Webaroo...

Well it has been a complete let down, frankly. We've been watching Webaroo for quite a while now. So many IITians have worked for them by now and on apparently very interesting things too. There were people working on image compression, video compression, information retreival, etc. They spent money too. Pizzas for lunch... etc etc. I was pretty excited about Webaroo myself. With them spending so much money on interns and the kind of work going on, I was expecting some spectacular products to be announced. Come 10th April and the only expression I had was - "What? All this for a webpack?"

And what a webpack too. A friend tells me that the Mumbai webpack does not throw up IIT Bombay in its search results. Ok, you can say I have an inflated ego but come on, I'd still say IIT should be there in a Mumbai-only webpack. In any case, the whole idea is indigestible. Lots of people have already pointed out several problems with the concept.

1. hard-disk space on laptops is expensive. Does 40 gigs of webpack make sense?
2. a webpack for cellphones? how many MBs did you say? duh?
3. anyone who knows he'll be away from a network connection (as when travelling on an international flight) for an extended period would simply download relevant stuff he'd want to read - well maybe this does not hold that much water, but fine.
4. connectivity is exploding. Beyond a certain threshold it does not matter how much hard-disk space you have. Is this a product to just act as a filler for the time when connectivity becomes ubiquitous, even in aircrafts? (yes, even today you can get network connectivity there, albeit at a fairly high cost and only on some carriers).
5. The internet is an interactive medium. Once you "download" it, the interactivity is essentially gone. You can't read email, can't eshop, etc. so what's the point.

Those are common arguments that are raised. I, however, had other questions on my mind. The first is that of copyright infringement. What Webaroo is offering is basically redistribution of content from the web. Now such material could be copyrighted and yet make it into their webpack (if it doesn't, quite a lot of good content would be absent). Google only stores it in an index for searching, so perhaps that's fair use. But giving it away as a product... is that fair use?

Second, what about websites that make money by online advertisements? Aren't they losing revenue because there obviously cannot be ad-tracking? So isn't Webaroo running at the expense of other site owners?

As I said, I was pretty much disappointed with Webaroo. So much research for (in my opinion) a fairly crappy product. Maybe they have something else hidden away; waiting for the right time to announce it. Maybe, just maybe. One hopes. Meanwhile, I'm just happy IIT has given me a 24 hour net connection and I can blog at 4 AM in the morning.

[Wait! Maybe people in IIT Chennai would like to download this stuff; what with LAN down during the night... just a thought]

[I remembered a joke I heard years ago. It was basically when the internet was only entering common vocabulary. This guy walks up to a computer store owner with a floppy and says - "can you give me a copy of the internet on this floppy?". It was pretty lame even then but I think the Webaroo guys got serious about it. Floppy maybe not, but an HD-DVD surely (or Blu-Ray disc, depending on which camp you're in)]