Dear Mr. Kejriwal, Forget the politics, Save the model

Dear Mr. Kejriwal,

I write to you at a very bad time for you and your party but I write to you because now is the time you need to hear this. As the joke goes around, a Taxi has more seats than your party. Never mind my crass humor, you'd be happy to know that I'm neither a BJP or Congress supporter, I'm actually a skeptic. As the masses who didn't support you, ridicule you and your supporters pour tributes and judge this country for not voting for you, I feel what you need to hear, is an honest neutral opinion.

I felt immense joy when you changed the face of Indian politics to organize a cleanly funded political movement which had such brilliant grass routes participation. Even at my office in Hyderabad, I know more than a handful people who made calls every weekend to campaign for you and some even traveled to Delhi to canvas on the ground. The way you mobilized the educated masses in a dirty field like politics was simply astounding. They believed in you not only because you were an anti-corruption crusader with a clean record but also because you spoke of a new model, 'ek nayi rajneeti'. You believed in grass-routes accountability.

I clapped and fist-pumped the day you won because I always root for the underdog. But from then on, I have simply cringed as I've seen every move by your party. Let me tell you why.

We're a country of perception. If my country is guilty of blindly buying into Mr. Modi as a solution to every economic problem in this country, it is also guilty of having blindly bought into you as a solution to every corruption problem in this country.

Mr. Kejriwal, if people like me think of corruption and try to be a little rational, we'll find that unlike what we think - that corruption is a flaw in someone's character or is somebody's personal choice, it is actually more an economic problem, one of scarcity power and of supply and demand.

Scarcity power because our systems, our processes today aren't transparent and people in a position of power have a scarce but valuable resource, public money. This lack of transparency makes the monetization possible. There is no way for people to know which companies tendered for which contract at what rate and which companies are owned by relatives of which politician.

The other problem is your day to day citizen who encourages corruption. I know educated citizens who will support your anti-corruption stand and speak for your party but will pay a thousand bucks to avoid a 3-hour line at the RTO or speed-up the permission file when their procession/party still doesn't have permissions. Our existing processes of public-government interaction are inconvenient in their current form and incompetent to handle our growing population. People like me with resources are more than willing to pay a premium to save our time. The question is why do we need to in the first place?

I like to put my faith in technology. We live in the information age. It is possible to build scalable technical infrastructure which when brought into public machinery brings transparency to processes and makes data available easily. Why aren't tenders being requested online and the details of the companies submitting them provided? Why can't I submit a complaint in my area with photographs on government portals and track the request and days to resolution? Why can't I submit all my applications online rather than standing in line for 3 hours?

Clean candidates matter. They are the people who will drive this change. But what will endure is this new approach, this new model. You talk of swaraj and responsible grassroutes involvement. You need to start experimenting with these ideals and come-up with replicable and scalable models which this country needs, which this country can see and which this country will ask for.

Sure, your first junta durbar failed. It was ill conceived but you'll find many more ill-conceived ideas and unforeseen challenges. What you need to spend time on is trying to perfect this model in a single constituency, in a single area and make an example which this country so desperately needs. Don't go selling a prototype to the market. You're still very much in beta.

Trying to fight the Lok Sabha elections only did you harm as you set to meet an aggressive schedule of promises that nobody asked you to deliver and you rolled out headline after headline of unsustainably met promises. Delhi never asked this of you. All they wanted was 5 years of good governance. You had a chance to make a new ideology work. You had a chance to utilize the youth behind you in creating the infrastructure I mentioned. You had a chance to create a new brand of governance.

Unfortunately, ambition and scale got the better of you.

When you won, they called your party the fastest growing start-up by an IIT-ian. You see Mr. Kejriwal, start-ups fail now and again but what they are advised to do is to fail fast. I see that you've done just that. Now is the time to hustle. 4 Lok Sabha constituencies and whatever the people of Delhi are kind enough to give you back - that's a lot to start with. So make it matter.

It's going to take time and you'll have to be patient. Ask the guy who took twelve years to shed the image of a mass murderer to become this country's 15th Prime Minister. God speed my friend. 

