Tag: twitter

  • This connect…..

    Perspectives. The ones that will only make sense to yourself. I experience a lot of that – both ways. Cryptic ‘humour’ that I come up with, a book that I read. Maybe one has to be ready to receive that perspective. I used to wonder what the drawings at gapingvoid was all about until recently. One change in my own outlook of life and it all started making sense.

    Sometimes I think I might get it, but it slithers away. Like Road, Movie. I did enjoy the ride, but I don’t think I got the perspective the maker had. But it perhaps doesn’t matter,  because I may attribute something to it and derive a value that the maker had never thought of. Maybe that’s why many artists become popular years after they go hmm, underground, or up in smoke. Maybe others gain that understanding required for the perspective, or maybe the artist is no longer around to dispute the understanding 😉

    Perhaps that’s all what the search is about. The one kindred soul who can just feel the same way about the particular experience as we do. A smile, a tear, a look, a hug, a connection. But of course, then the greed sets in, expectations abound, permanence is sought, and heartburn happens, for after all, not all of us are lucky enough to lose baggage in transit. 🙂

    I’ve been really stuck to the eklektic station on live365. And I like the playlist so much that I felt I could perhaps get away from collecting music if I had access to it all the while. It seemed vaguely analogical to the idea of having no baggage when one is connected to a higher consciousness that provides bliss all the while. 🙂

    Its one of the things that makes Twitter work for me. A stream of collective consciousness. Somewhere in that huge crowd i can be invisible enough to continue sending and receiving perspectives and wonder exactly how the other person’s perspective was arrived at, all this even without a conversation. I can also stop myself from seeking validation. No baggage… technically, if I don’t count the RTs 🙂

    Oh, all that I know,
    There’s nothing here to run from,
    And there, everybody here’s got somebody to lean on.

    until next time, sole searching for a read that didn’t make sense? 😉

    PS: Like with most things web, shared perspectives too have an extreme dark side. Read about the Chinese Cyberposse, who track down and punish people who they think have committed a wrong.

  • Social Obligations

    Sometime back, I had this conversation with Surekha. Let me give you the context. I subscribe to a lot of sites on Google Reader, and therefore find a lot of links that I want to share. I end up sharing them – on Reader itself, where i can also ‘Like’ it, on Twitter, rarely on FB, many times on delicious. I also use many of these links for the posts on my other blog. Surekha’s  observation was that I was stingy with praise. I, as is my wont, proceeded to defend myself. I said that since my sharing had multiple layers and filters, the very fact that I shared it on Twitter was a praise in itself. She called me elitist (which, after a recent post, is almost as insulting to me as being called a vegetarian :p) 😀 From where she’s looking, she’s right, and its a valid perspective, though I wouldn’t admit it then. 😀

    It made me think about how I share links. Now, I’m not sure if this is retrofit rationalisation or an inbuilt mechanism. In my chat with Surekha I had mentioned that my varied interests meant that what I considered a ‘Good Read’ might be a lousy read for someone not interested in the subject. I wonder now, if my binary kind of approach to things (0 or 1, extremes) coupled with my objectivity fixation makes me just share something without an opinion, so that the person who reads is without the baggage of my bias, good or bad.

    Sometime back, after watching the stream for a while, and reading opinions on a subject, I asked Mo, “post this generation,do you think anyone will know there is a ‘don’t like it,don’t use it’ option? wouldn’t they feel obliged to comment? :|”.  I felt that, what blogging started, microblogging has accelerated. From books and places and events to personal traits – not just of celebrities, but of other users’, everything finds its way into the stream, the digital version of the collective consciousness. To corrupt the current Videocon line “We is the new me”. Our ‘stream world’ and all its inhabitants seem extensions of ourselves, a huge canvas of vicarious living. Do many of us feel obliged to share our opinion in real time, some kind of pressure to constantly contribute, and so we comment on everything we can lay hands on?

    In this sharing blitz, do we spare a thought for the object of our comment? Specifically people. With real time, opinions are being formed in minutes. Yes, everyone is entitled to one, but does it also mean we become trigger-happy? When we stick labels, when we judge, do we think of the effort/thought/perspective of the person at the other end? (those on Twitter, think #mpartha, #princesssheeba…I must say, i confess to some silly work on the latter) As we have more listeners, do we feel obliged to pass judgment and evolve into what others would be impressed with/like? Is that why people change when they become popular on say, twitter? It happens in real life too – this modeling of self based on the audience, but in real life, its difficult to enter the streams of thousands of people. With each of us getting a microphone, I wonder if we have entered ourselves unwittingly into a new form of rat race, in which the casualty is compassion and consideration for others?

