Few hours back Facebook introduced Graph Search which could truly be the biggest innovation Facebook has introduced since its inception. Graph Search will provide a unique way to find information on people, places, photos etc. What excites me is the fact that it doesn't seem to challenge Google in a big way. Of course, the feature was introduced only few hours back and is not available to general users so it may be too early to make such statements but it is the respective motto of both the Internet giants that suggests it. While Google has always said its aim is to "organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful" Facebook says its mission is to make the world more open and connected. Of course neither is being truthful but the fact remains that Google has always wanted to organize information, Facebook wants to connect people, their interests, places.
For sometime now social media as well as traditional media sites have been buzzing with information on Facebook undergoing profound change. Lately, creating a media hype before release of a product (Google+) or a major Facebook upgrade (video chatting feature) has become an indispensible strategy but in this case I would wager that the change may really be profound. Facebook hasn't just changed the layout of the profile page, it has reinvented it too, incorporating various social web behaviour like listening to music or reading a book. The Gesture concept when properly applied may take us a whole level forward towards the Semantic Web. However,the idea of Facebook incorporating so much users data in their profiles is alarming , the privacy issue on Facebook gets more complicated and then there is the chance of Zuckerberg locking the users in.
Lately I have come across the word "troll" being used extensively on the Web and especially on Twitter and to be honest, every time I come across it there is a bit of resentment in me. Internet trolls are almost as ancient creatures as their folk-lore counterparts are supposed to be but the perhaps the former needs to be redefined. But then trolling was once considered an art (even if a dark art) which required some sort of skill but the latest breed of trolls on Twitter are more like sociopaths with 0 IQ.
The current phone-hacking controversy is a reminder that in the age we
live in information is power. Well, my emphasizing it doesn't make it a
breaking news,this has been known throughout
history which is why the flow of information has been controlled by the powerful (which also means that they powerful because they controlled information). The
Internet brought with it new means of communication,World Wide Web
made the flow of information to ordinary people easy but it is its
evolution into a communication platform called Social Web that broke all
barriers to the free flow of information. The investigation into
phone-hacking controversy has revealed how much political power media
moguls like Rupert Murdoch possess but Wikileaks and its fallout and social media showed
the power of information in motion. From Arab Spring revolution to
crisis management to raising quality of life, information systems have been playing key roles in our lives and society.
Impact of Wikileaks A key characteristic of the Web and most of its services is that they are unplanned, serendipitous which in turn makes them popular as they are designed as per user demand, but Julian Assange probably knew what he was doing when he founded Wikileaks. The impact of Wikileak has been much greater than is visible because it is too subtle. Leaked embassy cables and other confidential correspondence documents
presented to us,a picture of the world much different than we were
accustomed to from traditional media. Interestingly, in the Arab world a lot of people already suspected the double-speak, corruption and despotism prevalent in ruling circles but Wikileaks making it public as well as global gave them the impetus to revolt and bring the despots down.
Role of Social Media
Social media tools such as Twitter and Facebook played very important role in the protests as most people active on Web are acutely aware of. Facebook provided an excellent platform for the protestors to organize against the brutal regimes more fearlessly. Twitter had already proved itself as a potent politcial tool during the "Twitter Revolution" in Moldova, for the Arab protestors it was the holy grail of communication and coordination. Videos of police brutality on civilians circulating through Youtube and the uncensored reports and opinions through blogs brought the reality to the fore. The fact that the protestors knew that the global community was aware as well as in solidairity with them, is what turned a spark to blazing fire,two powerful dictators were brought down within days.
The Battle For Social Web
If you are not living under a rock you might be aware of Google's new Social Web service Google+ which is doing pretty well in comparison to its previous two attempts. For little less than a decade, Google has been the most dominant player on Web but the threat it now faces from Facebook is a serious one, especially since it seeks to make Google's mostly-algorithmic base, redundant in comparison to its own people powered base.Google has hit back at Facebook with Google+, a service that resembles most Facebook core features and given the wide range of services it owns,it's cosiness with Twitter, and the fact that it already has a vast user-base in its search engine users and those using Gmail as primary mail account, Google has a fairly good chance of pwning Facebook.