Does technology need to solve everything?

I needed soup. I was coughing, sneezing and dying a slow death called body ache. I needed something warm, something soothing. A few moments of relief. Soup.

It was my first year away from home. I had never bought packaged soup before. What I bought was trash. Desperation. All I could do now was Whatsapp a friend. ‘Dude, any restaurant in the vicinity that serves good soup?’

He said ‘Why would you want to order soup from a restaurant. Go to the Supermarket and get soup brand X. Trust Me’.

Good soup procured and the rest was history.

So yesterday when I read about a start-up providing social recommendations for shopping, I totally saw myself as a user. Recommendations from your close friends sometimes make all the difference. Even for something as mundane as soup.

The product was simple. Users keep recommending products that they feel are worth recommending. Using your Facebook data, the system figured out whose opinion mattered to you so that when you needed recommendations, you’d have them at your fingertips.

Great! Sounds like a plan.

Genuine need. All the right pieces of Technology — Mobile apps on all platforms for easy access, Social Mining to find people who matter and finally a platform which is time-persistent to record recommendations and provide them on-demand. Technology solves everything. Yay!

So now I need to buy a new-T-shirt. Friends, what be your recommendations?

Wait. Why would any of my friends keep adding recommendations to this service?

In real-life friends help-out each other because ‘They Care’. When you give them a call or text them, they do their best because they genuinely want to help you out. How do you translate ‘Genuine Care’ to a functionality?

How do you make caring an app-based incentive? Why would a user spend time recommending products on a third party service without any immediate needs or gains? We can always give them coupons but then we have enough of those anyways.

Secondly, when you need recommendations, who would you get it from?

Probably this friend who knows about where all the offers are. Or maybe that friend who has those ‘Superhero T-shirts’. Or maybe that friend who has the same shopping budget as you.

How do you translate these to code? How do you record a user noticing a superhero T-shirt that some friend wore a couple of weeks back and use it to provide recommendations?

Sure Facebook has a lot of data about your friends and acquaintances. Pinterest knows the people whose collections you like. But the way we seek recommendations is more impulsive and intuitive than what data can currently model today.

And lastly, how do we actually seek these recommendations?

Do we like just ask a friend for some store names and then hang-up?

Nope. The process is much more than that. It starts with your friend asking you why you need something, what your criteria is and maybe how much you are willing to spend. After you've answered these, your friend makes tailored recommendations for your needs and then goes on to add some extra goodness like which brands to watch out for, which tailor to insist for and some real good advice to drop a criteria or to increase/decrease the budget.

Social recommendations the way we seek them today are much more conversational in nature than just reading a page full of information. It’s better to give your friend a call than going through 30 pages of information in the name of recommendations. It’s a no brainer that a call or text messaging is the way to go.

When I think of such questions, I realize that our ways of doing some things are much more intuitive than technology can offer.

Maybe some problems should be left alone.

Sometimes, the best way is the old school way.

Facebook can't be too many things at once

‘Dude,What’s this Facebook which everybody keeps talking about?’. ‘Man you don’t know about Facebook?! It’s awesome! It’s kinda like Orkut, but only much much better!’ - This was 2008

Since then, what Facebook meant to us has changed a time too many. Facebook went from being the new fad to the new buzzword to the new redundant. Soothsayers are already queuing up to forecast it’s death.

But how did it get here? Why is something as addictive and successful as Facebook being now treated as terminal? What did Facebook do wrong?

Let me tell you - ‘Nothing much’!

Facebook is a medium which derives it’s meaning from the content we create on it. It provides a set of tools and thrives purely by how people use them. Facebook is a slave to human behavior.

We changed Facebook and what it meant to us.And our behavior which led us to change Facebook isn't something new at all.

We rather demonstrate this very same behavior, subconsciously, at any large gathering that we attend. Let’s take a reunion. Pick any big reunion.

