Category: Digital

  • Waking Life?

    (not really to do with that excellent film)

    All good things have a season finale, and when it happens to be the last season, the event becomes all the more poignant. Boston Legal has been my favourite show for a while now, and I am a huge fan of Alan Shore‘s sense of fairness. And while the description is tossed around a lot, there really can only be one Denny Crane. True, the last season was lesser than a shadow of the earlier ones, however it still didn’t take away much from the series. But yes, case closed.

    Which brings me to what I shall now be doing on weekdays 10 PM.Yes, I could read more or browse more, but when one has been following a show for quite a while, one does feel a sense of emptiness. It led me to think about how a life is spent nowadays. Sometime back I had wondered whether everyone’s life would be ‘interesting’ if it were to be fitted into a 2.5- 3 hour movie. Interesting relative to the daily routine that a typical life follows. Yes, the ‘different’ vacations included. And yes yes, there are those who lead an interesting life 24×365, ‘it depends’ blah blah, let’s forget all that, let’s say I’m talking about mine. Subjective, and at least a few others I know of.

    So, typically, there’s a routine, work, dinner, television/internet, weekends, shopping, cinema etc… How many of these are conscious choices and how many happen by default? Not the conscious choice of choosing say ‘Lost’ over ‘Ugly Betty’, but at least a couple of levels above that to say watching television vs going for a walk. Does the former happen by default,unless of course a health scare suddenly makes you stop, think, and take a re-look at perspectives, and therefore go for a walk?

    So far, I will have to admit that mine happens by default. And what typically happens is that when a template is broken, like in this case, there is a sense of ‘boredom’ till a replacement is found. On twitter, these days, I find a lot of versions of the “I’m bored” tweet in my stream. It made me wonder about how we really spend our time, about multitasking. Heh.  About incomplete experiences. As real time and technology advances are made at dizzying spaces, I think the templates are being formed faster and the dependence on them becoming stronger. Even at this stage, the differences between the tail and the dog are blurring. What really matters to me – the experience, the sharing of the experience, filling up waking hours, racing with time to complete x tasks in y time? What is the driver? Damn, its not even a who.

    So I stepped back and asked why it was so? Is it because I never thought about it that way? Is it because it is easier to make a template and follow? Oh yes, switching on the telly, or playing around on FB is definitely is easier than figuring out what one wants, how one wants to spend one’s time, and other such difficult questions. These require an effort,  not just in thought but in deed (eg.trying out an interest like the ‘learning how to play the guitar’ route) and answers to tougher questions in the background. Or then again, is it because of a fascination, a way of living vicariously through the real and fictional characters – on the net and television? Or to ensure that there is no time left for such thoughts, because I know they’re difficult ones? I think a bit of each, and anything else you’d like to add?

    And so, is it possible to make conscious choices every moment? Would that be the best way to fully live a life? I wonder what it would do to ‘expectations’ though – set me free or get amplified, for isn’t each expectation derived from a previous direct or indirect experience? But that can be dealt with later, for now, the idea, to use Mo’s words is to (edited) a wee bit “devour every little bit of whatever is on your platter”, and yes, I need to consciously decide what’s on the platter.

    until next time, crouching potato 🙂

  • Where are you @ ?

    It’s been a while since I’ve been able to write about a shiny new toy here, but I believe we now have a service that can break the stranglehold of the holy trinity of Facebook, Google, Twitter – on this blog. 🙂 Say hi to Foursquare. Towards the second half of last year is when it was hailed by many, including Mashable, Scoble as the ‘next Twitter’/ bigger than Twitter. No, you don’t need to contradict that, that’s been done too.

    Though I created an account a while back, I started using it actively last week.  So what do I do on Foursquare? Well, I add places, check-in to places that have already been added by others, leave tips for people (no, not the waiters) and get points for doing all this. The places getting added are most usually F&B establishments, though that’s really up to you, because I’ve seen someone adding their own home too. Oh well. If you happen to check in many times, you get to be mayor of the place, until someone knocks you off. The guy who’s added his home, he happens to be mayor of his own home. 🙂 So, yes, it also works as a game, and you can import your friends from other networks. Status updating on Twitter and Facebook are also possible. Considering that I have more than 80 restaurant reviews on my other blog, I think Foursquare and I will get along just fine. 🙂

    When I first checked in, I was reminded of Twitter back in 2007. There will obviously be more features built in, it will evolve, just like Twitter has. Location based marketing is only beginning. But unlike Twitter’s cycle, things are faster now. Foursquare already has brand engagement and perhaps even revenue plans. I’d written earlier on Pepsi using Foursquare to fund Camp Interactive. Adage recently had a very good article on potential Foursquare revenue models, with separate working models for small local businesses, brands with retail chains and large multinational brands like Pepsi. Businesses are already testing out coupons based on preferences, for customers in the locality. Many places have Mayor specials. No, Barista, MG Road, Bangalore, obviously doesn’t have one.

