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How Blogger.com Began

The accompanying TechCrunch article.

This is sheer nostalgia! I remember coming cross mentions of 2 websites in an Indian IT magazine bought by Sebastian when he was staying with us for a few days in Pune.

Yodlee.com was decidedly useful and I found its credentials impeccable. Over the years, this service invented by a bunch of Indians in the US has steadily acquired customers (though mostly through 3rd parties like Mint.com) and become the indisputable leader in financial account aggregation.

Blogger.com, however, sounded very interesting but rather useless. I couldn’t understand what the ‘archive’ was supposed to do, why one wouldn’t prefer the ‘conventional’ way of publishing to the ‘blogging’ way and what blogging was supposed to achieve anyway. To put it flatly…I didn’t quite get it. But I liked its very geeky publishing tool, sort of made me feel ultra important as I waited impatiently each time I clicked on Publish to post something even as trivial as a 1-liner. I stuck with it anyway, mostly to post impertinent webly thoughts. As my blog matured, however, I realized its potential and deleted most of my crap posts (except for the 1st post which was re-dated while editing…thus losing the maiden post date) and started all over again.

The anecdotal first post is rather interesting. I was desperately hoping that my long-lost friends would chance upon me during a web search. Using the blog would probably be the easiest way to advert, I reasoned. Search Engines would pick it up and soon I would be visible to them all. Well, search engines sniffed my page all right but I don’t think any of my pals I’ve reconnected through the web discovered me this way! But remember, these were the days the phenomenon of social networking was yet to take off. Flawed though the belief was that my friends would desperately seek me over the web, it led me to the wonderful world of blogging. Serendipity, that’s what I like to call it.

I use both Yodlee and Blogger to this day.

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