    until next time, this is an opinion too 🙂

  • Whereabouts : The next social play

    Like I mentioned in the last post on the subject, ‘Location’ is back in a social avatar. A few days back, Foursquare celebrated its first year of existence, and now has more than 500000 users, 1.4 million venues, and $1.35 million in VC funding. I celebrated it with only my fourth mayorship. 😉 But there are a few more reasons why I decided to do a post. Both Foursquare and Gowalla had been launched at SXSW last year, and this year, location based services (LBS from now) are expected to be the talking point, much like Twitter 3 years back. 🙂

    In my last post, I had mentioned the specific competition in the space – Loopt, MyTown, Gowalla, Yelp, developments happening there, as well as the tie ups that Foursquare has managed with HBO, Warner, Zagat. Since Foursquare is arguably the poster child of LBS, and since there haven’t been any dramatic game changing developments from other players, I’ll focus on Foursquare and a couple of players you would know from earlier.

    Foursquare recently announced that it was launching a few business tools, which include basic statistics like total check ins, unique visitors, sharing to Twitter/ Facebook, gender split, time breakdown etc.  More importantly, it gives business establishments real time information that can help them plan promotions, take care of customer complaints, keep track of customer loyalty etc. There’s also a page where staff can interact with customers.  Though these might seem basic now, more detailing is bound to happen very soon, which will perhaps allow quick polls on menu items, service, allow optimisation that will cut things like waiting time etc. Indeed, Starbucks, which has been very active in the ‘social’ space, is now linking Foursquare to its rewards program, for instance, allowing users to earn a ‘Barista’ badge when they check in to 5 separate Starbucks outlets.

    According to Alexa, India contributes to 2.4% of Foursquare’s traffic, and is the 8th largest contributor. Maybe not the surest of sources, but its an indicator nevertheless. With rapidly increasing mobile penetration, net access costs are likely to come down, and this could mean good news for players like Foursquare. Imagine the implications on the CCD controversy if the Foursquare implementation had been done. 🙂

    (Interesting Read in context : Why “Where Are You Doing It?” Trumps “What Are You Doing?”)

    But wait, there have been other developments too. Twitter, still my favourite service out there, has turned on geo location. The API has been around for a while now, but it wasn’t really anything that anyone seemed to be taking an interest in. The first time I saw the implementation, was on a tweet from LBhat. Check out that tiny pin at the end, and you’ll see where he tweeted from. With the kind of development that happens with Twitter’s open API, there are bound to be some interesting apps very soon. Not to mention that Foursquare is already integrated with Twitter. (All this reminds me of an app called CitySense that I wrote about almost a couple of years back)

    Meanwhile, it has also been pretty clear that Facebook would make a play for local very soon. There was speculation recently that Facebook was showing an interest in Loopt, but nothing has been confirmed yet. What has been revealed is that it will unveil its location based features in April at its developer conference, f8. (location is shown on a Google Map 😉 ) Facebook has been pushing its mobile interface a lot recently, check out your logout page, or the ads on the right side of your home page telling you how many friends are using it. The article states that its more a play for local advertising (against Google) than against services like Foursquare. Business pages + location features for users + tools built from API will be interesting.  But it will also be interesting to see what they do about privacy. Something that remains a challenge for Google too, especially when Buzz and Latitude are integrated.

    Meanwhile, there are other interesting players emerging. Check out Miso, a Foursquare style app for TV and movies, RateItAll, that now wants to help businesses build their own Foursquare, Pelago’s Whrrl, which tries to connect social networking with real social activity – real places where ‘regulars’ meet up. Location based services are interesting because they integrate the real and virtual worlds. When I look at these and other  interesting developments like say, Google Street View (have you seen Hong Kong yet?!), and Augmented Reality experiments, the ‘Internet of Things‘ I think we haven’t even scratched the surface of the possibilities.

    until next time, now for vocation based services 😉

    Update: Just read that we now have a check in Aggregator – Rummble. Read about it here.

  • Fire Drill

    A few years ago, 3 to be precise, I might’ve been in the thick of it. The fire at Carlton Towers. My visiting card then carried this – Mid Day, 301, Carlton Towers…. No, I wouldn’t have been tweeting, because twitter would come into my life only three months later. But perhaps this was the reason the entire scenario bothered me, even as I sat watching the Twitter stream and the reactions. At first, i thought it was some minor mishap, and even cracked a mallu pun at TGIF’s expense. (@mixdev reminded me of that yesterday) But later, of course, I realised it wasn’t.

    I don’t watch news channels, so I was spared the repeated shots (a good post by my friend Nishant) of those tragic jumps. I was watching the stream though, and kept seeing retweets of @jackerhack , who was stuck in the building. I read about people jumping from the windows, and my first reaction was what the hell was wrong with them? What did they expect, a bloody bed of roses??!! And then I realised that there was no way I could even imagine, let alone understand what they must’ve felt in those moments. The closest I could get to is perhaps when I have trouble breathing. Now these are very very minor asthmatic attacks, but even then I know the intense desire to get one lungful of air. And that’s perhaps just a decimal percentage of the trauma those poor poor souls must’ve gone through.