    In addition to the obvious models, Foursquare has also signed deals with HBO (for a new series called How to make it in America) , Warner (for the new movie Valentine’s Day) , the History channel etc, complete with tips and badges. The other interesting tie-up is with Zagat, a food and restaurant review site, part of which is a  weekly ‘Meet the Mayor’ guide. This is more experimenting than what poor Twitter had in its first couple of years, I’d say.

    Foursquare already has a lot of competition – from Google Latitude Buzz to Loopt, MyTown, Gowalla etc. Loopt recently launched the LooptCard, which lets mobile consumers avail of offers, coupons and discounts by checking-in to spots. Gowalla recently opened up their API, and a report earlier stated that MyTown had surged past both Foursquare and Gowalla.  Foursquare’s traffic has tripled in the last 2 months, but there’s more competition too – Yelp recently started mobile check ins, which is not really great news for players like Foursquare because of Yelp’s existing audience. Twitter has made its move on Local, starting with trends, and will surely expand in that domain. Google Buzz connects to Google Maps Place Pages and being a part of GMail, already has a huge user base!! (Read more about the implications here, here and here) And then of course, is the new 800 pound gorilla in everything social – Facebook. With more than 1.5 million local business listings, they are bound to make a play in local soon. In India, I wonder if one of my favourite services, Burrp, will make a game out of it.

    Its amazing how the more things change, the more they remain the same. We’re now back to ‘Location, Location, Location’, but with the new layers of social, and behaviour added. 🙂

    until next time, keep reading, maybe I’ll be handing out special Mayor invites soon :p

  • The Fifth Estate?

    I remember an almost-discussion on twitter a while back, with shefaly and gkjohn, on whether was a tech company or a media company. The context was the Android getting space on the otherwise bare Google homepage. That would have a reach greater than perhaps most, if not all media giants. And thus I thought about taking a look at what could possibly be the new form of a media conglomerate.

    While Google’s dominance in search is complete, social search is another matter altogether, and if we go by Hitwise’s report on web user activity in Australia, social search is poised to overtake search soon. Though this is an Australia specific report and though it does leave room for arguments (YouTube is classified as social search though it is usually categorised as video search) it is definitely a trend. And while this page would give you enough statistics to show that ‘social’ is not really limited to Facebook or even Twitter, and includes everything from blogs to LinkedIn, if I had to choose one company which would be the player to beat in social search, it would be Facebook.

    But first, Google. Google is now easily the print industry’s bogeyman, and despite robots.txt wars and pay-walls, Google  continues to explore the territory. From adding FastFlip on the Google News homepage to the ‘starred’ feature which allows you to track stories of your choice on a separate page, thereby lending the algorithm a personal touch, Google is upping the ante on a regular basis. Meanwhile, understanding that its lagging in the ‘social’ space, despite services like Orkut, Google is working on an integrated social strategy using everything from a user’s current network of contacts in Google services to a social search that includes contacts from other networks and from OpenSocial and Friend Connect to supporting OpenID and OAuth, and even having a tweet ranking algorithm now. This could ensure that Google becomes an important part of our social profile soon, though personally I’d think a lot before working on my Google Profile!!

    Meanwhile, with over 350 million users, half of whom visit the site daily, Facebook is well placed to throw a spanner in Google’s works. Facebook’s biggest strength is the trust factor it automatically brings to search results because it draws these from a social graph – users and their inter-connections, and its a gigantic data mine. From the link shared earlier, over 2.5 billion photos and 3.5 billion pieces of content (links, posts etc) are shared every month on Facebook. There are 700000 active local businesses are listed. Meanwhile, it is trying to provide tangible business value too, from a conversion tracker to encouraging users to set up their accounts for news reading, it is now trying to dislodge Google from its areas of strength. Google is spread all over the web, and Facebook is a walled garden. But then, it spreads itself with Facebook Connect, which is implemented in 80000 sites engaging 60 million users every month.

    January 28th was World Data Privacy day. Google renewed its privacy vows, and everyone must’ve had a good laugh. This kinda explains why. And while Facebook makes claims that its recent updates to Privacy Settings had 35% users thinking about privacy and configuring their settings, revelations like these don’t help.

    RWW had a good post on Data Privacy Day on Facebook’s volteface with regards to privacy, which also made me think about the evolution of the web and the two sides of the coin – the convenience of recommendations based on my likes gleaned from my interactions on a network, and the privacy of that data.  The last part of Samir Balwani’s excellent post on Social Media ROI begins to address exactly this area.

    A few other players in the game emerge when we look at a larger landscape of web access. The iPhone vs Android vs (you could also say) Symbian/Maemo battle rages, even as 65 million users access Facebook on mobile. Google now has its own operating system and the gPad (concept) pictures are already floating on the net (within a few days of the iPad launch). Nokia, Apple and even old Microsoft, they are all media in themselves too. The common factor is data about us.

