• ‘What are you doing’ needs an @ reply ? 🙂

    And every so often, we hear about how brands screw up on Facebook and Twitter, these days we even regularly hear how Facebook screws up on itself, and finally we heard about how Twitter ‘screwed up’ on Twitter. In case you missed it, the chronology can be read here.

    And in case you were too lazy to follow the link, Twitter suddenly yanked off an @replies option — a non-default setting to monitor a conversation between someone you follow and someone you don’t, which was only used by 3% of the Twitter universe. In an initial blog post Twitter addressed it from a product design perspective and as a ‘small settings change’. The response from users was whale disproportionate to the 3%, resulting in the trending of #fixreplies . Poor Twitter was actually doing just that, because the 3% users were straining the servers, since each time someone sent an @reply, Twitter had to scan people’s settings to figure out which tweet could appear in whose timeline. The fun part is that we anyway got to hear only half the conversation.

    Let me try to explain quickly A and B follow each other, B follows C, A does not. In the earlier system (where A was one of the 3% who had changed the default option to ‘see all @ replies’) A could see B’s @replies to C. With this change that Twitter made, A stopped seeing it. The ‘fun part’ I mentioned earlier was that A anyway couldn’t see C’s updates, or specifically C’s @replies to B. Anyway, the 3% considered this option as an aid to ‘serendipitous discovery‘ of new people. But I think the trending happened simply because Twitter didn’t tell anyone before they made the change. As one of the 3% (I think, since I clearly remember finding people based on the @replies of those i follow. Shefaly, correct me if I’m wrong, but I think we started following each other thanks to our individual conversations with @dina) I think its a  mistake if the Twitter blog was updated without studying all the aspects, a bigger mistake if Twitter chose not to tell users the real reason.

    Twitter then blogged once more emphasising that the technical aspects, more than the product design flaws, were the chief reason for removing this option. And later, gave a consolation gift which now means that A could now see those updates of B, which does not begin with @C. eg.  wondering what @C is smoking. To me, that solves the problem, because its just a format change in a way. And who knows, maybe users will take more initiative in helping connect people now – a human touch to serendipity. Or more power to ‘recommended users’. Meanwhile, there are at least five of us who can have the pun fests we enjoy, because (only) we all follow a particular id we created only for this. So I’m sure users will figure their lives out without the option. 🙂

    Like Twitter, I too learned a few lessons from this entire exercise. That it is important to be transparent and communicate your complete perspectives, especially if you exist largely because of the community’s efforts. There might be disagreements, but its better to make your stand and reasons clear before the event. That it’s very easy for users to lose the perspective that Twitter is a free service that was never meant to be scaled so much, and a lot of what they’re doing now could be to ensure they can scale up. I’m quite glad that even unbridled mobs have  limits of ‘justice’ they can get. That it’s still an ecosystem about which very few (if any) people have a  clear long term objective about – on one side we complain about noise, and when Twitter removes an option that in many ways added to the noise, we complain about that too. That hashtags are increasingly becoming an end to themselves than a means. That it’s the real time issues that matter – most users wouldn’t know that its quite a difficult task (if not impossible) to get their first tweet, after they cross tweet # 3200.  Another example of how Twitter is so many different things to different people.

    until next time, “And I will cut you off from the peoples..”

  • Cafe Y

    Yes, before you wise ones point it out, the name does elicit a feeling of connectedness with the blog. You can guess y. 🙂

    We’d heard about Cafe Y and ‘filed’ it for the future when we were returning from ‘Something Fishy‘, but we never managed to remember it when the dine out question arose, until D did this weekend. Cafe Y is on Langford Road, very close to the Hosur Road – Langford Road junction, but its a one way (no entry from Hosur Road until that morning when Bangalore’s traffic cops have their next mood swing), so you’ll need to take the right turn after that junction and loop back. Parking is available on the side road right next to it.

    We hadn’t reserved in advance since we planned to go early – and we turned out to be only the second group at 7.45. By about 8.30, there were several other groups though. There are a couple of seating options outside, very close to the road, but could work well on a breezy night. We chose to sit inside. The yellow-red decor is worth mentioning. Its pleasant and bright and yet somehow lends an amount of coziness to the functional design. In addition to the main Continental menu, they’re also now offering a Chinese one. The latter is not exactly exhaustive, but has decent options of soups, starters, and main course dishes in both veg and non veg, and yes, desserts too.

