps and there you will get an option to first allow to share your location with any one of your friend. If you friend is using Google Maps on his phone or is on his computer using Google Map he would be able to find out where you are and in return can send you an sms or call you up. The two sided communication needs Google Maps to be running 24/7 which is quite expensive on a cell phone as i only open Google Maps when i am looking for some location rather then keep it open for the sake of opening it does cost bandwidth.

Though the information shared is also not known to be 100% accurate and my guess is that the information is tracked with the help of your cell phone internet connection maybe its IP , server and provider of course that can be easily traced which can give an approximate location and bypass the cellular network carrier.

Unfortunately i could not test it as that application is so far restricted to 27 countries only in which Pakistan is not yet included. I would love to know if some one in US could check it out and give a feedback.