It’s a free world and must remain so.

Twitter announced on 27th Jan’12, that they will censor tweets selectively on a country-by-country basis. The “country-by-country basis” rule states that if they receive a “valid and properly scoped request from an authorized entity,” Twitter will block users from seeing the posts.

And we are not happy with the new censorship rules and many tweeters like me(in millions) decided to protest by asking all tweeters not to tweet at all on Saturday, January 28. We used the hashtag #TwitterBlackout to organize the boycott.

My Last Tweet for 27.01.2012 :

My first tweet after #TwitterBlackout on 29.01.2012 :

I did my part, I had one day tweet free.

There were speculations that the new censorship rules was ordered by Saudi Arabia’s Prince Alaweed bin Talal, who recently invested in Twitter.

I was at home, enjoying my holidays. The day it got released. Monday I guess it was. Got the invite from a tweet-friend from US on first day itself. Though I could not explore much on the first day due to the internet speed constraint at home. When I came back, I tried my hands on it. Overall, I was not impressed. It does has some awesome features but I still love facebook & Twitter.

• The joke about “Google finally hired a designer” is old but true — the new design looks simplistic but elegant.
• From the start, the service just felt like it would be more useful than Wave. I anticipate G+ will stick.
• I see this app as a direct competitor to Facebook but not so much to Twitter. The appeal of Twitter’s 140 character limit will never get old. The Developer Apps is still to roll out i guess.
• Facebook’s saving grace is that its user base is already massive, and non-techies wont care to adopt GooglePlus. Where Google has an advantage over other community builders is the number of GMail and Google Apps users that will stumble upon G+.
• “Circles” instead of “lists” is just a fancy term, but they seem more pronounced on G+. The nice “Add to circles” mouseover effect reinforces that. As someone who likes his information organized, this feature pleases me quite a bit.
• Profile pages are a billion times cleaner than Facebook’s profile pages; with Facebook, there’s way too much going on.
• The photo upload feature and display system are pretty sweet from start to finish. From photo drag/drop upload, to live progress bars, to all of the great mouseover effects, G+ is able to utilize a lot of HTML5/CSS3 features without becoming a major turn-off. Well done to them.
• I realize that services like Facebook Places and Foursquare are popular, but check-in features are a surefire way to annoy the hell out of me and clog up my feed with crap.
• The long-polling (and probably future WebSocket) technology Google uses makes their app seem lightning fast. Probably difficult to construct the system but well worth it for all G+ users.
• I love the stream’s auto-fit-width and height. Loved it on Google Image search, love it here. Comment bubbles are a nice touch too.
• I don’t see a way to change a photo album’s name. Lame.
• I’m hoping that Google implements friendly links by username instead of the horrendously long profile URLs. I’d much prefer “/askrahul” to “/102551495343648090219″. Maybe that would too easily expose email address handles though?
• I use Facebook’s “Like” very much, so I did like the “+1″ concept. I wanted -1 to be there
• The small “Send an Email” feature is quite nice. No need to jump into Gmail, no need for access to direct email address.
• Profile editing somehow manages to stay elegant and organized despite being a one-page, inline process.

• The real test is when Google creates an API for G+; can G+ stay clean and organized then too? Or will G+ turn into a Facebook Farmville mess?

Those are my views on Google+. What do you think about Google+ ?
Though it has 18 Millions(as of today) users via invite but it can never overtake the 750 million Facebook viewers.

So, finally I saw Taj Mahal on 8th Feb 2011 on my second visit to the Agra. Thanks to wedding of a friend for which made it possible. The trip was my second trip to Agra, in first I could not visit the Taj Mahal due to the lack of time, which was wedding of friends bro.
I have never been a fan of Taj Mahal, to me it has been like waste of the Indian Resource by the Mughals at that time. Anyways it still looks awesome from the outside and has lot of visitors. We took lot of snaps here. KD’s SLR was a worth and we clicked over 500 pics from the camera and over 100 from my mobile N82.

The Taj Mahal.

Following Shot by KD is awesome. All up in the air.

It was perfectly captured.

Thanks to all friends who made it possible.
As usual there were live tweets from me, while I was on the Agra Trip and was appreciated by my Twitter followers

This is how it works in real life

Welcome to the Real World