    Now, the continental menu, that’s what I’d call fairly exhaustive. There are no less than 14 soup options (and thats after counting ‘creams’-of which there are multiple options as a single option) and a lot of them are different from the usual suspects we see around – ranging from the regular minestrone, mulligatawny and consommes to Hungarian Goulash, Scotch Broth, seafood chowder, and some good options in veg too – for instance, I’ve never come across a Gazpacho before. We decided on a Fragrant Chicken soup, which is a “chicken flavoured cream soup with pasta seasoned with fresh lime, mild chilli and chicken”. It turned out to be an excellent thick soup with a unique flavour, actually flavours, though you wouldn’t call the chilli mild, but hey, I’m not complaining. Loved it!!

    There are salads too, and an option to make your own from choices of vegetables, meats and dressing. And what has been referred to in the menu as ‘Sidewalk’, which could serve as side munchies as well as starters – veg and non veg, priced at Rs.55 and Rs.80-125 respectively. The ‘stuffed tuna in pepper’ and ‘chicken liver pate’ have been duly noted for future consumption. 🙂

    For the main course, you could choose from a variety of sizzlers – you have the option of creating your own in this too. Choices of veg, and all sorts of animal life – lamb, beef, pork, chicken and a couple of seafood options too!! Sigh. And then there are the ‘Fusion Flare sizzlers’ – that come in veg and non veg. Ever seen a “Corriander and jeera rice served with chicken katti roll and Indian curry sauce”? There’s also a special ‘Kiddies menu’ and a whole assortment of bakes too – lasagna, sausage moussaka, and so on. And then the plethora of steaks which give you a high. This was the only part of the meal that left me disturbed – a couple of pork dishes, a few beef ones, and many chicken ones, I love all of the animals in question equally – okay, some more than others, but had to forsake dishes made of them when I made my final choice for the main course, after long and intense deliberation. I promise to return.

    I ordered a Chicken Olivia, “grilled chicken served on a bed of sphagetti and topped with tomato, basil sauces, olives and fried egg” and D chose a King Chicken Americano, “crumb fried breast of chicken with a stuffing of mushroom, olives and parsley served with BBQ sauce, french fries and assorted vegetables”. The dishes remained true to the fantasy that their descriptions had created. The sauces were excellent, the quanities were perfectly sufficient, and the flavours somehow retained their uniqueness even while complementing each other.

    Now, the blueberry cheesecake here has quite a reputation, but I’m quite a blinkered horse when I see a Chocolate Mousse on the menu. And as i type this, I close my eyes in fond memory of that awesome piece of work. It was rich, with that tiny hint of better that (for me) takes a choc mousse to another level.

    The nice part is that all of this leaves one full without that bloated feeling, and one’s wallet without that thin feeling. All of the above cost us just over Rs.600. The service, while efficient, could do with more smiles. They did give us a wide smile after we paid the bill though which left me wondering what was it about me that made them think that I might not. Still, Cafe Y moves quite easily into our list of favourites on all fronts – ambience, food, value for money, and yes, skills with chocolate. 😀

    Cafe Y, 2/2, Langford Town. Ph: 41144561

    Menu at Zomato

  • Married but Available

    Abhijit Bhaduri

    “Mediocre but Arrogant” seems to have preceded this, but its a read in itself. As the author says, this is not a sequel. I’m not sure whether Five Point Someone came before this, but its difficult to miss the similarity in the context and the writing style – racy, with a bit of ‘philosophy’ thrown in. It had been quite a while since I finished a book in one go – and this one almost succeeded, so, to me, there is no question on entertainment value.
    The premise of an MBA in his first job, and the ups and downs he faces, the things he has to learn – not just about his career but also about life in general, from people and his own experiences, as he moves ahead in different stages of life, is something I could identify with, at least in patches.
    A reasonably good snacky read with no pretensions.

  • Blockheading

    He was asked to write about the blogger’s block. How could he explain, that, on some days the words just flowed, and one could write without a pause. More importantly, how could he explain, that on some days the ideas and the stories just seemed to dry up, and there were only pauses. Like today.

    until next time, clear hai? 😉

  • Search Advances

    So, Twitter seems to be getting serious about its real time search capabilities. According to various reports, all of which seemed to have emerged from this source, Twitter’s new VP of Operations, Santosh Jayaram, has said that Twitter Search will soon be doing two things in addition to what it does now

    • it will crawl the links that people tweet
    • it will sort results by its reputation ranking system