Stage 1 - When you’re there at first, you meet so many folks - friends and acquaintances that you've simply lost touch with. It’s so great to see them after so many years! You ask them how they've been and how life has turned out for them since the last time you met them. Your friend is more than happy to tell you that life has gone really well for him over all these years. He’s going to tell you about which college he attended, how he traveled all over the country, how he has a really cute dog and how he’s really into cricket. It’s great to know all this about your friend after so many years.

These are Facebook’s initial days. People were just thrilled to add their long lost friends and acquaintances on Facebook. Adding more friends was more fun and checking out their status updates and photos was super exciting. You found it great to know that friend A is totally into Football or that friend B has totally hot girlfriend and that friend C now goes to a top business school.

Back at the reunion, your friends keep telling you more about themselves and after a point,it gets boring. You’re not interested in the cake served at his brother’s wedding and how he found the icing delicious or how he loves his neighborhood so very much. You’re dying to excuse yourself from the discussion.

In Facebookland, this is when you started to feel that people kept talking about themselves all the time on Facebook and how their status updates are so annoying. You wanted to stare at an update and say ‘So what?!’

Stage 2 - Now at the reunion, you’re bored. You’re willing to participate in only those discussions which are about topics that you like or on which you have something to share. Bunch of blokes are standing at one end talking about the English Premier League while a group of folks on the other end are discussing ‘The Big Bang Theory’. I like Big Bang theory. You sway into the discussion and start talking about how Penny is really hot! You’re friends agree and then you all laugh on the C-men joke!

You see, the discussions now, have moved on from people to ‘Content’.

This is exactly what we started to do on Facebook. Sharing memes and status updates about Game of Thrones, Manchester United, Lokpal Movement, Calvin and Hobbes were the in thing! We usually found ourselves liking, commenting and sharing content which we liked. On some days, I felt Facebook had suddenly turned into 9GAG overnight. Facebook was entertaining again.

But here’s the catch - Facebook wasn't built for these kind of interactions. It was actually built for the initial ones. Other networks which were built for such interactions started to pop-up. Twitter and Quora introduced new ways to share and create content. Our friends were merely guides to access more content which we found interesting. They had a strong follow-unfollow model to help us maintain a curated list of sources as not all friends share our interests.

So Facebook did what it could. It tried to create and tweak more tools to facilitate this model of interaction. It brought in the ‘Share’ button, Hyperlink Previews and the app model which Quora adopted. It even went as far as adopting the ‘Follow-Unfollow’ model from Twitter. Facebook tweaked its algorithms to display content which we found relevant. It worked to some extent.

What it couldn't do was get people to unlearn how they used Facebook. In our minds, we had processed Facebook as a place we share personal updates. Although we were annoyed by people talking about themselves, we wouldn't hesitate to do the same ourselves. We would hesitate to unfriend somebody on Facebook as easily as unfollowing them on Twitter. The two meant different things to us.

What we ended up with is a Facebook which was still noisy and a patch work of sorts.

Stage 3 - Coming back to our reunion, discussions about ‘The Big Bang Theory’ have now moved to ‘How I met your mother’ (Ugh! That show!) and discussions about Wimbeldon have moved on to ‘Federer is the greatest player of all time’ (Yawn!) . ‘Hey guys, I’m going to make a move. Great talking to you all!’.

After many such discussions gone awry, all you want to do is settle-up in a booth or a corner with a bunch of close pals. Now you've moved on to discussions which you only have with your close friends. They know you better than most and you’re going to be chatting about stuff to which only these friends have context or access.

This is where we are today. ‘Whatsapp groups are the new social networks today’. How else do I explain 10 different groups on my Whatsapp list?

With media sharing, these interactions have only gotten better. We had such interactions on our ‘Facebook Group’ for some time but we dumped it in favor of a Whatsapp group which is more real-time and hence, better suited for such interactions.

To facilitate these interactions, Facebook will have to more than tweak itself and hope people unlearn what Facebook means to them in a big way. 

So what does this mean?

Does it mean that Facebook is going to be extinct soon?

Not in the near future. There is some value in our lives to the first kind of interactions and for it, there is no substitute to Facebook. Facebook is the only network where all your friends and acquaintances are and will continue to be.

