Facebook advertising

I stumbled upon Facebook's advertising page - http://www.facebook.com/ads/create/. One can choose various demographic parameters based on which Ads will be targeted. The nice part about this is that it shows the target audience size as you choose the values for the parameters. Numbers are always interesting. It is a known fact that not always the user declared demographic information is accurate. This seems to be the case with Facebook too.

Child marriage?! :-P

So, to what extent can one rely on user declared information? The question of trust is their on both sides - how can users trust service providers and how can the service providers trust their users?

By the way, Valleywag had reported sometime that now Bill Gates is "really" on Facebook.

It's your right

Tomorrow (technically today), is the Karnataka Assembly Elections 2008.
Go ahead and caste your vote!

Prediction by Astrologer Bejan Daruwalla in one of his articlescaught my attention which concludes by saying:

Considering all these aspects, Ganesha feels that BJP looks well placed but they might fail to get the comfortable majority in Assembly and may fall short to dominate the Karnataka's politics.

Update:
I just caste my vote. Some bad practices and defects I observed:

1. While collecting the voting slip, the people issuing the voting slip tried to bias/confuse by telling - "Saar illi eradane booth ge hogi first button press maadi" Translated to English - "Sir, go to the second booth and press the first button". I was conscious of the party I voted for, but, what about those people who innocently get biased because of this?

2. The logos of various parties placed besides each button on the electronic voting machine are printed on a pink-ish sheet of paper in black ink which is a bad idea. Ideally they should have printed the colour logo on a white sheet of paper.

I wonder if someday in future there would be web-based voting system. People who have been delivering long speeches would end up learning about XSS attacks ;-)

Yahoo! India launches Glue pages

Check out the all-new glue pages pages marking yet another step towards openness. Now, the search results contain not just the vanilla page titles and links, but, also shows up information from Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Images, Wikipedia, Howstuffworks, YouTube, eBay etc.

Sample search: Pizza, Cricket

YouTube India launches

If you didn't know about this, then check http://www.youtube.com/india (why is it designed so badly?) whereas http://in.youtube.com/ is neat.

YouTube on your cellphone - m.youtube.com Awesome!

Yahoo! SearchMonkey developer launch party in Sunnyvale

For those of you in CA, don't miss http://developer.yahoo.com/searchmonkey/event.html

More about SearchMonkey:
"instead of a simple title, abstract and URL, for the first time users will see rich results that incorporate the massive amount of data buried in websites -- ratings and reviews, images, deep links, and all kinds of other useful data -- directly on the Yahoo! Search results page."
from Y! Search blog
SearchMonkey preview

Now, search results will be all the more informative and will open up a new channel for great creativity and innovation!

Microsoft withdraws Yahoo! bid!

Microsoft was willing to pay $47.5 billion, or $33 per share

But Yahoo demanded at least $53 billion, or $37 per share, according to Ballmer.

"Clearly a deal is not to be," Ballmer wrote.

"While Yahoo would have accelerated our strategy, I am confident that we can continue to move forward toward our goals." - Ballmer

Read the full report here.

Good luck!

Looks like it is not over yet: Jerry Yang still open for talks.

Yahoo! India Local (beta) launched

Looking for ATMs, restaurants, shopping malls or anything else? Then check out http://local.yahoo.in I liked the "Essentialist" feature. (observe the right panel)