Desicritics Category: BizTech: Internet

Game Review: Farmville

Deepti Lamba — Thu, 7 Jan 2010 12:00:44 EST

I was anti-Facebook for a pretty long time and sometime back deactivated my account as well. I found it to be juvenile and a waste of time but I reactivated my account after convincing myself it was just another form of social media and a good way of getting to know people.

I had seen Ideasmith talk about her Farmville farm on Twitter off and on. I gave in to curiosity and decided to create a farm of my own and that was my undoing. I was plowed under and soon an avid farmer.

The game has become part of my daily routine. After sending kids to school I check my farm before I read the papers, watch the news and head off to the gym. I remember the harvest time of my crops and ensure I’m online to harvest the crops and play the game.

Initially it took some fortitude to play the game at lower levels. Money was scarce, the plot of land limiting and the rich neighbours with their gorgeous farms enviable. When I visited deserted farms I realized lack of interest in the game couldn’t be excused by lack of time but lack of consistent will power and discipline.

In many ways Farmville is like real planting and harvesting. After plowing and seeding one has to wait for things to grow and one can only plant what’s available at the level and though Zynga has the option of buying cash and coins with real money most of us realize it’s just a game and don’t give into temptation. It is best to go up the hard way from level to level and be helped initially by Ribbons and extra cash thrown our way by having bountiful harvest. Facebook reports that there are more people on Farmville than even Twitter.

Ribbons: Winning Ribbons means extra coins and XP. There are all kinds of ribbons.

Free gifts: Free gifts section opens up as one goes up the levels. There are trees, animals, objects and currently presents are still lingering around from Christmas season.

Neighbours: The more neighbours one has the more XP one can gain by fertilizing their plants, getting rid of weeds, bugs or animals by single clicks. More neighbours one has more the chances of getting one’s land fertilized and the number of gifts one gets also goes up. Also one needs certain number of neighbours before one can expand their farm.

Seeds: There are all kinds of seeds available and the crops are time bound. Some are for easy money making and others can be planted for three four days and then harvested. The most profitable plants are at the higher levels. A useful guide to the economics of Farmville is on Mahalo.

Animals and Trees: One can have a steady stream of money pouring in from animals and trees. Some can be bought from the market and others gained as gifts from neighbours. They mature and can be harvested. Horses are brushed for their horsehair while truffles can be picked from pigs.

Buildings: Buying buildings such as cottages, villas etc are expensive but they help one gain the architect ribbon, more XP and even get to the next level. Its a good idea to get a chicken coop and dairy farms to make your cows and hens more productive, and don't forget to adopt a bull for your dairy farm so you can occasionally share a calf with your neighbors.

Tips and Tricks sites: There are lot of sites which promise tips and tricks to get to the higher levels but its best to go up the regular way instead of falling for these gimmicks. One useful and legal Facebook application is the Farmville Bonus Checker, which periodically scans your neighbors' walls to check if there are any bonuses on offer.

Currently I am on Level 29 and saving to buy a manor for my farm and plan to stick it out at my farm for a while before I throw in the towel.

Aaman joined Farmville a few days after I did and after he had peered over at my farm and muttered about what a waste of time it was. Predictably enough, he soon figured it all out and was racing ahead of me, gathering the moolah, presents, and the most profitable crops. He quit suddenly over Christmas, after reaching level 31. He deleted all his crops, sold his villas, trees, and animals, and left a parting note for us hardworking farmers.

Book Review: Practical Intrusion Analysis

Ganadeva Bandyopadhyay — Sun, 3 Jan 2010 19:00:33 EST

With a core emphasis on intrusion detection systems(IDS) in networks, the book includes further topics like wireless IDS, Intrusion Prevention System(IPS),etc.

SNORT and Bro are the two main IDS tools discussed. Both of them are open-source tools. While SNORT is representative of signature-based IDS, Bro is an example of anomaly-based IDS. A signature-based IDS looks for signatures in the network transmission indicating an attack in progress whereas an anomaly-based IDS goes by a normal traffic pattern and raises alert if there is an abnormality detected.

There is some discussion on writing signatures for SNORT. There are sites on the internet where signatures can be downloaded. However, any intrusion analyst using SNORT in detail, would need to know the techniques for writing signatures. There are methods discussed in this book for strategy to create good signatures while going through a vulnerability' life cycle.