The Ungoogly Alliance
However, Facebook is not alone, Microsoft seems to have thrown its lot behind Facebook by not only investing in Facebook but also collaborating with it through the newly acquired Skype to bring in-browser video chatting. Besides, Microsoft is also upbeat about the yet to be released features of its search engine, Bing which is already indexing Facebook 'likes'. Further, Microsoft's 2009 alliance Yahoo and its latest alliance with leading Chinese search engine Baidu reflects the animosity with which it is trying to eat into Google's user-base even if it means losing millions of dollars. An alliance as formidable as Facebook-Skype-Microsoft-Yahoo-Baidu may be capable of defeating Google even pwning it if Google wavers a little in maintaining lead in search industry. Corporate rivalries are not new,but they are now taking an ugly shape, Google is already sitting over loads of user data gathered through tracking visitors and websites, Facebook on the other hand has a treasure trove of social data, either of them getting pwned would mean the winner taking over the entire web. The battle between the companies has become so fierce that I am sorely tempted tempted to quote the tagline of the last Harry Potter flick - neither can live while the other survives. (Prof Trelawny's prophecy).
Why Should We Care ?
What should concern us more is not the economic fallout of such an event, the socio-political fallout could be unimaginable. Now while we gloat over the power of social media and the Internet's role in democratizing the world, we tend to overlook the fact that social web services are created and owned by companies and much open to abuse at various levels.We have discussed above on the power of information and the effect Web has over our social and political lives,any corporation that can control the flow of information would become a superpower in itself, perhaps the first non-territorial entity that could change governments, regulate market prices, dictate government policies and pretty much do everything it wants to. It is a bit hard to believe but we have too many evidences to ignore beginning with the fact the none of the companies have been politically neutral.
In the ongoing Arab Spring Revolution the social media companies are just not only passively assisting protesters through there web-based services,they have gone ahead and provided innovative means to help the protesters communicate after the government started blocking the conventional means of communication and later even the Internet. Of course, we applaud them for taking proactive steps to help liberate oppressed people break free from tyranny and transition towards a democratic society. However noble their intentions might be and more importantly, in complete harmony with our own ideology, the fact remains that the companies do take sides which also means that they can be willingly or unwilling be used as tools by the dominant powers as is likely to have happened during mass protests in Iran, against alleged electoral fraud (remember GW Bush's controversial electoral victory in 2000 ? ) Considering the support the regime still possessed,it could well have been a crowdsourced black operation.
It doesn't really matter if Google triumphs or Facebook,Microsoft and allies do,its the web users and common people who lose. May be not. If wisdom of crowd and democratization of information has enabled the masses to topple dictators without taking up arms, Murdoch's News of the World had to be shut down completely as the information proliferated through each and every nook and corner of developed world, a corporate superpower too can brought down using the same platform. If everything fails, there is still an option,the reset switch ;)
Reference: Pwn :A Leetspeak slang used especially in online gaming environment to mean something more than defeating. It originated from a typographical error by a writer who intended to use the word "Own". Ironically, the word "Own" or "Owning" wasn't adequate enough to describe the act, which meant thoroughly destroying the opponent and take over everything. ( remember Carthage ? Tyre or recent Palestine?) as to make it seem that they didn't exist in the first place. http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=pwning
As I write this,the could-be-epochal Privacy Vs Openness Debate is raging on, Zuckerberg and his men are now announcing the changes they have been making to offer users more control over their data. However, I must admit that the whole privacy issue in context to a social networking site seems a bit confusing,after all, social networks are all about sharing information. In fact, its not just social networks, sharing data is one of the fundamental aspect of the Web 2.0 paradigm.
When @dibyabttbtweeted asking about the origin of Twitter's Fail Whale icon, I knew my reply would require much more than 140 characters,so here is a post on this unusual phenomena of a graphic.
If you are even an average user of Web 2.0 services,you are more than likely to have come across the term Fail Whale which Twitter.com displays to indicate that the server is down due to user overload.
Which is the best Social Aggregator ? There is a lively discussion going on a LinkedIn group over this question in which I have participated but think my thoughts on the topic required a more open and more personal space - this blog. This post in a threaded conversation involving a lot of participants would only disrupt the flow.