What it means is that Facebook isn't going to be as popular as it once was. But it isn't Facebook’s fault completely either. It can’t be too many things at once.

In another world, Twitter advertising works like this

Ah, Twitter for Businesses. Such a comprehensive guide for Businesses or Brands to successfully market themselves on Twitter – Creating a great Twitter presence, Engaging users, Attracting Followers and the finishing move – Twitter Ads! Success!

This is Twitter advertising as we know it today. Every business has a twitter handle, every brand is running a contest.

Funnily though, none of these ever reach me. Ever.

My struggle with information overload makes me pretty choosy about who I follow. Only people who tweet great stuff regularly stay on my timeline. Pruning and unfollowing is a weekly activity. To me, Twitter handles of these brands are either dispensable or overlooked without a blink.

I expect this to catch up. We live in a world which hyper-shares. We have irrelevant and uninteresting information thrown at us every day on our social networks. Twitter and its ‘Follow’ model is a huge respite. Everybody either ignores or is choosy.

Now let me tell you what happened to me last month - #shubhaarambh did – a promoted hashtag which popped up quite regularly on my Twitter timeline.

The question now is how?

Here’s how - Rohan Joshi (@mojorojo) is a funny guy. He’s one of the few folks who have stayed and made my Twitter timeline consistently entertaining. Turns out he was tweeting with #shubhaarambh all along slyly placing it in his humour filled tweets. Netra Parikh (@netra) is another quintessential on my timeline who tweets really helpful stuff for Mumbai folks. Turns out she was tweeting #shubhaarambh too.

It was actually for a contest by Cadbury. Well done Cadbury, you have gone where no brand has gone before – My timeline! You had my curiosity, but now you have my attention.

So what does this tell me? Maybe Twitter, there’s a different way you could do advertising.

Let me make a small analogy to explain my idea - @mojorojo, and @netra are like quality television channels like ABC, FOX or Star Plus with popular content like TV shows in primetime programming both engaging and entertaining. These shows have ads!

While watching these TV shows, commercial breaks don’t hurt and I actually end up consuming some advertising when I’m hooked to them. Similarly, if these Twitter users tweeted some stuff bearing promoted content, I’m also very likely to consume it while I’m hooked to their stream. They have my attention and their tweets seldom get overlooked.

In contrast, dedicated accounts for businesses on Twitter are like post 12 am infomercial channels - dedicated to just one product and more likely to be ignored. No entertainment, only ads.

So aren’t tweets bearing promoted content by these users a much better way to advertise on Twitter?

My friend Tejas revealed that celebrities are already tweeting promoted content. What’s more, I ran into this website -  

@mojorojo features on this list at $77, so does @hoezaay, a similar twitter user at $177.

And here I am thinking - Maybe you should be doing this Twitter.

Twitter has the power to make advertising non-invasive, seamless and engaging. Along with or instead of selling promoted tweets and accounts, Twitter can help connect brands to influential Twitter users and promote this model of advertising.

Twitter can easily possess the ability to identify influential users in every demographic, their model of engagement and topics, keywords associated with these users. Twitter can also determine spheres of influence of these content creators to reduce redundancy and improve coverage. It just needs to map influential Twitter users with a target rich audience to the brand of the advertiser.

Twitter now becomes a marketplace for connecting these two parties and takes a cut at both ends based on the effectiveness of the campaign.

It can and should also do one more thing – Grow its own superstars! The easy and obvious choice for this form of advertising are Celebrities. They are well-known, have huge followings on Twitter and have an image the brand can capitalize on. But most celebrities tweet infrequently with content which merely has fan-value. Instead, Twitter should take the lead in promoting Twitter users whose influence is growing. It needs to grow more channels in each demographic and bank on these channels to provide more opportunities of advertising to their advertisers.

Moreover, these content creators can not only be channels but also ad-men. Creating effective content for advertisers should come to them as naturally as tweeting.

These content creators are at the soul of Twitter. They share their opinions, laughs, experiences and curiosities to make Twitter what it is - entertaining. Twitter needs to reward them for their contribution.

