• 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

  • Flipkart affiliate program

    Just found out, on Twitter, about Flipkart’s affiliate program. Since this blog has over 30 book reviews and is bound to have many more, I thought it makes sense for me to add the bit of code to the review posts. Okay, you don’t need to flip, it isn’t as though I’m going to bully you into buying a book, since I know that in case you don’t like it, you’ll throw the book at me. :p

    Meanwhile, it helps that I’m a satisfied customer of Flipkart and can, within reasonable limits, recommend their service.

    It’s right at the end of each book review, so in case you’re planning to buy the book, it would be great if  you can do so from here. I’ll get a tiny share, and you’ll help feed a hungry blogger.

    Food for thought, of course. Ok, chocolate too occasionally 😉

  • The Immortal’s reality

    ‘1984’ is a subject that has appeared in many conversations, no, not Indira Gandhi’s assassination, George Orwell’s book. And every time it did, I have smiled politely and pleaded ignorance except for ‘Big Brother’, nothing to do with Shilpa Shetty’s adventures or Sunny Deol’s movie, in spite of my Bollywood fixation. I read the book a while back, and was absolutely fascinated by the dystopian world Orwell has created.

    Though I found many facets of the book interesting, there were two that were more equal than the others. 🙂 One was the idea of a few people controlling the minds and actions through unrelenting propaganda (among other things) and the sentence ‘He who controls the past controls the future, he controls the present controls the past’. History being written by winners, and it being what’s recorded (either in books or other data storage devices), or people’s minds. The second interesting thing is to do with the latter, of how reality is such a deceptive thing, and is of our own making. If there are two of us, and both of us agree that one is flying, then that is reality for us. Yes, you might laugh at the simplistic approach, but in the context of the book, absolutely possible.

    The human mind, its storage capabilities, and its evolution is a subject that keeps popping up regularly in this blog. Recently, the concept of singularity has interested me a lot, and I’ve been reading up material available on the net. While I’ve been interested in science fiction for quite a long time (from watching Star Trek and Sigma on DD, okay well, that’s a start to Doctor Who and the Foundation series in school and college, with minor setbacks like not being able to like Clarke, and recently, not able to enjoy Doctor Who on the BBC) and I saw singularity as a natural progression of that basic interest. Except, as I read more, I realise the lines between fiction and reality are beginning to get blurred.

    I had an interesting conversation recently with a friend S which was a sort of mash up of both these subjects. We were discussing the effects of these advances on society. I brought up the argument from 1984 that whatever happened the three tier classification of society (high, middle and low classes) would be retained in some form or the other. S was of the opinion that the have- have not divide would widen, he even brought up the concept of human farms, harvested for body parts. (a human controlled version of the Matrix). The 1984 premise of thought control would be perfect for that.

    And then, after teleportation, time travel, whether teleportation would be significant if we are able to replicate all sensations before that (as of now, we can see and hear across distances, smell, taste, touch remain) and similar interesting stuff came the subject of immortality. I said , one of the things that sadden me when I’m reading science fiction is that I’ll not be around to witness science fiction becoming reality. But I also  wondered whether, even if the body were capable of lasting for an infinite amount of time, would the mind be ready for it. All of our life, we base on finite time – things to be done, objectives to be achieved, what if we had all the time in the world, how would we adjust? S pointed out that these things happen gradually, and by the time we become immortal, we would have already grown used to really long life spans. Like many things now, we would take it for granted, and would not appreciate the significance. We were only having coffee but discussed how there might still be loss of (memory of) experiences so far, and how there would perhaps be preloaded SIM cards one could install, and how the immortal’s “will” would have instructions of the “I don’t want a Windows OS for my body, Chrome is where my heart is” variety. Ok, cheesy, but can you imagine the possibilities?

    My biggest concern was the revenue model. If i lived forever, how would I afford it? What would be the economics of such an existence? Writer this century, sportsman the next, will natural ability be of any value or significance? And the final question, will we able to control time enough to have alternate realities? S says never, but i get back to the 1984 premise of reality, of controlling sources of information to ensure that the past is consistent with the present, and I wonder what humanity will end up doing.

    until next time, morality and mortality…

  • Jet City Woman

    Ankush Saikia

    The name of the book, inspired by the Queensryche song, would suggest a female protagonist. In a sense there is one, but the narrator is a young student from Shillong, who arrives in Delhi in the second half of the 90s. While the story revolves around the eternal theme of love and longing, the uniqueness that’s brought in through the ethnicity of the narrator and the inherent simplicity in which the tale is told, makes it an interesting read.

    Delhi almost seems like a character in the book, and the influence of Shillong on the life and attitudes of the narrator and his friends is also evident. The timeframe the story is set in, allows the dot com boom and bust, and the beginning of the BPO era to serve as backdrops. The subtle way in which the author points out the diversity among people in the North East, and their perspective on the way the rest of the nation deals with them, is also praiseworthy.

    While the story primarily deals with the narrator’s relationship with Naina – a girl with a mysterious past, it also portrays two diverse personalities. The narrator is a small town boy, trying to make sense of life in a large city, and amidst the parties and the night drives, is grappling with the larger questions of his life ahead, still anchored to his hometown and the way of life there. The girl he is strangely attracted to – Naina, who refuses to divulge details of her past, wants to cut away from it, and moves ahead with a speed that leaves people close to her perplexed and lost.

    Like I mentioned, the book has a simplicity that appeals immensely, the joys and apprehensions of the narrator is something that is easy to relate to. Laced with occasional humour and Floyd lyrics, this book is worth a read.

  • 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