As most of the readers would already know, a massive 7.0 magnitude earthquake hit the Western Hemisphere's poorest country, leaving behind what could perhaps go down as the one of the biggest natural disaster and humanitarian crises in recent history. But before proceeding further, i should also mention that since i had been traveling the whole week and facing major connectivity issues, i wasn't very aware of the magnitude of the disaster until a couple of days back. However, this fact does not in any way, dilute my sentiments towards the victims or the disaster. In fact, a very few people can, IMHO, relate to the pain and suffering of the victims than those of us who have faced the super-cyclone that devastated Odisha (then Orissa) in 1999. It has been more than 10 years now, and i have still not been able to find words to express the experience. In nutshell, it was a nightmare..those of us who survived were mainly because we were relatively better off economically, socio-politically. Neither the government nor the media were able to capture the extent of damage.
Anyway, coming back to Haiti, the visuals,news reports coming in are more than just nightmarish! Haiti has has been devastated and its likely to take a lot of time and effort to get the Caribbean nation back on its feet. On the brighter side, this epic disaster has also shown how useful social media can be, in responding to major catastrophes as quickly as possible. Twitter in particular has not only been the main source of getting the getting news and images from the ravaged country, it is also helping in coordinating rescue teams.
If the sight of such human suffering depresses us, it is also heartening to find people all over the world extending their hands for the rehabilitation of the quake victims. Google has pledged $1 million for relief work and has also put up a special page, Google Crisis Response page with links and information on how you can do your own bit. You can Donate via Google Checkout or you can find links to donate to organizations like UNICEF , Care, Red Cross , Doctors Without Borders , Habitat for Humanity and other organizations working to help the victim rebuild their lives and communities.
Oops @ShashiTharoor has done it again! Does he serenade controversies or controversies have ways of seeking him out ?
I believe it is a little bit of both. For over-excited media channels vying with each other for TRPs, a candid Shashi Tharoor on a promiscuously open platform like Twitter, it is a wet dream and there is no way they could miss such golden opportunities to manufacture news. In this instance too the controversy couldn't have started without the media's active contribution. But then those were not verbal statements that were then put in words by a reporter to mean differently,the minister had tweeted them and they are still there for the whole world to see. How could he then have been quoted out of context ?
Well, the media is seldom neutral while reporting news , it tends to be far more judgmental and passionate, even to the point of being untruthful. In almost every instance of news reporting, the facts,allegations are never served in isolation but are packaged with the opinion of the journalist, which again is influenced by her/his craving for sensationalism. This exactly isn't a secret, media's penchant for sensationalizing even the most drab story is very well-known but in Tharoor's case, Twitter seems to be a recurring factor. Twitter is just another platform, if at all Shashi Tharoor's statements were objectionable, they could have been made anywhere! In fact, it is Tharoor's questioning of the Home Ministry's visa restriction policy that has stirred this controversy, why is "Twitter" emphasized and hyphenated with Tharoor on all news channels and print media ?
This may be because the media and the government both have issues with a Minister of State airing his views on an open forum. Had he given the same statement to a handful of reporters, these very words might have sounded "refreshing"and the media could have hailed him but to devoid the media agencies from raking the moolahs is not something the latter can forgive or overlook. No wonder, at least one notable journalist, who also heads a television channel has gone on record criticizing the Minister for his twittering ways. Ironically, he himself did it on Twitter.
Apparently the government in general and Shashi Tharoor's boss and the Home Ministry in particular are not at all happy. It is not about going against own government, Tharoor as the Minister of State for External Affairs was merely cautioning against implementation of a stricter visa policy which were not taken well by several important countries. As such he was doing his job but what has annoyed a lot of people is the platform he chose. According to them, governmental policies are too sacrosanct to be even exposed to common folks' perception.
What does a career diplomat like Shashi Tharoor know on foreign policy making ? India is a democracy but that should be restricted to voting only! Once the ballot has been cast and a government is in place the people should go back to their toils leaving things like laws and policies solely in the discretion of the on the ruling elite, of course they can later be used during future electoral campaigns but till then the public have no right to know anything about the policies, at least not from the minister himself ! http://twitter.com/ShashiTharoor/status/7064122644
Twitter has been down for more than 2 hours,the last tweets on my time-line reflect panic as one would expect from the passengers of a ship as it goes down with the waves! Well, i haven't got a Google Wave account yet, the analogy is partly coincidental :p
Was i surprised? Not at all! This is not the first time that the micro-blogging site has gone down, since past few months,outages have become a regular affair and most likely will continue for a while. No! I don't mean to say that the guys at Twitter are not smart enough, indeed, it would be foolish to say that for guys who came up with such a brilliant concept such as Twitter. The only speculation that can be made is the probability that the issue lies deeper than it seems to us.