Some of the other network analysis tools described in this book include vulnerability assessment scanners(ex. Nessus, Nikto, router audit tool a.k.a RAT), packet sniffers(ex. Wireshark, TCPDump), file integrity checker(ex. Tripwire, RANCID, AIDE), password auditing(ex. Cain and Able, Brutus, RainbowCrack), wireless security toolkits(ex. AirCrack, AirSnort, Kismet), vulnerability exploitation tools(ex. Metasploit), network reconnaissance toolkits(ex. Hping2, nmap, ngrep, ntop). The distinctions between these may be small and sometimes even overlapping such as an essential packet sniffer in an intrusion detection system.

There is some discussion on web application firewalls, wireless IDS/IPS, some other less frequent topics like physical intrusion detection and geospatial intrusion detection. Web Application Firewalls are specialized IDS to cater to the practicalities like more percentage of secure network protocols in use and wide variations from web applications across organizations. This makes the the general IDS tools practically ineffective as a intruder can go within a tunneled traffic which is not configured for monitoring out-of-the-box.

To summarize, the book covers a lot of topics within its scope. It is a good read for a introduction to current intrusion analysis,detection and prevention techniques. A more continuous discussion with more real-world examples and their solutions within the topics would have made this a delightful read.

To Tweet Or Not To Tweet - Word of the Year

sufferingsocrates — Wed, 2 Dec 2009 06:47:06 EST

I was neglectful of twitter for a long time, but the tweeting bug finally bit me . Twitter has been the rage, especially in the past year. The fact that twitter is the top word used in English language in 2009 bears testimony to this. Quite an act, driven almost entirely by the social website's popularity. It took out words like H1N1 and stimulus in the top words list, published by Global Language Monitor.

Twitter is such a rage, that it is almost like the next rss out there. While twitter restricts the number of characters to 140, the impact of tweeting has been contagious. Any news channel or website, which does not have twitter ids would come as a shock for me in this day and age. Any mobile phone which comes out these days, brands itself with claims of having tweeting options in them.

It does seem to me though, that twitter is the sms version of the web. The crucial advantage twitter has, that it is ubiquitous due its presence in the internet. A sms though is confined to a circle. The only comparison which comes up and which ends abruptly is the character based entry. While a sms would be a quick message or response to a select group, tweets are more for a quick update or a news item on the web, for one and all to see. sms is at a personal level, while tweets are at a social level for anyone accustomed to internet.

The fact that Twitter has been most searched and so vastly used, especially in 2009 bears a strange coincidence with the recession. Is it that, people have been following up or socializing more aggressively to know of happenings about the impact of recession? It would be much easier to know ground level details of layoffs or bankruptcies in a 140 character format, than to wait and rely on data gathering engines to throw up data once in a quarter. Is that the reason for twitter to have picked up so tremendously? But it certainly looks likely, that socializing through twitter would help approach multiple avenues for the unfortunate ones who get laid off. So much so, that linkedin (business networking platform) now provides integration with twitter!

Earlier, Microsoft's Bing and Google, both strung partnerships with twitter for their search results. The objective was quite simple. To refine search results, to reflect the very latest happening around the world at any moment. The power of twitter for up to date news has not been lost on the biggies of internet search. That’s the power of twitter. Unadulterated ground level reality, for all to read.

But now that recession has pretty much ended, and economies across the globe are picking up, is there a need for twitter to worry? It may have ridden the recession wave to popularize itself, but what happens of it post recession? Data recently released by eMarketer, reveals a significant dip in the traffic to the tweeting website in the months from September to October. Atleast the traffic from U.S to twitter website seems to indicate so. Does that mean, people are losing interest in twitter? Is tweeting well past its fad?

It coincides unusually with a pickup in the economy. Is it that, when people were desperate to socialize and land a job, twitter was the in-thing, while after the economy picked up, no one had the time for tweeting? The research though does not mention traffic to twitter via third party applications or through mobile access. So, things could still be rosy for twitter.

PC Game Review: Plants Vs. Zombies

Deepti Lamba — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 00:01:34 EDT

I have done my best to stay away from video games but my romance with pc games has always run strong. I used to spend hours playing Tetris, Solitaire, mahjong, Bejeweled and now find myself enamoured by the game Plants Vs. Zombies.

The game begins with easy steps where plants save the humans from the zombies. It starts with planting sunflowers which strengthens the sun and helps in buying plants like pea shooters, barrier forming walnuts etc that help in killing the zombies. The killing spree goes well into the night by the second level where one can also use toxic mushrooms that kill the zombies and if the zombies get the porch they get run over by the garden rollers.