    Trivialisation bothers me. I still read Malayala Manorama daily, and my biggest grouse with them is the way they capture deaths. Not events like the above, but individual deaths. Though I realise its perhaps a way of communicating to those who might not have known, reducing a life (and its end) to a few column cms with a matter-of-fact headline bothers me. Perhaps its some sort of block towards mortality. When @jackerhack ‘s (okay, he has a ‘real’ name, and its easier to type – Kiran), so, when Kiran’s tweets were retweeted by everyone who had access to an enter button, it somehow reminded me of the above. After some time, when he tweeted about not panicking, I was even mildly irritated. (Sorry!) If it was meant for the twitter audience, i was wondering whether the majority of the audience cared for him enough to panic, and for those who did care for him, I wondered if the words would do any good. Was the twitter crowd mature enough not to panic, or not to see this all as a “ok, big event happening, let me part of it” thing? Are we really so different from the media we claim to hate?

    Now he bloody obviously had reasons to do what he did, which he has articulated very well on his blog. I read and re-read and even before that, could empathise. And so, this is not so much about him as it is about us. Us, the crowd which blocked the roads there to take a look, us who sat watching on the tube or the stream, us the viewers and readers, us the voyeurs, and definitely me, who writes a post. Death makes a good story. With apologies to the few who don’t look at it that way, I wonder if being part of the excitement has taken a whole new turn when we’ve become the media on Twitter. Unlike the case with other media, when the crowd creates and consumes, who can complain? Yes, there are many cases in which relief and charity work have been augmented by Twitter, but this wasn’t such a case. Hopefully, all this is just me 🙂

    until next time, false fire alarms?

  • The clique friendly web

    In spite of the last post, I’m a bit ambivalent about Vir Sanghvi’s column.

    On one hand, I am in complete agreement with the rebuttals that I have read – Lekhni, Amit, Rohit. Rational and well articulated.

    And yet, over the years, that’s almost 7 of them, I can confidently say that blogger cliques have always been around. They may not have been formed with that intention, but over a time frame, many have developed that way, and this is a phenomenon I see on twitter too, where ‘followers’ tends to be taken literally. Will I name any? No, simply because they are cliques, and these days, cliques to mobs is a single click conversion. Heh.

    Simplistically put, many news channels and newspapers started out as a means of expression. Those who produced good content realised that many were paying attention to what they had to say. They looked around and noticed that there were others of their kind too. Mutual acknowledgment was a bit difficult because of business considerations, but they still stuck together, broadly, in terms of stances towards issues. The adoption of the medium rose, bringing new audiences. Somewhere, the quality of content became iffy. Sometimes because it had become a business, and sometimes because the content creators lost objectivity and started dictating norms, because they believed their audience was THE only audience that mattered. Of course they had measurement tools. Heh. (Just a small detour to say that even media planners trash the TAM and IRS/NRS methodology, yes, go on, take a poll)

    And then the web happened, and became a force to be reckoned with. It brought with it, blogs, which took less than 5 minutes to create. Some of the creators spent exactly that much of time. But others stuck on. Time and effort brought them recognition, and even some fame. They looked around, saw others of their kind. There were hardly any business consideration, linking to each other became the norm. The audience was being built all this while, and unacknowledged, a herd mentality too. Personal branding crept in. In many cases, the quality of content might have dropped with time – rehashed content using previously successful templates, link-baits, these are just online manifestations of things we see in newspapers and television. But though the posts were not as funny as they used to be or not well thought out, the audience stuck on, it was after all, a cool community to be in. There’s nothing wrong with it, its human nature to seek out kindred souls. The unfortunate part is the increasing intolerance for contra-views among many bloggers. You can see enough comment wars if you look around. At some point, perspectives became dogmas.

    And then came twitter, and microbloggers. It became all the more easier – from the simple RT to #followfriday and lists, there are multiple tools available, to build audiences, and cliques. And as I’ve written before, we on Twitter are famous for mobs. 🙂

    So,  my point is Mr. Sanghvi, relax. We’ve seen it all before, its only the medium that has changed. The people remain. This too shall give way to something else. If all goes according to the way it has before, in a few years, you can chuckle over post like yours by some blogger, who thinks someone in what is then the new media has been judgmental to a senior blogger. Heh.

    Meanwhile, the good part is, the web makes content production and distribution very easy, so you can ignore people if you personally think they’ve ‘lost it’. You will always find a contra-voice, it might be brow beaten sometimes, but it exists.

    until next time, sanguine 😉