At 216 slides, 'The Real Life Social Network' by Paul Adams takes a fair bit of time to wade through, but it does offer some interesting insights into the various ways in which identity, context and connections play out (and differ) in the real and virtual worlds. More importantly, with rumours flying thick and fast about Google Me, this could be a pointer as to how the product could work. Of course, with the assumption that Google Me is indeed a reality.

The story behind every start up runs along two chapters. The first is the search for a sustainable business model and the second is the search for an operational model which is sustainable in the business you are looking to operate. '7-days a week' is a concept that is at the core of the start up folklore and it goes something on the lines of "if you are not killing yourself (and your team in the process), you are not worthy enough to call yourself a start up".

When I left the big company job in 2008 to start on my own, it was not the ideal scenario be venturing out. The global financial meltdown was well on its way and it was becoming increasingly clear that chasing the digital opportunity in India was going to be an uphill task. Now, about two years down the line from then, it has been an interesting experience to look at what all I've wanted to do and what all I have wound up doing.

After being positively addicted to using Chromium for a while now, I decided to give something else a try the past week. I like switching browsers every now and then to see what I've missed out on and for some reason Chromium had become very slow on my machine, giving me another reason for the switch.

So I wound up giving Camnio a shot again and it felt a lot like going a decade back in terms of browsing experience. This is not a criticism of Camino - it is a lovely, fast, no frills browser. It is more a note on user behaviour and expectations.

Facebook has been trying very hard to communicate to all of the internet that the new defaults are something that will benefit all of us and the internet as a whole. The founder CEO, Mark Zuckerberg does not spare any opportunity to remind us that he wants to make the world a more open place.

For a company that wants its users to open up and share everything, you'd assume that Facebook's senior executives would practice what they preach. But reality is far from that assumption.

These are interesting times, made even more interesting by the unveiling of Facebook's new Open Graph Protocol. To say that this has not been in the works would be an omission of a grievous nature. It has been coming for a while, even if the pundits have been screaming something else from the rooftops: that Facebook - because of their closed nature - is threat to Google. There has never been greater misunderstanding of how both Facebook and Google work than to claim something like that.

The network neutrality debate is an exceedingly complex one. At its heart, network neutrality aims to ensure that all services are treated neutrally on a network, which is a noble-enough aim, but one that is not realistic if you know how the internet functions in the real world.

Behind the scenes, on any network, connecting from point A to point B is never as simple as finding the shortest route between the two. Depending on a number of factors, even machines on the same network may or may not take an entire roundtrip around the globe to get talking to each other.

There are numerous ways to support many of the open source products that we all use directly or indirectly every day. From the venerable Apache server to products like VLC, our generation of technology consumers have benefitted a lot from the hard work of others.

While it is not possible for us to contribute to these projects in a direct manner like contributing patches or helping with the documentation, we can still help open source projects in a different manner: by seeding the files on bittorrent.

After being out of a regular job for well over a year now and now slowly moving into what can be called doing a start-up, I have to say the feeling is very similar to the year 2000 when I started working for the first time in my life. It was the fag end of the dot com boom and the onset of the bubble being burst at that time. The feeling was eerily similar -- high potential, high paying domain having had the rug pulled from underneath its feet. The digital domain in India feels no different at the moment.

When I decided to go on a hiatus from the social networks (read Twitter and Facebook, two of the products that I use most), it had more to do with trying to get a handle on things in both professional and personal life than anything else. Over time, my use of these sites had become more of a crutch to support increasingly bad management of time and effort. Nothing spectacular happened because of the blackout. The world did not become a better place, nor did any of my problems vanish magically, but I did get to focus a lot more on matters that needed dedicated and sustained attention.