The zombies are a quirky lot from newspaper reading zombies to cheerleaders and bucket headed janitors and as the game progresses, it naturally becomes complicated and difficult. On higher levels one can even landscape and have a Zen garden and kill the zombies with all kinds of creative tools.

What I liked about the game is the interest my son professed in gardening after playing the game and he is very strategic about the planting of various plants and using of tools against the zombies and the game has diverted his interest from the idiot box to a large extent.

The visuals are rich and quite cute to look at and the game is available at Pop Cap Games.

Another game that seems to have struck the fancy of many Facebook users is Farmville where they known their own farms with animals, have crops etc and like most video games its very addictive. But since I deactivated my FB account I have not fallen prey to the game, yet.

On Plants Vs. Zombies, I am on level three and the game has become quite complicated but it continues to be fun to play. Its only negative thing about the game is that its very addictive and difficult to quit. So play at your own peril.

Google - Weaving a Worldwide Web

sufferingsocrates — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 08:38:58 EDT

Google has been quietly gunning away at the technology behemoths. Being itself a giant, it makes things easier for Google to take on the might of Microsoft and Apple. Just as recession is ending, Google beat market expectations and grew 7% for Q3 ending, September 2009, as compared to Q3 in 2008. Ad spending, undoubtedly is flooding Google's coffers once again, after a rather grim year of recessionary trend. Google announced a surprise bonus for all employees across its board, as an incentive for their efforts during October 2009.

Riding on the wave of the strong growth, Google, which has always been quietly working at spreading its wings far and wide, is investing more in view of the positive outlook in the economy. Cues such as its aggressive ad campaigning for businesses to adopt its Google Apps services to embrace its enterprise search appliance option are just an indicator. Touted as Gone Google, the marketing campaign is going to be featured in airports, high traffic spots through billboards.

Google, clearly is also pioneering the cloud computing phenomenon, to have any or all softwares hosted in an internet cloud hosted by Google, and accessed by an entire enterprise, rather than store them in separate servers, thus saving costs for big and small organizations alike.

Google's Android open source mobile platform, for mobile phone handsets is just beginning to open up. In what is being touted as the biggest threat to Apple's iPhone yet, Motorola, after being on the wane for almost 2 years in the mobile market, would hope that Droid would change its fortunes. Droid, runs the Google Android software, and will be sold by Verizon Wireless in the U.S. That would mean a 3 way battle through one collaboration : Verizon taking on AT&T; Motorola taking on iPhone; Google taking on Apple itself !

Google Wave is another phenomenon waiting to further cut down distances separating the internet world. Claimed as a real time communication platform, Google Wave is an effort by Google to integrate a multitude of features like email, instant messaging, wikis, web chat, social networking, video conferencing, project management to build one elegant, in-browser communication client. The anticipation for Wave to roll out can be gauged by the fact that, there have only been 10,000 or so invites for end users to try the service. So much so, there are invites for Wave being auctioned at eBay !

This is not all. After launching Google Chrome browser last year, Google announced an ambitious plan to launch its own open source Operating System. Christened, Chrome, it is evident Google is plans to make this an extension of its browser. The final objective it would seem, is to integrate the internet world, to draw the hardware resources of the computer. This would mean, more efficient memory usage and better batter life for computer devices. This is where its Cloud Computing could be key.

Clearly, Google has in myriad ways, taken on the likes of Microsoft and Apple, quietly from just being a search engine giant. Google's potential and its undisputed capabilities are only just unfolding. The key aspect to Google's future ambitions would be, how it leverages and grows on its cloud services. That could well result in a truly world wide web weaved by Google.

Google Launches Sidewiki - Changing The Perspective

Aaman Lamba — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 12:41:00 EDT

Google announced the launch of Sidewiki, a commenting system that adds a frame to any webpage and allows users of the Google Toolbar to add comments to any page, and then share or publish those on their own blogs or other sites. These comments are visible to other users, and introduce a meta-layer to the sites being reviewed.

At first blush, this seems like a very good idea, and on one hand, it is no different from commentary about the website on Digg, Twitter, or a personal blog. On the other hand, the commentary is distinct from the website's content although it appears contiguous with it. The commentary may be at odds with the website policy, and worse, could be construed as objectionable by site readers. This can lead to liability issues, and moderation might be tricky, especially for very public sites, it is hard to believe that crowdsourced moderation will not descend into a maelstrom of chaos - the wikipedia editors have enough trouble with this approach, and they make a herculean effort, with much interdiction and vandal protection. One saving grace might be the requirement to be logged in with a Google account, but this doesn't amount to much. There is an option to report abuse, but no promise that this will be addressed. The Sidewiki program policies are quite reassuring, not sure how effectively they could be enforced in the Wild Web.

