Earlier this year I did a podcast on Facebook platform and why it is attractive. But since then I am losing interest in Facebook’s capabilities and thus this blog post. In that podcast we discussed how Facebook connect/Google connect are going to be used as openIDs and would help build communities around  external sites. Those things have not changed but my understanding of social communication had changed.

Everyone indulges in few types of communication – private, public, official and collaborative. As I see, I have better tools for everything that I mentioned. For private communication IM suits perfectly, a one on one real time communication. Public communication can be achieved via Twitter, especially its capabilities have enhanced with excellent clients like Tweetdeck and Seesmic. Twitter also changed the default settings of ‘replies’ going to all your followers, and that has helped in improving twitter experience. Official communication can be achieved via emails and collaboration via Groove, Google docs or Wave. These all makes you wonder the importance of Facebook?

I use Facebook for three purposes – Photo sharing, Social calendar and Social games (yes, I used to play Farmville). Facebook has grown to be the biggest photo sharing site, since it has advantage of tagging people it is attractive but one cannot upload hi-res photos and that’s what bothers me. Secondly, how many photos one wants to share, I think I have hit my limit (not FB’s limit). Social calendar has been a really cool feature and I used it a lot too, but integration of Google Calendar, Gmail and iPhone calendar has worked much better for me. This combination does not tell me who is attending or not attending an event, but if I care about that I can always use email/IM. No comments about social games, they are addictive but scandalous.

My usage of Facebook has reduced drastically, they tried to bring together the experience of IM, but its broken; email, but it has limited capabilities – no forwarding/adding of new recipients, just reply not reply-all, no attachments; calendar, but its not open to exchange (microsoft or other formats); real time updates, but not as efficient as twitter. This does not mean that Google or Twitter has taken market share, it just means that Facebook is losing its capabilities in keeping people at hand. We cannot see it now as it has reached critical mass and growing rapidly, but as I see, people will start (or have started) losing interest in Facebook.  Its main strength was to bring people back to site but that seems to be weakening, combined with the advertising fraud, no proper source of revenue, I see Facebook will have to come up with a plan to keep in this business or they will be the Friendster of 2010. 

A set of tweets in a language I don’t understand made me think of about the problem of twitter groups. Many a when I tweet I face the problem that I am going to annoy my followers who are not interested in certain topics such as F1, Cricket or Web2 technologies. Since we have been waiting for long about Twitter groups, we have come up with hashtags and clients such as Tweetdeck to resolve most of the problems. But last month twitter turned on the feature where a ‘reply’ would be visible on your timeline only if your follow the person who the ‘reply’ is addressed to. So, here is the idea how we can harness that to simulate group feature.

I will demonstrate this idea  with an example: I am interested in formula1 and own the account ‘fakeF1’. People, who need to see tweets from me about F1, should follow ‘fakeF1’ because whenever I want to post a tweet, I would be replying to ‘fakeF1’. So, none of my followers who are not interested in F1 will get my F1 related posts till them come to my specific page (which is very rare). For people who do not follow me but just ‘fakeF1’ should put a search filter in their clients to get all the details about F1. We can have handles like CricketTweets, WCT20, OnlyFootball, GeekTalk etc.

Only one person has to create a dummy twitter id and it would resolve problems of many. I believe in wisdom of crowds and think this id can work brilliantly.

Twitter suspended the account ‘F1‘ 3 weeks back and after I lodged a complaint I got a auto-generated response 2 weeks later. I filed my request again today like this:

I own the Twitter account @f1 for more than 2 years and have 4000+ followers. I have been using it for broadcasting Formula1 related news and manually broadcasting updates during the Formula1 race. I have been following every follower in the account and we engage in a meaningful conversation. These conversation include sports related details, comments, clarification, humor etc.

I am not violating any Trademark as F1 does not hold any trademark. Please refer to link here for court case ruling that- “Formula One Losses Trademark Fight“. I am not breaking any issues related to copyright, because mainly I collect information from sources such as Formula1 website, BBC F1 site and other popular F1 blogs and tweet the links for the followers. I also tweet updates during the race, but those fall under Fair Use.

I am also not trying to impersonate any person or team at F1, Formula1, FIA, or FOM. I give link to my blog instead of of Formula1.com in bio. Please look into the issue and check back the replies at @f1, where F1 fans have been requesting to un-suspend the account.

Regards

Kumar Veetrag

 

Twitter has suspended some other sports related account and TechCrunch has reported it here. Fan followers can follow me at FakeF1 till I get my account back.

Any suggestion how to approach Twitter and get this issue resolved as early as possible are welcome.

