When 2009 kicked in, one of the first things I did was to cut down on my absolutely horrendous volume of information consumed. As laid out earlier, this entailed drastic cuts in the number (feeds and people) and the volume (items and tweets) of sources and information consumed through them, over and above the rather drastic step of being almost off instant messaging itself. Those measures have helped quite a bit and I will detail them out in a later post, but that is not what I wanted to say with this post.

On Saturday morning I headed out with my girlfriend to Bikaner. It is a nice little town about 490-520 kilometers (depending on which road you choose to take) away from Delhi. I had intended to use the trip also to test out a new GPS service provider for my Nokia E71 - the Wayfinder and Mapmyindia combo. In a rather interesting twist of fate Airtel had decided, on their own, that they should disable my domestic roaming while they were carrying out my instructions to disable only international roaming.

This had an unintended consequence of my phone being pretty much useless once we crossed the telecom circle from Airtel NCR, to Airtel Haryana. Unfortunately, all of the phone-based GPS units need a working GPRS connection to get going and that meant I could not test the unit out. The shorter version of the story is that I could not be online or be reached easily for most of the 24th, following which I had decided to really get as much as possible off the grid. The only exceptions were a couple of tweets to broadcast where I was and a handful of absolutely necessary phone calls and messages.

Now, having gotten back and staring, trying hard to connect, at the tangle of tweets and bold unread items in the RSS reader, there is this strong realization that I won't find the next greatest revelation of life or business in the tab cycle number 556 for the day. Half of the muck spewed by the collective echo chamber we lovingly call the social graph has near-zero value in real life. Want to know why? Just shut down internet access for three days, go some place where you can't be reached and come back after that.

On your return, chances are that you'll find little has changed about the world other than numbers in your Twitter follow list and the next big life-changing feature rolled out by the social networking site of the day. Chances are that you'll realize that in spite of the slowdown, crashing markets and a horrible economic climate life is not all that bad if you choose to stop hyperventilating about it. You know, these things happen over time. What does not happen repeatedly is the precious time you have in your life, which won't come back to you again.

Yes, it is an interesting perspective, that too coming from someone who is trying to establish a business which will transgress on some of the products, concepts and ideas effortlessly dismissed in the previous paragraphs. What I am saying is not that these are not useful or important. What I am saying is that we have deemed them to be more important and more useful than what they actually are. And that has implications that are rather interesting, not just in terms of how much you poke or how existent or non-existent your offline life happens to be.

A whole lot of the problems in today's troubled economy stems from the lack of actual value in products and transactions leading from them. If Facebook, a company valued at $15 billion dollars, disappears from the face of the earth, will it create more than a temporary ripple out there? My guess is that it won't. My intention here is not to dismiss products or to say who or which is better. I am just saying that we can do better and that we can build better. If we do that, we will certainly have better puzzles to deal with than finding out 23 different ways to monetize the poke button.

To do that you need to get out and stop being sucked into the echo chamber and see what real problems that need to be solved for the real people who live outside the echo chamber. On the days I was outside the grid, a news item that seems to have grabbed everyone by the ball is the release of the new Twhirl client. Try this for a test. Step outside, ask 20 people you see or know, outside your Twitter buddy list (6 million people is even lesser than an atom in terms of the world's population), what Twhril is. The answer should be self-explanatory.