Our program policies listed below play an important role in maintaining a positive experience for everyone using Sidewiki. We'd like to maintain an environment in which everyone can express their views and connect with others. To maintain this type of environment, we need to curb abuses that threaten our ability to provide this service.

We ask that everyone abide by these program policies so that we can all enjoy using Sidewiki. Violation of these standards may result in denial of Sidewiki access or deletion of your Google Account. Be sure to check back from time to time, as these policies may change. Please also refer to Google’s Terms of Service for more information.

Visually, the implementation seems crisp and unobtrusive with a hideaway frame. There is a challenge though in the provision of paged comments, and it is likely only the most recent comments will be read, although Google Sidewiki provides an option for page owners to leave a special entry that appears above all others, and is styled differently. Multiple languages are supported. Sidewiki comments can also be ranked, ordering comments through some private logic.

Sidewiki uses a quality algorithm and user ratings to determine the order of the entries that appear in the sidebar for a given page. The entries that are scored as being the most helpful and pertinent are more likely to display.

Google Wave, not yet in public beta, may provide enhanced control over Sidewiki content. It would be quite straightforward to expose a Sidewiki comment as a blip, and the entire thread as a wave on Google Wave. An API to export content from Sidewiki is inevitable, and one should be able to integrate commentary back into the website.

There are no features for website publishers in Google Sidewiki yet, and no option for websites to opt-out of Sidewiki comments. This is by design naturally, but one believes this feature will be added by Google soon, There is no restriction on posting commercial content to Sidewiki, and this could lead to egregious abuse of the service by SERP professionals and marketing advertisers, so brand managers could have their hands full moderating external content, including competitor links, negative feedback, and more. This can be the ultimate CRM tool, though, aggregating feedback conveniently juxtaposed with the brand/site.

This new service unfortunately seems to be another tangential effort from Google, and one hopes they would focus on stabilizing & improving their existing business critical services before remaking the web yet again.

Tweeting the Kampala Riots: Access to Information

Zehra Rizvi — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 09:24:35 EDT

So, it's official. I love Twitter. Love it love it love it. As does my blogging buddy Toaf and I echo his sentiments when he said, everyone is blogging about twitter, I will too. His blog post ends up being something I am thinking about myself but just in Afghanistan instead of Kampala. It's true - everyone is writing about Twitter, Facebook, blogging and the power of social media, so why not me too?

I had joined Twitter about two years ago but didn't tweet for ages or check it or anything, and then all of a sudden, on moving to Kampala, not sure why, but I got active on it again. Actually, I do know why. Same reason my Facebooking and my blogging had a resurgence. It's a great way, a one stop shop for me to stay in touch with friends and family. It's fantastic, especially when you are on slow internet and you DO want to stay in touch. People are not an easy phone call away (not on a 7 hour difference, anyhow!)...

So I had been tweeting along and adding people selectively, and I even read a book about twitter All a Twitter by @TeeMonster (Tee Morris), which I mentioned last time and I keep saying I will write a review about (yeah, some day).

The real power of tweeting came to me during the last few days of rioting we've had in Kampala. Quick background on the riots: The Buganda King wanted to visit a part of his kingdom and Museveni, the President said, no, you can't until you meet two conditions, so pick up the phone and talk to me. The Buganda's in Uganda (6 mil in a country of about 30 mil) took offense and started rioting. Short and sweet. Google it to get more stories/background/in depth analysis if you really need to. Back to why I love twitter:

I remember when the Iranian election violence was going on and hearing about how everyone was using twitter and keeping abreast of things but I didn't really take it seriously. It was removed from me and I didn't get into it at that point. But this time, obviously, as I live quite close to where everything was going down, twitter became a lifeline.

I am working as a consultant out here in Kampala and normally, I am used to being a full fledged member of a delegation and being plugged into everything. (I wrote about it here and as it says, Kampala is totally safe and a lovely place to live). Not this time. Micky, my husband of three weeks, was away in the UK for a week and I was by myself and had no access to radio and no local TV channels. In case you think I'm a total loser, I would like to clarify that I did just move here (and that includes a three week break outside of the country for my wedding).