This post is in response to the questions asked by Mr. Tweet on his blog:

I have been using twitter for almost 2 years now and was expecting some popularity but not of this level. My opinion about Aston Kutcher Vs CNN, I do not like what is going on. It is just a publicity stunt and a rat race. Many people joining it and abandoning it after two days. Real value of twitter can be added by community, when you have similarly minded people interacting. Not by trying to decide what gift to buy for someone else. What purpose does a million followers mean? Just an ego boost.
Second, why a reputed organization like CNN has to get involved in this. It is like comparing apples and oranges. Aston takes opinion from people while CNN is just broadcasting medium. And since there is no revenue model, they should not care how many people follow them.
Third, definitely there is too much noise but it does not affect me. I follow right people and few people follow me. I use some news sources, utilities like tweetscoop, filters and my purpose of using twitter is served. I can shut anyone down when I want by unfollwing or blocking them.
Fourth, yes quality information is reduced but that depends on how we use it. Having a set of people you like and following them in appropriate. Twitter is such a generic tool that it can be molded in any use we want.
Fifth, it was not Aston who made it mainstream media. When pornographers started joining twitter, it had become mass media.

Twitter, the best service that I am aware of. OK, I won’t get into my love for Twitter, but this post if about Tweetdeck, twitter client, that changed the way I use twitter.

These were my main issues that I was facing

1. There were a set of people I wanted to follow, but didn’t want to read each and every tweet. I just wanted to read their tweets when I was free.
2. There were a set of people whose, I didn’t want to miss any of their tweets.
3. There are a few celebrities (@Scobelizer etc)  that I follow and I didn’t want to follow them all the time but wanted to know their opinion and check their (past) tweets in free time.
4. I didn’t want to miss any instance of @kv used by anyone ( even from my non-followers). Sometimes when someone uses replies to multiple people, it does not show up in one’s timeline (replies).
5. Since twitter stopped IM service, there was no way of ‘track’ option and that was one utility I miss the most.
6. I wanted to use other services which use Twitter credentials to log in and their ecosystem is based on twitter. e.g. TwitPic.

How Tweetdeck solved all the issues:

I can for groups in Tweetdeck and that sorts out the problem of grouping people. I have formed groups such as Buddies, Blacksburg, Celebrities and that gives me an option to concentrate on group that I want to talk to. I can clear tweets individual group of tweets and ignore a group if I want to.

Now, I do not miss any tweets that have mention of @kv because Tweetdeck replies group not only check using API but also uses Twitter search.[Check above image, last tweet in second group is a retweet of my tweet]  This has one more advantage, I reduce the Twitter API calls.

Track option can be simulated by search option provided by Tweetdeck. We can create search groups with particular keywords (f1, Yapodcast, semantic web, ces, mumbai) and can get results in one or more groups. Search functionality includes AND and OR option too for optimizing our searches.

At the same time using other services such as TwitScoop, I can which what are the current buzzwords on Twitter. That is a very fast way of getting news. (In the image above, I could see Earthquake as buzz world and just one click on it told me, people are talking about earthquake at San Bernardino, CA which occurred just 10 min back)

Not only this, I can use my other favorite services such as TwitPic, 12seconds and a lot of choices of URL shortening services. Now, I don’t have to open browser and login to multiple systems.

Shortcomings:

1. Tweetdeck stores all the group and search settings on the client side only. So, if one formats the systems and reinstalls Tweetdeck he will have to create his groups and searches again. But, how often do we reinstall our system. I believe Tweetdeck team would be trying to include a server level component too, which will store all the info on Tweetdeck server. This should not be a difficult task to do.
2. Tweetdeck’s groups take too much space on desktop and we have to scroll sideways. I would say, use it judiciously and you wont get into trouble like this. Any tools which provides group functionality will have to face this issue.

Suggestions

1. I would like to see a tagging system included into Tweetdeck. I can create few keywords that I usually want to use as hashtags and then I can use a drop down to include them in fast way. Going ahead, there can be an algorithm which can include hashtags on its own from my set of hashtags. (I suppose this also does not need algorithm, just a call to Open Calais API can provide that functionality)
2. I should be able to resize the group tab on Tweetdeck.

This twitter client proves two things, firstly, how simple tools can transform the way we use a service and secondly, flexibility and simplicity of twitter, we can mould it is any shape we want for our usage.

It is not 40 hours since series of terrorists attacks in Mumbai, it is one of the most horrible things I have seen in my life. My heart goes out to all those effected, policeman who gave their life and people still struggling stuck surrounded by terrorists. Great work by Indian soldiers, Good luck.

One disappointing thing that has emerged is irresponsibility of media. Role of media is to provide information to the public but in a proper way and taking care of that they are not divulging important information. I am watching TV channels – NDTV, IBN-CNN, India TV, Sahara Samay, Star News and many other and have realized that none of them are  doing their job properly. In this unfortunate event they are trying to sensationalize the information and acting irresponsibly.

First mistake they are making is providing sensitive information such as movement of NSG and Police forces to public. I am sure, this information is not useful to public at this time. At this time, people need to find out where their relatives are, who is injured, which hospitals are people taken to, what blood type is needed and where. These are much more important information if provided to public it would be helpful.  Yes, people need to know what area are safe, what is the progress but giving step by step information is not useful. There are rumors (and probably true) that the same information is retrieved by terrorists and can be used against the brave souls who are trying to protect our lives.