    The reason why all this is interesting is because unlike the earlier forms of media we have known, neither Google nor Facebook are content creators. They are aggregators of content – from  known publishers from old and new media, and more importantly, from us, the users. Our consumption patterns and interactions will be the data from which marketing insights will be gained. As these networks increasingly become media, the search for revenue models and the trends of using these as marketing/advertising platforms will also increase. This needs to be kept in mind as we spread ourselves across the networks.

    until next time, virtual realty 🙂

    Bonus Read: Why Facebook is wrong: Privacy is still important

  • Version next

    Those kind souls who follow this blog’s feed on Google Reader or a similar service, might have noticed the change in url a few weeks back, to the /blog sub-domain. Apologies for the sudden flood of old posts in the last few days, the shift caused a few hiccups, and a post was also sacrificed. Thanks to an e-mail, it was retrieved, and was re-posted yesterday. The kinder souls who read posts till the very end might have noticed a small line on an announcement, a few posts back. Actually there are two, linked to each other. One of the announcements is the revamped main domain – www.manuprasad.com.

    I’ve always been experimenting with lifestreams – from the easy to set up Friendfeed to the slightly more difficult sweetcron, and several in between. But this time, I decided to get it done by a professional, and as far as my needs and expectations are concerned, Chugs did a great job.

    But why now, and why a professional approach. Well, the other announcement is that I’ve quit my job in The Times Group, though my last working day is more than a month away. I sense great shifts happening in the way we work, live and the way we function as a society, and I also feel that this is a great time to start creating the job work profile I’d like. The new website is a reflection of not just my work interests, but also me, as a person. My skill sets and interest areas are here. Thanks for your interest in advance. 🙂

    We started with Google Reader, so let’s end with it too. A significant feature was added to the service a few days back. Google Reader will now help you keep track of even pages which don’t have a web feed, like www.manuprasad.com. I plan to test this using my website, as I see it as a harbinger of some inorganic developments in the ‘feeds updates’ domain, which will be of great interest to corporate and brand websites.

    until next time, www.manuprasad.com, take a look 🙂

    Bonus Read: Hugh McLeod talks to Seth Godin on Linchpin

    PS. Meanwhile, a slightly dated piece of news – Got featured in Surekha Pillai’s list of top 10 desi twitterers in Impact magazine :))

  • De-privacy

    The Twitter discussion last week with Surekha and Karthik, was mostly about attribution, but it had another facet to it – privacy. Last week, a childhood photo of mine was shared on Facebook, I promptly untagged. Thankfully Facebook still allows that, though I wonder for how long. But it made me think. Does the photo belong to the person clicking it or the person who has been clicked?

    Surekha, for example, mentioned that she was okay if her tweet was reproduced, so long as it was attributed to her. I am ambivalent about my stance since I have at least a couple of problems, one practical, one theoretical (for now) – first, the context of it, where will it be used and in what context? I even stretched the thought to whether I can choose who gets to RT me and which tweets. Second, what if someone has a revenue model out of aggregating tweets, and that’s not just MSM I’m talking about, its online publications, blogs and blog aggregators too.

    The first one is about privacy. When I share a status/tweet on FB/Twitter, I do it on the assumption that its shared in a relatively closed network, and in a context. It would be ironic if the content creators of new media to say they’ve been mistweeted. With Facebook’s  changes in policy at the end of last year, the definition of privacy is actually up in the air. No, actually Facebook is deciding what is privacy and that it is over. And to think that privacy was the cited reason for the non-portability of the data on the network!! There are two wonderful posts on the subject which you really should read – one by danah boyd and the other by nicholas carr. On a tangent, this post onThe Inquisitr about how (in the context of customer service), in spite of the web making every person a media outlet, the concerned corporations would choose to listen to only a few. The fear being whether rules of personal privacy would also be decided by a select few. Are we talking the Schmidt language here – “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place”. Oh, did I take that out of context? Heh.

    The second one (about the revenue model) made me think about media and brands and intrigued me because it is linked to privacy, and more so, because I sensed a paradox – between the individual’s notion of privacy and how we expect a media outlet/brand to be dictated by us on how and where its content is used. Yes, they are not individuals. But even if news per se is not owned by anyone, isn’t the particular form in which it is carried owned? The brand, is owned. The way the web is evolving, do they have a choice about where they are seen and who talks about them? This is not a debate on whether it makes sense for them to be private/public, but my point is about choice. When we start thinking about ‘linking’ as a right, just because the web economy is supposedly supported by it, I get the feeling I mentioned earlier – will a (new) powerful few dictate how it plays out? Privacy and control – they cross paths a lot. What really are we creating?

    until next time, protocols