I heard about the rioting but the first day just thought, yeah ok, it's just protestors in town. I took it easy on Thursday and since I work from home, it didn't really bother me. Friday, when I had to go to the office, I asked my maid who came in that morning, all OK outside? And she was like, NO, it's not. I called up the woman I was supposed to meet, to cancel the meeting and she was like, yeah yeah, it's fine - come on out. Lessons learned here: TRIANGULATE your information. How MANY times have I done this?? Always always always hunt for the third opinion. Sheesh.

I went out to the office and was driving in eerily quiet streets (it's just a ten minute drive) and was standing in the office and all of a sudden heard a rat ta tat tat. No one else really blinked, so I was like, hmm, OK, my imagination. Second time I heard the sound, I was like, umm, guys, what's that? Answer: Police firing live rounds into crowds to disperse them.

Great. I am close enough to hear the shots and in about five minutes, there were shots on the street the office was on. Really, that's fantastic. For someone like ME, who takes security so super seriously, I was really out of the loop and annoyed about it. I still finished up my meetings and then headed home (with a pit stop to stock up on groceries for the weekend).

I came home and tweeted about it. Just one message. And all of a sudden, got a response from someone I didn't know. How @UgInsomniac found my tweet, was a mystery to me but then I saw the hash tag. I did a search on Kampala on twitter and was plugged in BIG time to everything. I spent the next day and a half glued to twitter and watched as the Kampala stories came flooding in.

It was incredible. There has been a media blackout and the only way for me and lots of others, including major newspapers to follow what was going on was through twitter. There was a map on Uganda Witness that very clearly showed where riots, civilians, deaths, military presence etc all were and it was information being received through twitter that filled it in . And it's not that it was just news flowing in. It was about the community of news and the support I felt from everyone who was tweeting. We were all in it together. Every once in a while, someone would crack a joke, or respond to yours and it helped in a situation where I felt like I didn't have anyone really, to turn to and I could have been living in a vacuum.

In the past two days of calm, the Kampala forum on twitter is posting blogs (two excellent ones that write about tweeting and the riots, WAY better than I have can be found here and here) and recapping what happened and staying in touch sporadically. The BEST thing I have seen though, is one I was thinking about last night: access to information.

This is something we think about a lot now in humanitarian work. Be it riots that we just had in Kampala or after a natural disaster: How does the communication flow to people? To the general public. Not as @CamaraAfrica rightly points out, to just the 'elite' who have access to twitter?

My friend Imogen Wall and her colleage Lisa Robinson, post tsunami, wrote this excellent paper on communication with affected populations. Great title, by the way. Left in the Dark: The Unmet need for information in humanitarian response. The link will take you to ODI’s website where you can get a synopsis of the arguments put forth not just in her paper but also what others think need to be done. Imo is a journalist and was working in Aceh at the time of the tsunami and this was a hot topic. It was a hot topic everywhere and something we were consistently failing on. Keeping people we were there to serve abreast and informed of developments. The World Disasters Report 2005, a publication of the Red Cross, stated access to information as a basic right and one that we had to look at more seriously (which, I think, is what also triggered Imo et al to write the paper).

A quote from John Mitchell Head of ALNAP (Active Learning Network for Accountability and Performance in Humanitarian Action) to start off the report says:

The flow of information throughout the disaster cycle is crucial for effective humanitarian operations. This year's report, with illuminating examples from before, during and after emergencies, will be welcomed by practitioners and policy-makers.

It took about THREE years, but last year, in New York, hosted by OCHA, there was a srious discussion about access to communication and from it, started a group. I have my issues with the group (it’s primarily journos and comms people within agencies and there needs to be more field practioners) and I know they have set up a working group etc to start to deal with how to improve communication. I will try and get permission to get emails etc IF people are interested in how to join or contribute to the group. Leave me a comment if you want the info.

Having said ALL this, I think there are important lessons to be learned and ways to move forward from the riots. I think the most important thing coming out of this is that communication was down. TV and radio were just not working and there was a media blackout. There was some of us, with internet access and twitter access who were able to stay in the loop but we were literally a HAND FULL of people. As @CamaraAfrica tweeted just this morning, her taxi driver was saying, yeah yeah, it’s fine, nothing wrong. (She also gave a rec for a great place to have a massage post riots...YAY!). There is a gap in communication and there are ways to be able to fix that, be it in a situation of a natural disaster or something like the Kampala riots. You could easily be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I was, but got lucky.

Dear Brother Internet

Rahul Jauhari — Sun, 6 Sep 2009 08:33:35 EDT

Dear Brother Internet,

I hope this mail finds you in the pink of health.