All in all - It’s a win-win. The advertisers get a more engaging way to market with tailored content from creators which the audience likes and anticipates. Imagine @mohanstatsman talking about a contest to be in the Pepsi VIP box blended into his cricket trivia.

The Content-creators get real value in being on twitter and creating a dedicated followership.

Twitter gets an entirely new model of advertising and increased Twitter activity from this incentive.

Target audience like me will truly get to choose the advertising they want to subscribe by extension of deciding whom to follow.

Of course this will create it’s own set of behaviors and concerns – Brands will have to figure out how to retain their identity when they engage in this model, content creators would really have to be smart about the number and kind of sponsorship they take up and so on.

But it’s still worth a shot!

Thanks Teja for your inputs! 

PS - This is just a pondering. If any of you know about how Twitter does this already, please feel free to share. Thanks

Hey Facebook, why no nicknames?

This week, Facebook launched Facebook Home, its next big thing after Graph Search. So since the world is talking about Palo Alto and new features, I thought I’d write about a feature I’ve wanted since quite some time.

I got this idea first when Facebook had just launched the functionality of being able to tag friends in comments. On a photo which had a long thread of comments, I tried to tag a friend to hurl abuses at him, only that when I tried to, for five seconds I couldn't figure out what to type.

I was trying to tag a friend of mine called Ashish who is known by all but that name. Now people from my class would know that despite knowing Ashish for 6 years now, I have for most part known him as ‘Matya’, so have all my classmates and he was ‘Appa’ to me before that. I wrote Matya for the first time and took five seconds to realize that I need to type Ashish. That was my first experience with how unnatural tagging close friends with their given names felt.

Gone are the days when Facebook for me was about adding more friends or liking more pages or poking people. My day to day Facebook activity now is only about keeping track of and knowing about what’s happening with a bunch of my close friends and folks who I no longer meet on a day to day basis. I also share what I want these people to know – my last check-in read Cheese Disco Pav at Relax was quite a matter of envy among my friends.

A large part of my Facebook activity is now conversational by nature with a bunch of very good friends, classmates in the form of comments, likes and photos. As a result, as I comment and post every day, I think of this missing piece every time. I believe it is something quintessential to good friendships that didn't make it to the Facebook experience.

More so, even today I have observed, people use their friend’s nickname in a post and then tag them by their given name at the end of a post. Everybody would have liked this.

But then well if Facebook has to implement something like this, this is easier said than done. Even Matya can clearly list out the issues in something like this –

• People don’t want EVERYBODY to know their nicknames
• People don’t warm-up to the idea of them being called by their nicknames by someone other than a certain set of people
• People are conscious about where and how their Nicknames are used, especially people with embarrassing nicknames. (‘Dude, don’t call me that in front of her!’)
• People have multiple nicknames and some more issues

So how do you implement something like nicknames for people on Facebook?

Now let me think for a moment about what a user like me would actually like to do when he says he wants to use nicknames on Facebook?

I want to be able to –

• Tag people using their nicknames in posts, comments, check-ins, photos and so on.
• If one of our mutual close friends does the same, I’d want to see the nickname instead of my friend’s given name.

Simple. Not too much to ask. All in the name of a more natural friendship experience on Facebook.

Now let’s see what my friend who is being tagged by his nickname would want?

• He wants to be able to control who can tag him via his nickname. His close friends
• He wants to be able to control to whom his nickname appears. Again his close friends
• In case there is a situation where a friend who has been granted the privilege does so, in an inappropriate context, he should be able to revert to his given name

If we can make sure the above three can be satisfactorily taken care of, the next question would be what happens to such posts where people get tagged? Do they become protected or don’t appear to people who don’t have the permission to view or use a person’s nickname?

Here’s my simple proposal –

Let users send their close friends requests to use a certain Nickname (maybe piggyback on the close friends feature Facebook already has). The friend gets to approve which friends get to use nicknames and by extension the various nicknames he allows these folks to use. Now let these people have the functionality to tag that friend by his nickname in posts, comments, check-in and photos. Similar friends who have also received the permission to use the same nickname will now see the nickname instead of the friend’s given name. For others, Facebook should simply replace the nickname with the given name.

