Sunday, September 28, 2008

Tweet-a-boo (aka The Twitter Phenomenon)

The Wired Magazine calls it "Incredibly useful" and Time calls it "Twitter is on its way to becoming the next killer app." Damn I have to part of cutting edge useful things and it's been around for a year or two! Click here to visit Twitter. Well I've been watching Twitter for a while now, sightseeing. And this fine Sunday, thought I'll share my penny's worth.


The concept is quite simple and the site so eloquently puts it
"Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?"
Long story short you build timelogs of your activities. Postings are called "Tweets" and you have a plethora of applications that help tell the world what you're upto. Check out the video explaining why you need to Tweet! Take for instance SMSs from your mobile, direct posting from the site, IM apps and dedicated desktop clients. (Digressing a little: found a really cool (free!) multi IM called Digspy. Had been using Pidgin, meebo & Trillian for a while. Will do a quick comparison later)

My first impression: doesn't Facebook already have this?

Second impression: redundant information. Too many sources of information. And in someway you following someones Tweets, doesn't it vaguely resemble subscribing to an RSS feed of a blog? Possibly ambiguous too "I got an out of office mail and his Tweet says he's working today!"

Biggest impression: do we need to be this open?? (Pause for thought) I'll give that a morbid yes. How many times have we checked out friend's videos and photos? Youtube, Flickr. I rest my case.

The experiment (if I may call it) is quite interesting. Check out how many guinea pigs we have: (Source)
March 2008
Total Users: 1+ million
Total Active Users: 200,000 per week
Total Twitter Messages: 3 million/day

And interestingly 40% of the traffic is from the US. Now now, I'm not drawing any conclusions here :)

So what ideas do I see (apart form the one where there'll be electrodes stuck in your brain that can directly feed Twitter)? Thought I'd list the fisrt few that popped up.
  1. We're all going to be even more dependent on Internet. And that means ubiquitous... convergence of devices. "Why call him to see if he's at home? I'll just check his Tweets!". "Did he remember to pay the electricity bill? I'll just check his Tweets!"
  2. A Tweet channel where you can collaborate and Tweet together. "Okay man, I'm with you. We'll wake up everyday at 5 and got jogging."
  3. A service where you can plan your day and Tweet through them. "Hmm. Practice guitar at 4 for 15 mins. "
  4. Distribution points for information. "Follow me to find the best deals on the Net."
  5. Curiosity among PR guys & enterprises. New medium to reach out to users. Facebook is something I joined recently and it struck me as a huge marketing ground.
The concept is so wild that I actually think it might work! Heard recently about Dell planning to answer customers through Twitter. And then there was a bank, can't seem to recall the name. The idea was again to use Twitter to reach out. Hey if your customers are hanging out in Secondlife and you can set up shop there, why not Twitter?

I'm very sure that enterprises are confused about the phenomenon. But the concept of Twitter is so wild that I think it might just work. And I certainly do see it evolving to videos, voice, streaming stations and merging with a popular social site;)

As an after thought frankly I think the name is hilarious! What are the people called Twits? :p

PS: To hell with privacy. You can catch my activities here.... when I eat, sleep, run to catch the bus. How interesting! Hmm lets see if this is gonna work out.

Wednesday, September 24, 2008

Differentiate on price or relationship

Borrowed the title respectfully from Anthony Lye (Senior VP of Oracle's CRM unit). Well thought I'd let him know over a business lunch later this week ;)

Anyway this has set off a train of thoughts and concerns. His thought: it's increasingly difficult for companies differentiate themselves based on offerings, so start getting cosier with the the customer. My concern: his is extensively being used by people in their daily lives. Right from the home where you be nicer to mom for that extra serving of dessert to the office where you bring in a card on the boss's birthday when everyone emails!

My concern again: is our puny life just driven by selfish gains?
Bigger concern: are we giving up on differentiating ourselves in quality?

PS: Just a quikie from a 5 min coffee break in office. This one's got me a lil more interested. Hoping to pen more ramblings...

Tuesday, September 16, 2008

Just Imagine... Life in 2020: CNN Article

Came across this very interesting read on CNN about the living in the future. To put an year across 2020. Read here.

Various topics discussed include The future of Gaming, Virtual Reality (quite cool), the future of Cities, social networking. I have to admit it's too much to read at one sitting though.

Also found an interesting one one teleportation. I'd written an article about this during my engineering. Lemme see if I can dig it up...

Saturday, September 13, 2008

Of god Particles

Seems taken straight out of a Douglas Adams' novel. Another wonderful way to end the world. The Hardon Collider has raised quite a few eyebrows. I'm really surprised that some behemoth of a contraption that apparently had the capacity to create a black hole was allowed to operate without any public opinion poll. I would love to stand corrected on this one.

Nuclear testing, cloning all created such commotion so why not this one?

Sunday, September 07, 2008

On Chrome, Google & the fight for the enterprise customer

Note: Had this urge to write something so I've scribbled horribly in this post (promise to clean up soon!)

And what a hype it has created! And I certainly wasn't expecting Google to come up with a new browser (with it funding Mozilla).

Chrome has been developed with the idea of being able to run pages totally independent of each other. Hmm seems familiar to the way an OS would want to run applications.

The Google ecosystem certainly isn't getting any smaller with Android scheduled. I expect a bloodbath.

Here's what I think the top 3 fights would be
1. Microsoft. Yes it involves IE, but the plot thickens... with Live Mesh, Online Office and family. Microsoft's attempt at device agnostic data.

2. Nokia. Symbian going opensource should have lit a few bulbs. And with the recent announcement expecting reduced market shares. If they embrace Chrome on Symbian it's a sure suicide. In all probability this would be Google's trojan horse into the enterprise mobility space.

3. RIM. Blackberry. If (Google, that is) they have email solutions, calendar solution, a mobile OS that integrates so well, a way to deliver content, tie up with CRM vendors (SFDC). Oh and let's not forget data centres. Sums it up for me.

Of course a lot of little fish would get eaten up. I'm not quite sure how Opera (who incidently is the inspiration to Chrome's look) fits into this whole picture. Shout and let me know your thoughts.

Another interesting thought is the impact on retail users. If everything goes online, I sure do see a lot more revenue coming in through legitimate licensing.

Indian IT Industry Trends & Challenges

A friend of mine had a few months ago asked my opinion on the trends & challenges facing the Indian IT industry. Here's my take. Guess the slides are self explanatory (too lazy i know!). Lemme know your thoughts. This is more for a formal reading;)