And does not find its way into your junk folder.

Is it true that's why you never answered my previous mails?

But first things first.

This week, you turn 40.

Congratulations.

As Virginia Slims cigarettes said to young ladies around the same year you were born:

You've come a long way, baby.

Wikipedia says that is also the title of Fatboy Slim's second studio album.

In which, in a song, DJ Freddy Fresh sings 'Fatboy Slim is f#@%ing in heaven' - a full 108 times.

But that is not the one I was referring to.

I genuinely meant that you have come a long way, baby.

Now to come to the point.

I am older than you are.

And being someone who genuinely cares for you, it is my duty to wish you well.

And ensure that the advice of our village elders reaches you.

Brother, you are at a turning point in your life.

You must be careful.

We had read somewhere a few years back that you had gotten involved with many sites of the explicit sexual type.

Chacha Ramdev had, back then, recommended you be termed an outcast.

Later, when we protested, he suggested you turn to yoga.

I know, in younger days, we tend to lose our way.

I also know you are all grown up now.

But if you HAVE to deal with these sex type sites, then remember one thing.

Always wear a condom.

We are contracting flu from swines nowadays.

Who knows what a site might transmit?

Brother, you are at a turning point in your life.

You must be wary.

Three years back Munshiji received an email at the cyber cafe.

Someone from Nigeria wrote to him saying his dead uncle had left him 50 million dollars.

And to receive the same he would have to wire 5000 dollars first.

Munshiji, after treating the entire village to jalebis, sent the money.

But never heard from that person again.

That is how we came to know of your involvement with those email-fraudsters.

Munshiji demanded that your face be blackened and you be stoned to death.

But after we bribed the Panch, you were let off on grounds of lack of evidence.

Yes, I know you are not like that.

But ALWAYS do a background check of people you befriend.

Better still, ask them for their pan card.

That way you will know if they are genuine or not.

Brother, you are at a turning point in your life.

You must be smart.

Men, it has been written, become wayward at forty.

It is a delicate age.

You remember Bansi?

Well, he got started on this internet messenger chatting with some Savita bhabhi.

It started with being good friends.

He would send her virtual cards.

But very soon things went out of control.

Even when his wife of 14 years walked out on him, he would not stop those sex-type chats.

Till the day he discovered that Savita bhabhi was actually a horny old man.

Bansi called you unmentionable names that day.

But I know you.

You would never know that man.

Nevertheless, in case you get the chance, never have intimate conversations with women you cannot see face to face.

NEVER.

Now with section 377 being valid in our village, Bansi's case hardly stands a chance.

To think, he also lost the only real woman he had.

Brother, you are turning forty.

You must slow down.

Today, I read on google that you are giving birth to too many social networking sites.

Have you forgotten the virtues of family planning?

Do you know what your children are up to?

Do you even remember all their names?

Remember Bholu, the village panwallah?

His teenage daughter put her picture up on one such site.

Some crook stole her face and pasted it on a porn site.

Now the only man willing to marry her is that 60 year old retired station master.

And the villagers are baying for your blood.

Again.

I know children are children.

But too many are difficult to control.

Always deal with them with a firm hand.

And if your wife wants to have more, tell her what the dispensary nurse told us:

Pehla bachha abhi nahin. Doosra bachha kabhi nahin.

(First child, not now. Second child, not ever.)

PS: Do check in the junk folder in case you missed my earlier mails.

To The Cynics With Love: An Ode to Twitter

Sanjukta Basu — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 09:48:50 EDT

My sister is a complete opposite of who I am, she is more like dad and I am more like mom and since mom and dad have nothing in common, sis and I were bound to be different. She belongs to this ‘old is gold’ school of thought, like those conservatives who think everything new, particularly in the field of technology, is a conspiracy to spoil the nation’s youth, those who whine over emails and are often lost in cheerful nostalgia about those beautiful days of hand written letters and pink envelopes carried by pigeons. (Good thing is she doesn’t think too highly of blogs either so chances are she wouldn’t be reading this)

So sometime back she had put this YouTube video (which she thought was funny, I didn’t and I am writing this post to tell you why) on her facebook profile and asked me to see. [Link to the video]

I told you she belongs to the old school. So the video was a terrible take on Twitter. It said Twitter is for people who are self-centered exhibitionists who only want to flaunt their extra ordinary life style. That, on Twitter people think they are talking but they are actually are not talking because no body is listening, that even though you think you are keeping in touch with your friends and telling them what you are doing all the time, truth is those on Twitter have no friends.

