Rediff has just the right UI for flights and train booking

I just happened to experience rediff.com's travel section after long time, and really liked its interface: Just the right interface, right clues at right time. For e.g. all airline fares in visible area (i.e. no big graphics there),  quick access to prev/next day's fare scenario, access to lowest fares in next 3 months in simple calendar interface. It also gave alternate option of traveling by train and quickly gave list of trains. Usability is serious: It is knack of weaving the features into right navigation and clues, and can only be done by very talented people in the field. It is often be a secret sauce for making a site wildly popular.  One wonders why rediff is not considered to be in race along with yatra, makemytrip,  cleartrip and travelguru!

It is too late for them to create a new brand now in this crowded space. Industry trend is pointing to  heavy funding in this space, and usually that means winning eyeballs through adverts. Rediff should, assuming they have money, should focus on simplicity for their adverts.

The user remembers specific sites for their contexts - for e.g. "I need to urgently get any flight in next few hours", "Any cheap flight next week", "A group of us have to travel for attending marriage", "We are trying to book route for holiday".  And each of those contexts is a business opportunity, and given the Indian market, we should hope to see more activity in this space.

Not route to google

Am I the only one finding google inaccessible this morning in Pune, India today? I can't ping www.google.com. Other sites are accessible. Pings to gmail.com are fine, but http redirects to gmail.google.com, which is not accessible. Traceroute reveals that there is no route beyond 209.85.254.245, and this seems to belong to google (from whois). Friends from elsewhere in world say they can access google fine.

A friend first reported this yesterday night - he couldn't access gmail - it would hang after authentication phase, and at that time things were fine.

I should say I had to switch to alternate search engines for first time in last few years for standard searches.

In increased globalization, I guess one has to cope with a minor problem in a big infrastructure affecting minority set of people while rest of the world goes humming as usual.

Future of publically available scalable infrastructure

2007 saw a lot of action in standardized front-ends (i.e. Flex and Silverlight), and 2008 could as well see emergence of standardization for backend: publically available internet infrastructures.

If I am a startup, what do I really need to make my next social internet idea implemented quickly? Infrastructure elements such as Thrudb, Solr and Apache Hadoop integrated with services such as EC2. Some folks are now providing end-to-end stacks so you have full data management. We should expect the evolution of these stacks to standardize scalable service APIs for information store, search, user management, OpenID and so on.

For architects, the two pain-points will be addressed:

• During development cycle, it will be nice to first use local infrastructure and then shift to public infrastructure.
• Freedom to match and mix public infrastructures - not getting tied to one vendor. Multiple images, but same interfaces.
  

Let us wish that these services will be available through all major hosting vendors soon, and prove . Even major players are likely to jump into cloud computing. Let us hope that talk of few players dominating the cloud will prove to be wrong.

Powered by ScribeFire.