I some how stumbled on it, and was astounded by it. Its high on simplicity, and is pretty useful and addictive. Three things which I reckon are essential for a good startup, or any new web service. Though there are always more things required to make a killer product, but for a successful product the above three things are very important. But this is not why I was astounded while going through Quizlet, I would tell it after I finish what Quizlet is all about.
We all know that flashcards are nice learning tool, if you didn't knew about it then also Quizlet will keep you busy, why? just because it is informative in nature. It is very simple flashcard using tool, you can create a set of your flash cards, and then use it for future use, and keep on using them. But thats not all, yes, its social, which means that you can learn from others flashcard. Not only this much but it also provides multi user editing, much like a wiki. So your set an be more than your set but can be your groups set as it also provides option to create a group. Since it is focused on vocabulary building and similar things therefore a simple statistic tool also works beautifully.
Now comes the astounding part, this whole website is a brainchild of a child, rather I should say teen, his name is Andrew Sutherland, and is just 17 and launched Quizlet when he was 15. As he has mentioned, it took some 420 days for him and him alone to make Quizlet, and few more days to become president of his startup firm Brainflare.
Thats not all, what I found more admirable was outlook towards his job, he does have a definite business plan for Quizlet, in his words...

Quizlet is free and will remain free to all users. The current plan is to offer targeted advertising on the non-studying pages. I'm hoping to make some deals with some educational and test-prep companies and perhaps some universities. If you're interested in advertising to my userbase of highly-motivated high-school and college students, shoot me a note (see above right).

For future I wold love to see its mash ups with flick images or Google maps and anything else, which can make it more interesting. Much higher on want list would be a web widget of Quizlet which we can put on our web pages or blogs. He is an intelligent kid, what it seems from here, and soon we may fine such things.

I didn't noticed it when I logged in, happy valentine post became my 51 post, and this is my seconds after I realized that I have crossed an important milestone, crossed half century. I am thirst for more so be sure that you are going to get more and more stuff, things will certainly become more exciting, both in terms of content and in terms of the logic behind them. Now on I will try to bring post with strong data in support, so as to bring some useful information for you all.
Now on I will try and avoid long holidays...but still examinations are in someway very important.
But still today is very nice day, I crossed my half century....njoying

HAPPY VALENTINE TO ONE AND ALL. THE THING WHICH WAS BEFORE YOU AND ME AND WOULD REMAIN AFTER YOU AND ME WILL BE LOVE, THE PURE LOVE.
MAY ALL GADGETS AND GEEKY OBJECTS BRING YOU PEACE AND GOD BRING YOU EVERGREEN LOVE.

This is not a very unique post, and neither it is breaking news. Stumble Upon is already having nearly 2 Million users who are stumbling over new sites daily and are pressing stumble button on stumble upon tool bar which must have become an integral part of their web surfing experience. One thing we all know that normal search engines leaves lots of logical sites which should have been there in search. But public is not a algorithm and thus services like Digg and Stumble Upon are very useful. You just click on a single button and will get a site submitted by a discoverer from a topic of your choice, you also get an option to search another topic. Most often than not you stumble on a very interesting site, and if you are one person who thinks that there is nothing exciting on internet or lazy enough to not to search for your choice of topic on conventional search engines then you must get this for your browser. This small toolbar will sit there at top pretty similar to Google search toolbar. Stumble upon is now also offering video stumbling which they will soon bring up in their toolbar.
I am not sure whether I would write about Powerset or not in near future, but I am sure that I am going to write more about user generated search results.
For now we have Google at the helm of internet search, they are biggest and fastest though by few milliseconds but still they are not perfect. I have one open question which have potential to run few brain mills wild. Should Google buy a user generated search engine and add their results to their conventional search? Bye the way to make your search on Google more intelligent you can go for advanced Google search.

I went out of my study table limits and covered GooTube integration with Orkut. (here) . Things which I have been saying since long time are getting in shape, and this proves that there are intelligent people working for Google. Recently they have been putting few tips to for their service users to work in tandem with their other services.
Heres one example...

The above mentioned example was already present, and you can see it working on this blog also. But having a service and having a known service are two different things and they are making people aware of what Google have up their sleeves to offer. And its good.
There can be few people who feel that this is unwanted, but I think that as a big company they should certainly promote users to use their service, because better integration will always save time.
Heave you noticed any other example of any such integration then you can certainly send a tip off.

I am back, and this time, its going to much more quick, more kinky, more intelligence as some tadka, and as always more geeky.

In the mean time I would like to tell, that few days back, I chated with Abhishek Bhatnagar, he also blogs on technology at Technix Update, and does that very nicely. He is one cool guy, with level head on some sturdy shoulder. I am having one eye on him and other on how his blog shape up in future.

Oh yes, I came and blogged which I wasnt meant to do, as my exams are on run, and I am trying to catch them red handed. But one thing compelled me to do this, yes after so many messages of suggestions which many others including me must have posted to orkut about including videos, we finally have them. It was quite simple, they are having one of the biggest library of videos, yes You Tube and still they didnt had video option for their social network. But now they have that. And yes it wasnt there yesterday.
They also had (for one day) a navigation button for pics in orkut album, which they removes after few hours or so, I dont know the reason behind, but that was a good add on.
Google can still integrate few more things on orkut just from their very own stable. They have many for that. And one certainly would be Blogger.
Googlers please add just one more button...on profile page for Blogs. And thats it.
And yes yes please remove the 12 image cap from album, we want to upload more, and yes few more personalized options for increased privacy. Like by whom we want our photos to be seen, because recently there have been few cases in India regarding this problem. As of currently any one visiting my profile can see my album, which was primarily meant just for my friends as orkut was a closed network. But late last year they made it open, and now we have more problems regarding privacy.
One more thing...yes for orkut...why dont they update there news section
Before ending lets discuss what this service is, its not a stand alone video sharing service. You upload your videos on two of the Google services, that is You Tube and Google video, which I think amount to largest user generated(and not so user generated) video library, and then put its link on your Orkut video favorites. So this makes it more like video blog entry without any possibility of any kind of write up. If google is in any plan to monetize videos for users than this can be a double edged master stroke. I dont understand one thing, why after making Orkut a open social network they are not providing easy url for profiles for example my profile url is http://www.orkut.com/Profile.aspx?uid=6074091533297241425 , this is some thing which I can not remember, at least that number is beyond my mental reach.


As of videos one more thing which I should mention is that this service is only limited to You tube and Google video, this means that if you are having your videos on some other services that you can not show them on your orkut profile. This is not at all good.
Beside adding an option for video they have also tweaked one thing for good, that is in scrap book, now they wont be telling you some out of world time for your scraps but would be telling local time and also relative time. Oh thats one great relief.
Even in present format Orkut is far from being complete, its not as big as Myspace but yes it does have potential to be so. Now they should try to make it much more secure, they should also look at privacy factor because that was one of their USP when they launched it.