Outages are not specific to Twitter alone, most popular services including Google, Gmail and Facebook have had their blues too. It is an irony of fate that the very participatory nature of the Social Web is also the factor that takes it down often. For instance, the Internet traffic generated by Michael Jackson's death was much more than the servers were prepared for; it seems that most of the people in the world decided to use the Web to find more information about MJ, unprecedented numbers of requests coming in was interpreted as a DDoS attack by Google which then went into emergency mode. However, other Social Web sites such as Facebook, Friendfeed, MySpace and Twitter of course are far more open, consequently they could not balance the load and crashed.
So couldn't they build the service keeping load balancing in mind? This question is complex too, the Web is evolving at such a rapid pace that it is no longer possible to follow the traditional model where even the tiniest detail has gone through analysis and validation before the development has actually begun. Most of the popular service providers of the day are widely used for features some of which had not even been foreseen when the service was built for the first time. Adding newer features to existing applications is a continuous process that is conceived of and implemented in response to changing paradigms. Quick adaptation and innovation-on-demand is what drove their growth and has enabled them to change the way we use the Internet now.
Keeping the above scenario in mind, it is easier to understand why Web 2.0 websites often face scalability issues. Most of them had started up targeting a small segment of users, with plans to upscale operations on a future date. But as the service becomes popular and the user base increases exponentially,
too many requests lead to bottlenecks that make the system defunct for a period of time. There are technical reasons of course, I have come across quite a large number of papers blaming Ruby on Rails, the framework on which Twitter was built. This aspect cannot be refuted absolutely when one considers the fact that this framework has not been proven on large-scale application development. Facebook has addressed this issue by migrating the background code, it also has a limit on the number of friends a user can add. But there has to be something more than the weakness of the development framework.
One of the reasons that i love Twitter for is the fact that there is no restrictions apart from the 140 characters per tweet limit and the model itself. Unlike IMs or Social Networks, Twitter delivers messages from multiple users to multiple users. This makes every user a center of information propagation or many-to-many messaging system yet the server remains centralized, so as the number of users increase the processes increase exponentially since every user follows an unspecified number of users and is in turn followed by other users. i am not aware of the business logic or algorithm used by it but can understand that it must be efficient enough to handle all those transaction most of the time. However, the frequent outages suggest that something at the fundamental layer needs a re-look at.
As i said in the beginning i do not have a Google Wave account yet but from what i have read and seen in the Developer Conference preview video, the architecture is more inclined towards being a distributed one rather than being centralized. i wonder if the folks at Twitter have looked in that direction, if the server is unable to handle the load now, waves of users are just starting to migrate to Twitter. Read: Has Cattlegate Opened The Floodgate?
Also read : http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/05/22/twitter-at-scale-will-it-work/
P.S.: Inviting my friend netgenre to write a guest article on data marshaling in the above context
Update
Recently i came across (through Twitter, of course) a excellent article at High Scalability which offers to explain the different factors responsible for the scalability issue of most social media sites. i found the part on Pull-on-Demand vs Push-on-Demand approaches quite interesting. In the first approach, which is followed by Facebook ( according to the same article), the service queries all your friends,fetches their updates and changes and provides them to you at one place. So if you have 1000 friends, it makes 1000 queries to show your friends update. So with every new user or even connection the number of queries to execute rises exponentially.
In contrast, Push-on-Demand approach deals with updates in a different manner. Rather than waiting for queries,.it pushes the data to friends right when it is changed! The user no longer needs to pull data, since it is already there when s/he logs in. Of course this model is not without drawbacks but that is beyond the current scope.
But more importantly, which model does Twitter use ?
i am not sure, but most likely it uses a hybrid of both model...Just a guess right now ;)
Picking up the thread from the last post, I will try to demystify the basics of Twitter for the benefit of the complete N00B. Here is how twitter works and the meanings of the terms that baffle you the first time you start using it.