Incidents like Sahara Samay showing (in real time) commandos climbing a specific stair to get into windows is completely rubbish. They could have jeopardized the complete operation. Similar situation happened when CNN (US) correspondent asked their counterpart from CNN-IBN, isn’t showing these videos on air not proper, can this information be used by terrorists? The CNN-IBN correspondent did not reply to that question.

Second issue, camera person showing injured people and not many people to help around. Why is the need to show it to the world and specially when you could help those people. You could save someone’s life by helping them. Instead they were continuously showing, these people need help. A message is enough after that its an overkill, trying to blow incident out of proportion. When you are at case, help people. You are humans first!

Third issue, this was an interview of someone who have been saved out of Taj. It’s not even minutes that the lady has come out of such horrible situation and our reporter is asking silly questions. At one point of time it was evident that the reported was pushing the limits so that lady starts crying. So much for TRPs, those people have been under tremendous pressure for last 24 hours, they need peace and rest, they need a doctor or psychologist, not some insensitive reporter blurting out questions whose answers are known to everyone.

Fourth issue, their was a lot of improper information. It is the responsibility of media to provide proper information and make sure it does not create panic in public. If necessary some discretion can be maintained and information provided at later stages. I understand it was a chaotic situation, but still relevant information is must. Over a period of 8 hours, there was news flash more than 10 times that ‘Taj is free of terrorists’. I am still not sure it is free or not, just because I don’t trust you guys anymore. Then we have some people from India TV who claims to have talked to terrorists and are aware of demand, and they even have audio stream of that. Here we have two points to take care of, government should be contacted at first place and its up to government that they want to make it public or not (definitely it would never be made public). Second thing, if it is false information, then you should never be allowed to be part of media again. You guys are shame on your profession and does not deserve to be here. Remember, aim of terrorists is to terrorize people, to make things unstable and you are helping them by acting irresponsibly.

Fifth issue, don’t be insensitive. I heard some reported using the word – ‘interesting’. I had no words after that. People are dying and our reporters can use words like these. This is not over, there were many cases of similar usage.

Sixth issue, why is media going to places where it should not go. For instance, I saw some reporters inside the Taj lobby showing the logo and what importance it has for people. Yes, we understand its heritage but that news can wait for some time. Why going in and risking your life and others to things which can be delayed, still that place has few terrorists and anything can go wrong. If you don’t care about your life, its ok but don’t create problems for others. (I will say, it is responsibility of government too to take care of incidents like these, a complete cordoning of area should be done with no one allowed till it is completely safe).

Last issue is about social media, twitter played an important role in information dissemination and we just not only got information but images (from people like Vinu). But, there were a lot of rumors too. I think, like bloggers, twitter users should be responsible too. I am not questioning anyone intentions but make sure information is correct and we are not leaking some important information, we are not sure who all are monitoring things.

One last thing, I understand everyone does not have the same impact of the news but please don’t make those things public. I saw a question on twitter stream (not directed to me) – You are not from Mumbai, then why are you concerned[from one Indian]. I won’t give answer to this question, I understand that readers of this blog feel the pain in same way as I do.

Godspeed soldiers!

(Blog title taken from one of the tweet replies)

PS: In my view every media person should watch the movie ‘Mad City‘, its tagline says it all – One man will make a mistake. The other will make it a spectacle.

Download (15 MB) – subscribe on iTunes

Participants : Thej and Veetrag

Podcast Notes

• Chandrayaan – impact on common man [1], Thej’s interview at BBC.
• Facebook Scribe to go opensource
• Yahoo Application Platform, part of Open Strategy
• Twitter stops IM service and its impact – part of business plan or they are getting out of business?
• Google App Engine to support Java – good or bad?
• Live blog from Eric Schmidt’s talk
• Podcast Recommendations -
  • TWiT – This Week in Tech, one of the best podcasts available.
  • gdgt - Gadget reviews, news updates from the guys who started Engadget.
  • Escapepod – for science fiction lovers, a sci-fi story every week
  • Stack Overflow
  • IT Conversations

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PS : Follow YAPodcast on twitter for live updates and suggestions

The deal is done; Twitter has acquired Summize and most of its employees. I would say this is the perfect move by Twitter. Most important thing that twitter was lacking (other than stability) was a search functionality and Summize will fill the gap.

Now only thing that twitter needs to do is provide a search API which is as simple as twitter’s API. I think that’s the motive of Evan in keeping the employees. As soon as API will be out there will be many clients which will provide options like tagging and channels. By integrating search and not mot making it complex what twitter has done is maintained its simplicity and provided a way in which almost everything is possible. I would say for developers who write clients for twitter only their imagination will be the barrier, possibilities are endless.

List of twitterits present: @adese @labsji @gbot @adityamishra @hnprashanth @jerrymannel @kv @f1 @2s @netra @sanjukta, @privarma @ujj @swaroopch @kaargocult @mayankdhingra @cruisemaniac @anant @holydevil @mataal @bhuwan @scorpion032, @hephail @neogarfield @thej @prsn and @shailen, @eventsbangalore