My college wanted us to do a project as part of a “Bridge Course” this semester. In a way, I liked the concept as it was at least trying to convince some people to do something besides curriculum. Personally, it’s always good when you are working towards some objective like completing a project you have to submit. An example is last summer, when I had to create a project for the summer and I ended up doing a lot of fun stuff.

So, I thought, why not build a solution for a problem I have been facing for quite some time now. Those of you who know me personally or follow me on twitter, know that I am particularly unhappy about my college’s attendance criteria. It’s always been a headache for me trying to keep track of when I went to college and when I didn’t. I tried using Google Calendar but I thought it was pretty cumbersome to use for this particular purpose.

So, I thought, why not create a simple, easy-to-use and nice-looking webapp for exactly this purpose. That’s when ProxyCal was born. Even at the beginning, I had the idea in my mind of a calendar which used colors like green, red and yellow to denote the status for the day i.e. whether you went to college, took a leave or college was off. One more thing I wanted to do was to avoid anyone from creating a new account for using ProxyCal. So, I decided that I was going to store all the data regarding the attendance in a separate calendar ‘ProxyCal’ in the user’s Google Calendars.

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Uptil now, the only way I had to keep track of Twitkut was the Google Gadget Directory, which still shows that it has <100 users. At the time I developed the app, Google Analytics was broken.

I have an Orkut filter setup on my Gmail, so that all the emails notifying me of scraps skip the Inbox. Today, however, I decided to check my Orkut emails. And guess what, the first mail I saw was from the Orkut guys giving me the weekly statistics of my Opensocial application!

Here it is:

Here are the statistics for your OpenSocial app twitter.xml on orkut for the week of 2008/12/30: 

App submitted to orkut on 2008/11/04
Number of unique users who installed the app this week: 77
Total number of unique users who currently have the app installed: 532
Number of times profile pages of users who have installed this app were viewed: 16395
Number of times this app was viewed in canvas view: 446

Wow, and until now I thought that less than 100 users were using my application!

I think the Orkut team only recently started mailing developers weekly stats. I think it’s a great idea and hopefully they will continue to do so.

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I am a big fan of Twitter. Unfortunately, almost all of my real life friends are only on Orkut. Most of them haven’t even heard of Twitter. That’s how I came up with the idea of creating something like Twitkut.

I update on Twitter a lot. So, I thought how cool will it be if somehow all my Orkut friends can also receive frequent updates on my tweets as well as be able to read them from Orkut itself. That means they don’t have to be registered on Twitter to follow me and get updates.

Twitkut displays your recent tweets on your Orkut profile page. Besides, it also shows you which all of your friends are using Twitkut so that you can follow them. It shows you their combined recent tweets too. This way you don’t have to follow them separately on Twitter. You can simply read their tweets every time you visit Orkut.

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PollBol is an exciting web app that adds a twist to conventional polling by adding an additional social aspect to it. After making FriendComparé, which was a mashup making use of the Last.fm API, I wanted to make a more independent app that maintained its own data.

Even so, I fully support the idea of making use other apps’ APIs. It makes it easier for the users to adopt since it builds on the functionality of the more popular app. And so, FriendComparé has had comparatively far more visitors as compared to PollBol due to the popularity of Last.fm.

With PollBol, I had to think of a development platform that would allow me to complete the project within my summer vacations. And what better for agile development than Ruby On Rails. It was exciting to use Rails as it divides the entire project into three parts: Models, Views and Controllers. And this makes it easier to plan on the various modules of the project.

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