The last part I feel is the most important because this will lose value if we change the current experience to accommodate nicknames. Instead, we should simply hack the current experience and make it more natural for our close set of friends.

But here’s the catch. Even this simple user design has implementation challenges. Imagine maintaining a mapping of every user’s multiple nicknames to his identity and with it a whitelist of people who are allowed to use them. On the other hand, whenever a user logs in, Facebook would have to check all his whitelists to display posts and comments with nicknames instead of given names for all the posts on his feed. Doable but quite a task.

And to add to it we won’t appreciate this much compared to something huge like Graph Search or Facebook Home. It also offers Facebook very less the product differentiation or competitive advantage. Maybe not something which Facebook would want to put on top of their priority list.

So sadly for quite some time, you will most probably only see this idea on this post and not on Facebook. Unless there’s more to it. I ponder.

LinkedIn - Making Deeper Connections

'ARE ALL MY LINKEDIN CONNECTIONS THE SAME?'

Last week I said hello to LinkedIn after a really long time. Trust me when I was in my final year, this used to be a lot more. While accepting the numerous requests to connect, I took some time to actually go through my LinkedIn connections after a very long time. Normally, I get LinkedIn requests from a broad spectrum - people who I genuinely know, people who I haven’t interacted with much, people who I know just by name and even complete strangers, same as any other LinkedIn user. 

My process is simple – check if I know a connection or if I have something in common with a requester or lastly, if there is any value to adding them to my ‘Professional Network’. It keeps my connections clean and includes people who I really want to know about or keep in touch with.

On the other hand, while sending out requests, I usually add people I know well. But mainly, I use it regularly to add folks who I have interacted with, sometimes pretty miserly, at various networking events like competitions, conferences, barcamps and so on, if they are genuinely interesting. It’s like keeping somebody’s business card if you need to reach them someday. Some people I know use Facebook and Twitter for this, but I draw the line at LinkedIn for folks like these.

What I was really pondering was the purpose of adding these connections?

A few obvious ones like below come to mind -

1. Migrate your real network to a virtual network and then extend that network by reaching out to folks in the virtual networks of people in your network


2. Use connections as a reference or an introduction to reach out to and speak to new people of interest


3. Find somebody within a given organization to get referred or probably some information


4. Keep a track of the career changes/milestones/ skills etc. of the people you know so that you are always updated


5. Improve your discoverability to pop up on top when somebody is looking for prospective hires, skill sets and so on


6. Adding weight to your profile by showing off your network capital


7. Get valuable reading content shared by great connections

If you ask me 2,3 and 4 are what people actually trying to achieve. The rest are good to haves.

Now Quick question – I want to get referred to a position at ABC Corp which I think suits my skills. Who would be a better connection to get information about that position and possibly a reference?

• Somebody I met at Robocon 2012 or at IIT Techfest who now works at ABC Corp


• A guy at ABC Corp who my classmate or close friend regularly plays tennis with but I don’t know directly

Unless you have a magnetic or memorable personality or you met a really nice guy at Techfest/Robocon, in the most cases, it will be case no. 2. Which brings me to my original point –

‘Are all my LinkedIn connections the same?’

I feel not. There are ‘buddies’, ‘connections’, ‘acquaintances’, and simply ‘random’.

Though adding all of the above makes absolute sense and provides great networking capital, can we take a step back and think about how to provide a user with the ‘Optimum’ way to perform a ‘Task’?

Starting a conversation, getting referred, getting an expert opinion can be tasks. Though all your connections are a part of your network, not every category of connections will give you the same ‘return on connection’.

A 2^nd Degree contact may a lot of times get a task done much more easily and quickly than a 1^st Degree contact.

Now let’s look a step ahead. How do we characterize, deeper connections from the looser (loser) connections in real life?

