Blue Screen of Duds

I have been pruning my Twitter follow list over time. It was initially at around 160, then it dropped to about 130 and it was at about 105 till yesterday. Last evening, I gave it one almighty chop and pruned it further to about 66.

The chops were done largely on the basis of the following rules *:

No automated feed publishing on personal accounts

No high-volume automated accounts (Example @techmemeFH)

No compulsive retweeters (Example @timoreilly)

No mutual-hugging A-Listers.

People I don't really know, who say things I am clueless about

People who have not updated in yonks

* There ARE exceptions to the rule.

Quite a few of these rules come from a simple issue I have with Twitter. That there is no way at this moment to vary attention spent on each tweet. The problem ideally should not exist with Twitter. At 140 characters, it should be easier to consume/follow/track. But 140 characters also mean there is little skipping of text, much fewer patterns to be matched, you wind up reading more than less with Twitter.

Let us assume that each tweet costs you one attention unit to read as it scrolls past your screen. Unless you are not online with a client or not on the Twitter website itself, there is no way you will wind up spending less than that one unit per tweet. On the other hand, there is always the potential of expending more than one unit, if the tweet is actually interesting.

Writing here has come down significantly due to my feeble attempts at trying to take it a bit easy over the last couple of days. Not like I have succeeded much in the endeavour, since I have been pretty much up coding about 10-12 hours a day ever since I decided to go for 'easy'. I am afraid this will not be one of the typical technical or business rants that I normally post here. This is where you push the 'eject' button if that is not the kind of stuff you would like to read.

2008 has been a crazy year in every possible way for me. Having always been someone who has worked in a proper company for close to ten years, this is the year when I decided to break with the pattern and strike out on my own. The idea was cobbled together much before the catastrophic collapse we are seeing in the world economy came into being and many have said it is not the wisest of things to do, but for me it was a case of 'now or never.' And 'now' it had to be.

It is very easy, in retrospect, to say that there was a particular moment in which it all came together, while that is seldom ever the case. Both building and tearing down, if you discount natural calamities, are things that happen over time and not at a particular point in time. 'Today' is really just a milestone in a journey that was started about three years ago to consciously try and find a way forward, when there was nothing resembling a clear path to be found.

To have given up on that journey because of adverse economic conditions would have been a terrible thing to do. On the other hand, you never know, but time may just prove me to be quite silly in having gone ahead with it, but I, for one, was never fond of going six feet under wondering, if it came to that. It is not easy, though. Lifestyle switches are often quite inconvenient, but they also teach you to appreciate the value of what you have when you can't play footloose and fancy-free with it.

it is now fairly well documented as to how Google is stepping up its measures to bring in additional revenues from any possible source in these times of strife. Looks like we have yet another instance of another such initiative being pushed out by Google.

At least until January 2, 2008 (well, that is the latest working copy of the page to be found on the amazing Wayback Machine), Google Apps did not have a sign-up flow that did not spare any effort to push to the paid version in your face. I believe this was the case till at least April 2008, which was the last time I had migrated a domain to Google Apps, but I don't have any real proof beyond my very unreliable memory to back up that assertion.

In its earlier avtar, users had the choice to pick the package they wanted from the landing page itself. Compare with the state of affairs now. The URL, http://www.google.com/a/ itself redirects now to http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/admins/editions_spe.html. Moreover, It takes you about four clicks to get to the free version, while the paid version of the platform is the one which is shown to you by default.

It is amusing really to see changes like these, for they are very reminiscent of a time when you would have to hunt around, leaving a long trail of clicks behind you, in trying to download the free version of Real Player or Winamp in the years closer to 2001.

I guess we can, with this, bring on yet another slew of articles that will poke fun at the 'Do No Evil' motto at $GOOG.

There is much blogging glee underway in the content/tech/biz media about the viability of YouTube in terms of money it is making at this point. Details in posts here, here and here. I think they all have gotten it wrong in different ways and I will try and explain how.

YouTube has been and still is a game changing play. Which means that the way in which it is changing the audio-video content business has no precedents for us to refer to. I will confess to being one of the doubting Thomases when Google acquired YouTube, but I have changed my opinion about it. But, coming back to the main point, the way in which this will play out has no previous instances to refer to. So, trying to call it on the basis of what we have already seen is not going to cut it.

You have to be very foolish to think that YouTube is a short-term play or that it is going to be cheap to run. Then again, it is considerably cheaper for someone like Google, with their extensive peering agreements and dark fiber ownership, to run the service than for a standalone player to accomplish it. Google's peering is already quite significant, with 130 prefixes, which is about half the size of someone like Limelight, which has about 300 prefixes.

It was announced by Jason Goldberg today that SocialMedian, the website which helps you consume news through your social connections, has been acquired by XING, one of the older social networks that is headquartered in Germany. Here are a couple of thoughts on the very 'social' hook up:

Products With Core Values Rarely Fail: I have been tracking SocialMedian for a while now and have been a user of the website since its early days. Where the site has reached today is a testament to the fact that good products that do something useful for you repeatedly rarely ever fail. Other than the tremendous hours of work that has gone into the website, from what I recollect, the site has done zero advertising, than Jason relentlessly pushing and leveraging his extensive network to spread the word about the product.

SocialMedian took an existing ill-defined solution of filtering and sourcing news through your peer funnel to discover content and news. Normally, this is done through a mix of email, IM, Twitter, various shared lists (Google Reader, Delicious etc), in a haphazard manner. But, this mode of content discovery through P2P has been the silent rising star of the past couple of years. What SocialMedian did was to pick this up and packaged it nicely, making it much more accessible for the average Joe.