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Sunday, September 27, 2009

Has Cattlegate Opened The Floodgate ?

Holy Cow! Shashi Tharoor's single tweet has taken Twitter to every nook and corner of India. Now, even the most obstinate bull squatting in the middle of the vegetable market wants to know what Twitter is all about. Of course the cows let loose by their owners to graze in Indian streets are equally curious even if they are not mooing it. Indeed, a lot of people are signing up on Twitter, a vast number intend to do it in near future. But I am a bit skeptical, if most of the people have an understanding on what Twitter is and how it should be used.

I have posted some of my own experiences here

There some facts and opinions that I should mention before proceeding further. I think all Internet users who are not on Twitter can be broadly categorized into 3 categories. The first category includes people who use the Web minimally, their professional as well as personal agenda doesn't allow them to explore the social aspect of Web. As such the whole social media debate is irrelevant to them, at times they are indistinguishable from machines .

Then there are people who think Twitter is just another way of wasting one's time that could be utilized for creating artificial intelligence or achieve major breakthrough in stem cell research. However, you won't find them doing either, instead, you can find them participating in Orkut. Socialization, interaction, collaboration to them means going through photo-albums of this cute chick they came across in the friend list of another friend's friend. The main activity would include sending persistent add requests, leaving flashy images,ASCII art or corny scraps in Hinglish or broken English or do stuff that require little or no intellect. People belonging to this category, who think that the phenomenal growth of twitter userbase, eminent personalities and biggest organizations and almost every website extending tweeting functionality, is because of a social media hype and
who are convinced that Twitter is a waste of time should strictly continue with Orkut, Twitter would be an incompatible medium since the latter requires intellect!

However, there is the third category of users who do not doubt the utility of Twitter but are still not using it because they don't fully understand it or it has not worked for them. Indeed,there is not a single social website that one can join up and start enjoying or get results from day one. How effective social networking sites turn out depends on how well the user has created her network. This is especially true with Twitter since there are no photo albums of users, no social games or "which movie character you are" quizzes (well, there are mechanisms to share images, files etc but they are not integral part of the architecture.) . In other words, your experience on Twitter depends totally upon how you interact with other users (Tweeps). If used properly, it opens a completely new world of options, from real-time news to reaching out to targeting customers/audience and getting the most relevant answer to your questions. The potential is immense! In my follow-up post, I will try to compose a guide for beginners.

Posted By Danish 3:37 AM

Saturday, September 12, 2009

Transparency, Radical Trust and the Indian Democracy in the Age of Web 2.0

Every time i see @shashitharoor defending his tweeting habit on TV i can detect a gleam in his eyes which betrays a feeling of incredulity within him. WTF?! They seem to say, shouldn't his government be grateful that he is connecting it to nearly a hundred thousand people? One could say that may be Tharoor's long stint at UN has made him forget the epitome of doldrums that our babudom is, but that wont be the whole truth. Managements in most large organizations world wide are scared of new things (and for good reasons too) but that's part of the larger social media debate, this post is about the Shashi Tharoor question and about Twitter.

Shouldn't a democracy like India support transparency as the UK does, for instance, Tharoor asks. The penetration of Internet technology in India has not been deep enough to become part of our lives as it has been with the American and the British. India may be emerging as a software giant, but the majority of Indians, including those belonging to the IT workforce view the Internet as an unreliable medium. True, everyone right from the governmental departments to the small-time trader use the Internet for things like e-mails and correspondence, online booking and shopping and propaganda. But these are traditional tasks that the Internet makes easier, they don't harness the real power of the Internet.

The real beneficiary of the Internet have been those who have been able to leverage its powers. Let us not forget that there has been a major paradigm shift in the architecture and usage pattern of the Internet. It now goes by the moniker, Web 2.0. Tim O'Reilly opines that a significant characteristic of Web 2.0 is the fact that businesses are embracing the web as a platform by building applications and services keeping the features of the Internet in mind instead of expecting the Internet to transform itself to suit traditional models!
Yet, a large section of the literate Indian population still consider the Web as something that should be used strictly in a manner that keeps the user insulated from the other users.

In the early days of the Internet revolution, anonymity was a major factor which encouraged participation and for good reasons too. But Web 2.0 revolution has changed all that, users now are not only using real identity but are also trying to put up as much info about themselves as possible. Discussing the various aspects of the changing user behavior is beyond the scope of this post, the point i wish to drive is that if anonymity was the flavor of Web 1.0, trust and transparency are the pillars of Web 2.0.

Lets take Wikipedia as an example, a reference site that can be modified by anyone with access to the Internet! A decade back, the majority of people would have scoffed at the idea. Indeed, Wikipedia was not an instant hit, it came out as a winner with the passage of time. But Wikipedia introduced the idea of radical trust which went on to become one of the distinctive features of the Web 2.0 meme. Almost, every successful Web 2.0 enterprise has been based a collaborative platforms that believe in actively engaging with the consumers and using the feedback to offer far more customized services/products the consumers.

For Indian democracy, this a great opportunity for interacting better with the people. The incumbent governments stand to gain the most by connecting to the voters directly, redressing most problems would be an impossible task but letting the people take a glimpse of the working of the government can actually instill much greater confidence of the people in the government. In fact, the opportunities are immense, if the Ministers, bureaucrats and legislators are willing to come of the time warp and connect to the people. Instead of trying to discourage Shashi Tharoor, they should actually be encouraging other Ministers and spokespersons (as well as issuing- DOs and DONTs lists) to use the power of the Web 2.0 to strengthen democracy.


Reference:
http://oreilly.com/pub/a/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html?page=2

Posted By Danish 9:02 PM