You usually have a deeper connection with somebody who you interact with regularly or strategically whereby the person on the other end really gets to know you. This can both be in a formal or informal setting. This can be a guy who you work with on your team, your childhood friend, somebody you play tennis regularly with, somebody who you know at water cooler discussions, etc. Infact, it’s a pretty accepted fact that the closest folks at even offices are the ones who drink or smoke together.

So how do you discover and map these relationships to LinkedIn?

Using something very obvious – People who share deeper connections are also very likely to reach out to each other on other social networks, informal ones like Facebook or Twitter. By periodically accessing a LinkedIn user’s Facebook or Twitter data, one can continuously enhance information about a relationship.

Is being friends on Facebook or Twitter in addition to being LinkedIn connections a good way to term a connection as deep?

I say we go deeper. One can monitor for ‘interactivity’ on these networks. This can be simply comments on each other’s posts, posts on each other’s wall, likes and so on. All these actions specify a different level of interactivity. A comment on a post by the connection can be considered a better interaction than a ‘like’ or a ‘retweet’. Employ a weighted system to derive a quantitative measure of interactivity and assign it to relationships on LinkedIn.

Now an example -  Let us say our system assigns a ‘deep weight’ of ‘1’ to an acquaintance and increases this value on a fixed scale as it finds more interactions on these social networks. Let us say Ram is Shashi’s classmate (Deep Weight = 3) and Shashi plays tennis with Ravi (Deep weight = 2). Ram also knows Nandini who he met at a conference (Deep weight =1). Both Nandini and Ravi work at ‘ABC Corp’ regarding which Ram needs information.

Let us just say Ram searches for ‘ABC Corp’ on LinkedIn. A smart algorithm which takes interactivity into context will evaluate deep weights of both connection trails. In Nandini’s case it is simply 1. But for Ravi the algorithm can add the two interaction weights i.e. 5 and maybe apply some operation to account for the fact that Ravi is a second degree contact in Ram’s network, say divide. The evaluative deep weight now becomes 2.5 which is still greater than 1. The Algorithm will hence suggest Ravi over Nandini as a better connection to achieve a task. We will need much more sophisticated algorithms for actually evaluating ‘deep weights’ and evaluating various degrees of connections by using these deep weights.

However, this should have a fixed scale and constraints. Ram asking Shashi to talk to Ravi who then introduces Ram to to Balvinder who then introduces Ram to Sheetal just doesn’t make sense. Rarely will we find such high degrees in connections, but we need to account for this. The current system of degree of connection has fixed step values -1^st,2^nd,3^rd but maybe adding the context as above may implement a completely new ranking in the background with free flowing values.

A case can also be made to look at and derive data from other sources like Quora, Yammer or measures of interaction at a workplace say Exchange Information. These ideas seem good to ponder on too but the concept remains the same.

Finally -

• Just use the data in the background. That’s it - As interactions on LinkedIn and other social networks like Facebook and Twitter are inherently different, I have my doubts on more UI based Integration amongst these networks

• Make this a premium feature - The very nature of data that will be crunched and the advantage that will be provided screams it out to be a premium feature. It provides an edge and the edge should come for a cost. Also this exclusivity should make users comfortable in allowing LinkedIn to use their data

• Not just results, facilitate communication - For such a functionality, it is also critical to provide a way to get introduced via somebody in more seamless way. Adding intermediate connections automatically to CC automatically provide contextual information within the messages, go figure!

Finally, I would like to end with something I read-up on twitter very recently –

‘Sauthi Moti khan – olkhan’

(Guj for: ‘NetWork is Net Worth’)

The Curious Case of Television Learning

'ON PERHAPS WHY THERE CAN BE NO LEARNING IN TELEVISION LEARNING' 

Last week, I went through the second advertisement of Airtel DTH’s latest campaign. A teen we’ve all seen with a familiar detestation and escapist attitude for studies, suddenly has a change of heart and takes an interest in learning after his family switches to Airtel DTH owing to its ‘iExam Interactive learning’ service. ’Sirf Cable Nahin, Life Badlo’ they proudly declare. It got me pondering over the concept of Television Learning. Interactive learning content on TV to teach or assist in teaching students.