    The ranking algorithm is going to be very interesting, because unlike, say, Google’s search algorithm, this would have to work at two levels – one, similar to Google’s Page Rank to ascertain the site quality, and two, the reputation of the person sharing the link. So, it’d be interesting to see which one would come on top, assuming the same story – me, sharing a TechCrunch link, or Mike Arrington sharing a link to this blog. 😉 Mashable had earlier written about an alternate  Twitter search service called Tweefind that uses various parameters to rank a person. The eternal debate about what should make a better twitter rank just got more interesting. 🙂

    RWW has connected the above happening to an interesting change that happened at Twitter recently – Twitter replacing tinyurl with bit.ly as the default url shortening service. According to an earlier article on the same site, bit.ly does more than just shorten a url, it “analyzes the page being linked to, pulls out the key concepts discussed on that page, and then provides real-time statistics about where the link is being shared and how many people are clicking on it.” Now, isn’t that interesting??!! When talking about the crawling of links, its hard not to think about the various services I’d written about earlier, (Krumlr, Fleck etc) which work on a delicious+twitter principle – use the delicious method of tagging and then share to twitter. I wonder, if at some stage, this is the kind of semantic association that Twitter would want to build on top of the crawling spiders, or will the machines take care of this too?

    The impact of all this on Google remains to be seen. Google is also looking over its shoulder to another hyped up participant in the ring – Wolfram Alpha, which is yet to make a debut. But there are speculations that they are on top of that situation. Anyway, Google must be doing something, they always do, that’s what makes them so dangerous. Since it already indexes tweets, adding real time shouldn’t be a big deal. A greasemonkey script does that for me!! But with the addition of Search inside GMail, the possibilities of that + Google Profiles + Friend Connect (and Gtalk status sharing) in creating a human layer  on top of the existing search is interesting. Their Searchology event has brought out a lot of new stuff  –

    • Search Options – a collection of tools that help you wean out the information you are really looking for, and view it in the way you want to. Essentially you can now tweak Google Search some more to your preferences.
    • Wonder wheel – it clusters search information
    • Rich Snippets – In addition to the info that currently gets displayed in a search item, there will be a line that sums up the result – eg. ratings for restaurants. It has asked publishers for their cooperation in adopting microformats to create this structured data.
    • Google Squared – As per the post, it “doesn’t find webpages about your topic — instead, it automatically fetches and organizes facts from across the Internet.” Its description does remind me of a certain yet to be launched search engine 🙂
    • Search will also indicate whether a site is optimised for mobile devices, and will consider location when delivering search results. (Google Suggest bringing in results from local places for say, restaurants)

    Some excellent live coverage happened at Search Engine Land.

    Meanwhile, a small detour for Microsoft and Facebook. Microsoft claimed recently that its going to become “more disruptive in search.” Facebook recently opened its stream API but also cut off the RSS feed for the updates. I used to make use of it in at least a couple of places. 🙁 It also acknowledged Indian users by making itself available in 6 Indian languages. I wonder where Facebook figures in these search battles. Does the opening of the stream API mean that we will soon have a real time status search mechanism? But how useful will that be when a lot of users prefer to keep their profiles walled (like FB itself)? But its interesting to note that many geeks also auto update their FB statuses with their twitter ones thanks to many available services. FB is quite an aggregator too, in its own way, so I wonder if we’ll get to see a search that shows Twitter + FB statuses, and the videos, pages, shared links and comments content on FB. Meanwhile, on real time, alerts now happen as pop ups. 😐

    The last couple of days also saw new versions of a couple of existing players – One Riot now indexes and groups link shares on Twitter and Digg. It also allows you to dig further into the data- numbers, who shared it first etc  and then share it on the two services. Tweetmeme is launching an enhanced search version which lets you filter results by age, category, channel and also shows how many times result has been tweeted.

    To me, real time is only one of the things that makes Twitter’s foray into search interesting. After all, when I search for real time links to a story on Twitter, I don’t think an Ad Sense like mechanism will work for revenue. So it is the combination of semantics, sentiment analysis, and real-time data that makes this Twitter development seem like a huge leap (when it happens). Google seems to be working on making more sense of data, than real time, or semantics. Can that be taken as actually walking the talk when they claim that search is still in its infancy and there’s a lot of room for existing and new players? Twitter and the new services don’t have the scale of indexed pages that Google has, and Google doesn’t have real time. For now, its interesting how all of these services actually work out complementing each other, as shown by the comparison here.

    I have to admit, with all the connecting that was happening on Twitter, I was hoping that a revolutionary model (of revenue and web behaviour) would evolve. The current developments, though a lot of it is still conjecture, are not as over whelming as I’d hoped for. Its an organic evolution of sorts – semantic, real time, social web. Perhaps it is only the beginning.

    until next time, the search is on…