I totally hated the video which my sister loved enough to share it with her Facebook friends. So I asked her, very cautiously lest we pick up a fight, “Why don’t you see Twitter as sharing? Everybody likes to share, didn’t you want to share the video, wouldn’t you be happy if more people saw what you shared and may be agreed with you, or even disagreed but reacted in some way?” She said, “No, I didn’t want to share it with the whole world, I only wanted to share it with you and some close friends, and probably post it on my profile only to give an idea to visitors about what I think of Twitter.”

It doesn't matter to her whether people at large know what she thinks of Twitter but it does matter whether her close friends and family know. She being a private person is against the idea of putting her whole life out there in front of the world nonetheless she too once in a while feels like reaching out to very close friends through Facebook.

Ultimately, she is restricting the use of social media but she is still using it.

Same is true for Twitter, you need not necessarily be sharing your updates with the whole world. You can choose to keep only your family in your timeline, you can privatize your updates so that random strangers don’t read them. You choose who follows you and who you follow.

This is true for most social media sites. You cannot generalize the usage of Twitter or any other social media tool for that matter in big square boxes. There are tons of creative users out there using these tools for various purposes. I’ll talk about Twitter specifically, not every body who tweets, do it for the same reasons as others. Not every body tweets the same information either. Sure, there are some people who are exhibitionist, who tweet to flaunt their extra ordinary life; sure there are some very lonely people who tweet only because they don't have real friends to call or text. But that’s not everybody.

Is Twitter about exhibitionism?

I don’t tweet for any one of the above reasons but for all of the above. Sometimes I really want to flaunt, so I would tweet something which in my opinion would make me look very intelligent and cool and then I would want my followers to read my tweets and be jealous or be in awe. But sometimes I don’t care if somebody is reading my tweet or not, sometimes I just want to tweet to keep a record of my own random thoughts. If I don't tweet they’d be lost.

But that’s what journals are for, isn’t it? If you don't care if people read or not then why do you tweet instead of writing your thoughts in a private journal?

Because while I don’t always care if people read or not, I wouldn’t mind if they do. I don't have a problem with people reading what I am doing. One might be comfortable sharing their life with a few close people; I am comfortable sharing it with thousands of them why should that be a problem? Why should they label me as some sort of 'dishonorable exhibitionist' just because I am comfortable in sharing?

Through Twitter we really do connect to somebody somewhere, no matter how insignificant that may seem, it still matters.

For example I came across this really funny page called Uncyclopedia. I wanted to share it with my friends as well as with the world at large. So I tweeted about it and also wrote a mail to few of my close friends. Half of them either didn’t read or read but didn’t care to reply and those who did reply did so only after two days. By that time my enthusiasm was lost.

But on Twitter a random stranger read it and responded immediately with equal enthusiasm. Then we exchanged a few @each other tweets over the topic. I don’t need to add him to my life as a friend right away, I don't need to have him on my Gtalk or exchange numbers, he continues to be a stranger but for one tiny topic, for few insignificant moments our minds did connect and that means a lot. Some of us essentially live in the moment.

It’s not true that I don’t have real friends, of course I do, I have a great family too but not all of them would be interested in all of my pursuits so I don't have the enthusiasm to share everything with them, but of the 1200+ odd followers on Twitter at least one of them would be interested in one or the other of my pursuits. So it helps to tweet rather than call or text the close friends.

Also, even if my friends replied to my mail immediately with equal enthusiasm there’s a limit to how many mails I can write to how many friends in a day. Pretty soon I would be called a spammer. No body wants unsolicited mails on their inbox but with Twitter -- hey they asked for it by choosing to follow me.

Twitter is not really just about what you are doing

I was watching this really cool interview with Abhay Deol on NDTV and I randomly tweeted it. In few seconds I got a reply from a follower thanking me for the ticker, he had promptly switched on the TV and was able to catch the interview.

Now, I had no idea what this friend / follower was doing on a Saturday evening, no idea if he was a fan of Abhay Deol or not, no idea if he was at all in front of the TV so of course there’s no question of me calling him up and telling “hey am watching this interview”. A call was pointless, but my tweet was relevant to him.

Similarly I would never know which tweet is relevant to which of the 1200+ followers I have but I still would like to think that I am giving out information that is useful to somebody or the other out there.