Twitter Jargon
Tweet - The only question that drives Twitter is "What are you doing?" and a Tweet is a response to that question. If you are into social networking sites like Facebook and Orkut or even a Skype or GTalk user, you must already know what the status message means. But unlike the other services, the status message on Twitter i.e. the Tweet is not a passive message but the medium of communication or the counter-part of the IM you send to your chat buddy. However, a Tweet is generally visible universally unless, of course you have blocked a person. A Tweet can be of 140 character length only, which could be one of the reasons why Tweets travel faster than anything else i know of.
Handle - Username, this is important as it is likely to become your identity on Twitter, for example my Twitter handle is danishctc. You can find my profile on twitter by simply typing http://twitter.com/danishctc in the location bar or your browser. You can also reply me or mention it by simply prefixing my handle with the @ (at) symbol : @danishctc
DP - Stands for display picture or avatar. It is highly recommended that you put up your own picture as DP.
RT: Retweet is nothing but the same tweet being posted again by another user. There could be many reasons for doing this but the most common ones are- the person liked the particular tweet and would like to share it with her/his followers and the original Tweet is kept to make sure that the response is seen in the context. To retweet, you can copy the whole tweet along with the original tweeterer's handle (prefix the @ (at) symbol to the handle ) and type RT right at the beginning. (Most clients make this easy, explained here just to make sure)
Screenshot of my convo with de3p , pushkarbhatt Replies/Mentions: these are tweets by other users who have either replied,addressed or mentioned your handle. A handle prefixed by @(at) symbol is treated by Twitter as a tweet meant for that particular person and shows up on his timeline; for example- "danishctc: @anandmisra hi"
DM: Direct message, visible only to the recipient. Normally, all clients have a functionality to let you send direct messages to your friends but you can send dm by simply typing the character D before the handle.
Example: "danishctc: D anandmisra this a dm"
Friends - Twitter is people-driven, if you want to harness its power then you have to follow people whose updates you would want see. You could start following people in the suggested list that Twitter displays when you sign up or celebrities you already know ( for example Shashi Tharoor, Celina Jaitly, Gul Panag) but it is important that you find other like-minded users to make your tweeting productive. As with so many services, Twitter can also import your contact list from other accounts and suggest your pre-existing contacts that are already on Twitter. To follow them you can go to their profile page and click on the link "Follow" (Note: Following a large number of people in a very short time is seen suspiciously by Twitter since spam bots seem to follow a similar pattern, trying interacting as much as possible )
Followers - These are people who are following your updates. They are important from your point of view since they are your main audience as well as customer-base.
Favorites- If you find a particular tweet interesting and dont want to lose it in the melee, you can add it to your favorites. To add a Tweet to favorites, click on the star icon, the Tweet can now be found in the favorite section of your Twitter profile.
One of the major advantages of Twitter is the fact that it is not limited to a single client, single domain or even single device. I prefer tweeting from mobile rather than the desktop.
The original interface for interaction was Twitter.com and continues to be so since that is where you manage your account and set preferences. This is also the site you should be using if you are a new user.However, this interface lacks certain features for more advanced users but this is aptly compensated by numerous third-party clients.
Clients- There are plenty of clients avaible, download the one which meets your expection. On desktop/laptop, i find Tweetdeck the best, followed by Twhirl andSeesmic. Firefox add-on, Twitter Fox is another client that i find myself using a lot. On mobile (i use Nokia N95 8GB), Gravitycomes across as the client with best features but i have also usedFring and Twibble for tweeting.
There also some very cool web-based clients that you should check out: http://dabr.co.uk and http://slandr.com
Update - Thanks to Softykid for reminding me about Snaptu, a mobile client that i had heard a lot about yet never got to installing it. But now that i have done it, it is strongly recommended that you try it out :)
P.S.: Thats it for now, hope someone finds it useful coz i didn't get much pleasure compiling it! not my kinda thing ;)
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.
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.
Lately I have come across the word "troll" being used extensively on the Web and especially on Twitter and to be honest, every time I come across it there is a bit of resentment in me. Internet trolls are almost as ancient creatures as their folk-lore counterparts are supposed to be but the perhaps the former needs to be redefined. But then trolling was once considered an art (even if a dark art) which required some sort of skill but the latest breed of trolls on Twitter are more like sociopaths with 0 IQ.
Replies/Mentions: these are tweets by other users who have either replied,addressed or mentioned your handle. A handle prefixed by @(at) symbol is treated by Twitter as a tweet meant for that particular person and shows up on his timeline; for example- "danishctc: @anandmisra hi"
