Ideas, Rule

Now tell me who isn’t attracted and glued to Twitter. Celebrities, Politicians, Millions of internet users, Doctors. Welcome the cartoonist. Found these cartoons on Slideshare and thought of sharing it with you. Enjoy!

I don’t know if its just me or all you guys feel the same way about emails. On an average I receive around 50-70 emails.

Here is mockup thread (and believe me entire world is copied on this email)

Due to blah blah blah, the XML message mentioned below did not go through successfully. We want your sign off to send this message again the downstream system.

(the story goes on and on)

To this someone replies

Yeah, I think this is very critical etc etc etc, and would appreciate if we can get this data into the system as business is getting affected blah blah blah ..

(yeah, we know business gets affected even if IT people sneeze a lot and waste time)

This is just a beginning of this thread. Then people start saying, we are doing release now. Business gives their sign off. Another communication on the release is completed. Reply is  a big thank you. To which another reply is Thanks for your patience … gawd, Microsoft Exchange is getting killed, please stop!

I am not saying here that Emails should be replaced by Twitter. My point of view is Twitter is making us believe that 140 is beautiful, sufficient and crisp. If you cannot do in that, that means you should take effective writing courses.

Anyhoo, some tool like twitter which will sell and work in Enterprises should be built and adopted.

Truely a work of genius, as Pattie Maes mentions. Hats off to Pranav Mistry.

Now isn’t this just brilliant? I had a traditional water pump right front of my house back home. Some like this would be so cool. Brilliance at it’s best!

Whenever any great invention happens, the inventor along with the pros of the product might also think about the problems his/her investion might bring upon the society. There are so many such examples. Well, great that nuclear energy got invented, but it gave us Hiroshima & Nagasaki. There are cars, but now we are fighting with the pollution and all the damages is it doing to our planet. The list is so very long. And now we realize and think about how we should put a check on all kinds of pollution from such origins to save the planet.

Similarly, and it might not be right away, we will face similar issues originating from these social networks/ information getting generated from the web. I mean look at the time we spend online — it’s increasing day by day. Sure the idiot box (Television) was considered harmful few years ago, because it made you couch potato, but Internet and it’s friends are just taking it to the next level. All work/ browsing/ socializing/ reading and NO PLAY!

Here are some trends by Online Publishers Association (OPA) 

Look at Twitter, Facebook, Myspace and hundreds of other social networks/ junk data generators. What good are they doing to us? Do we really need this much information in real time? I am not sure!

Well what triggered this blog, is the new service started by Google — Tip Jar . Is Google feeling insecured about people adopting Twitter? I don’t get it. And well, I know they want to organize world’s information, but look at the data coming up there. Here is one .. 

“Take advantage of free entertainment in your community – parks, museums, exhibits, etc. Go to free park concerts and other community activities”

Who doesn’t? Whoever posted this, didn’t he/ she come to the Central Park during free concerts and see the number of people hanging out there? Here’s another one

“Quit smoking. You will save tons of dollars and my favorite: you will save tons of years”

Ya right! You said it and now whoever reads it will quit smoking. 

My point is simple! I think there will be time when so much information will be floating around that we will find it tough to get to what we are actually looking for in the given amount of time. Noise is just spreading all over. Just noise!

And I don’t think building faster machines, better search algorithms or intitive user interfaces will do the trick. Look at the planet and think again, as to what we really need to do.

Eric Schmidt and his views on future of technology, information and the role Google will play. It’s an old video (2008) but I just loved it. 

One interesting point which Eric made was on “News”. He says well say a village gets the broadband (internet) for the first time, everyone is excited etc etc; they start going many things and get overwhelmed with information and possibilities with a computer and internet. But after a while “news”/ “information” is what they look forward to.

Worth a watch!