Exchange of information, breaking news, first hand account of major events are some of the most popular usage of twitter presently. Besides which twitter is also used as a place to broadcast yourself, like a quick shout to the world. Say you have a blog, every time you publish a new post you tweet the link. People get a reminder so they’ll visit the blog. Following somebody on twitter is easier than following blog RSS feeds or email subscriptions.

Most regular twitters also use it as random group chat on various topics ranging from funny to weird.

Celebrity tweeps

Twitter is now being used by celebrity to talk about themselves, connect to their fans, promote their new films/shows/books etc. With Indian celebs joining twitter and very actively tweeting and replying to their fans, twitter has revolutionized how we view our icons and how we communicate with them. While Gul Panag tweets to share her life with the fans at a more earthly and friendly level, Mallika Sherawatuses it as a fan mail central where she basically waves back to the fan frenzy. They both are very communicative yet we don't see the fans (baring a few) asking redundant repetitive questions like "Are you dating your co-actors?" On twitter, we respect our stars more because we get to see their human side sans the glitter.

About more usages, I’ll just say, as many users, as many usages. Twitter is like talking, can we make a list of usages of our ability to talk?

Twitter and ‘privacy’

I don’t understand this argument about ‘privacy’ around Twitter. Some people have this nasty habit of giving one weird look up and down your person and express silent disgust when they find out that you would happily tweet about how great was the sex you had last night. They say, “don’t you have a sense of privacy?” Then there are some people who would shudder at the very mention of any thing about their private life going online whether via tweets or blogs (Must add, many such men are living under the constant fear of me disclosing all about their private lives someday).

Pray why is privacy always surrounded by a cloud of insecurity? What is so horribly wrong with our private lives that it must be kept a secret? What is it that we are so embarrassed of?

I once tweeted one morning how the sex last night was good and my man asked me why I tweeted about such personal stuff. He clarified he was only asking and didn't have a problem with it, but still I wondered, why not? What is the big deal about a private tweet? You can tweet about the great movie you saw, the great dinner you had, but not the great sex. Eating and movie going are not part of your personal life? You can say you are feeling low, depressed, bored, but you can’t say you are feeling horny. At one time or the other we all are bound to feel horny but we won’t say it. Funny.

In conclusion, I would only say to the conservatives that twitter is NOT a conspiracy to spoil the youth, it is NOT a conspiracy to make us robots or retards its just one of the many things that we get excited about, use, explore and then be done with. So relax, don't sweat too much on the negative implications of twitter overdose.

Social Consolidation - Facebook Acquires FriendFeed

Aaman Lamba — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 21:32:20 EDT

With communities replacing eyeballs, social media sites have been reaping much hay. From early niche sites, walled gardens like AOL, and geek zones like Usenet, people realized the value of spending some of their time online telling others what they were doing, thinking, and listening to. Even before the surprise success of Twitter, communities like MySpace, Facebook, and Orkut had amassed their millions of followers.

There were still other, higher quality zones, some might say, where the cognoscenti migrated as the masses logged in. FriendFeed was one such space, with its real-time, conversation-style timeline featuring mixed media inputs, the ability to aggregate activity from a variety of sources, and a self-policied, active community. Very recently, Robert Scoble set off a veritable firestorm by unfollowing his thousands of Twitter followers and asking those who wanted to engage with him to come to FriendFeed, where he could categorize them into lists, hide unwanted ones, and even easily report spammers to be blocked by the ever-responsive FriendFeed staff.

With the rise of gargantuan walled gardens, as it were, there was little left to do in the social media space but shift to acquisition and consolidation as a means of meeting the breakneck rate of subscription growth they have experienced over the last couple of years. Much as Tom Siebel predicted the enterprise consolidation wave (and saw it consume his own company), Facebook kicked off the new trend by announcing the acquisition of FriendFeed for an estimated $50 million. This brings to the Facebook stable not just the innovative technology and subscriber base, but also the great team of FriendFeed founders, many of whom are ex-Google employees. Facebook also announced it was opening up its internally developed real-time search capabilities to its user base.

This acquisition can thus be seen as a strategy aiming primarily at the Googleplex, with its imminent release of Google Wave, the collaboration platform, and not just Twitter. Search is Google's primary value proposition, and while the Google Index itself is still probably the best around, there is a perception it lacks true real-time search capabilities people have come to expect.

Personally, I might move away from FriendFeed if it begins to look too much like Facebook, which I found to be shallow and boring. The people I've come to know on FriendFeed are what I'd miss though, so I'd like to take my social graph with me wherever I might end up next. There's a business opportunity right there.