Some research here and there later on the various education or learning services offered by the current DTH or digital television operators in the market today reveal that majority of them provide only online testing facilities for various topics and subjects, an example of which the aforementioned iExam services are. There is no instruction on any subject or topic. Nothing is being ‘taught’ and consequently nothing is being learnt. Thrown in with these testing services, is learning content for toddlers and English Speaking courses for people.

As a viewer of the ad, when I see the ad, the first thought that comes to my mind is something being taught on television, a perception I will share with many. A common presumption of television Learning would  involve some form of teaching done using recorded videos and other multimedia content enabling my kin to grasp faster and keep him engrossed with the so called interactive content. Such content is available in the market sold by the school stationary veteran ‘Sundaram’ and some other brands. Then why is there no such content on Television?

I think of reasons for the absence of instructional content despite the availability of so many start-ups in the country today churning out learning and educational content and a few observations come to mind.

Beta! 'Marks ka Sawaal hai!'

A probable reason is the Indian School System which is not ‘Learning oriented’ but ‘Exam oriented’ or ‘Syllabus oriented’. No matter how much we deny, our school students are tested less on their understanding of topics and the ability to apply them and more on their ability to reproduce whatever has been instructed in their classroom; in full.

Also our school studies are parent dominated. Parents invest a lot of time and effort in making sure that their son or daughter takes up his studies seriously owing to the growing competition in our country.

In such a culture, parents would rather have their son/daughter studying from books or class notes which will help them score marks in the exam. In all probability, they have also probably paid for classes or tuitions. They’d rather have their child do homework sums or assignments than sit in front of the TV, unless it provides assured results against the conventional studying from books. When operators are well aware of this culture, why should they invest so much money developing this instructional content?

Add to this the number of Examination Boards (CBSE , ICSE et. al) and the investment required has just shot up to create content for diverse boards.

Perhaps the case where television learning will have the most success is the KG belt where seldom there is any syllabus and learning is as much as your child can observe and grasp. It is also a time where parents in general take a lot of interest in the exact content a toddler is studying rather than in the later years when parents are only involved in policing. This provides an ideal setup to spend time with ones son or daughter and teach him good things using the interactive content on their television. In reality too, this is where the maximum use of these interactive services is being made and copious amounts of content is available for this category.

Chal channel change kar, Serial aa rha hai mera

Secondly, in India television is the only source of entertainment amongst majority of its population. Women by far are the biggest consumers of television. TV serial timings are treated as respectfully as Pooja timings and efforts are made to not miss episodes and watch parallel programs in repeat telecasts. The newer trend catching up is watching missed episodes on Youtube. Children launch their own struggle to gain control of the television and watch their programs. In such a crowded schedule, you cannot expect our average family to compromise their TV time for somebody to learn - Books are many, there is only one TV.

Of course studying is more important and one can always decide a fixed time to study on television daily. But our mentality will most definitely bypass these as the TV is not supposed to be a primary mode of learning but rather the books are. Parents would happily instead buy their kids CDs which they can use on their desktops and shiny new laptops and save Mumma her serial time.

Trust

But the most important factor perhaps, for the concept of television learning to work – ‘Trust’.  ‘How can I trust my kid to study or learn on TV when he can switch to his favourite show or cartoon with a single button when I’m not around?’  It is too fundamental a question to ignore. Although the metaphor is too harsh, it’s like telling a thief to repent for his sins in the lockup and giving him the key to his cell too.

Maybe at this point, using interactive television learning as a gimmick to make the consumer ‘only believe’ that he is indeed, accessing the next generation of television seems a better option.  It is sound business sense rather than investing in actual content which is both expensive and functionally useless. Tests make perfect placeholders for this. What’s better, for those who actually wish to use the testing services, the companies can happily charge them. Comparatively, the time to set up a testing service from readily available content in the market is negligible.

So if you’re a consumer looking to buy a new DTH connection it is probably best to not even bring the TV learning into consideration while selecting a service or plan. Most probably you’ll not end up using it anyway. Be smart and choose an option which provides better benefits.

If you’re a DTH operator, rather a DTH operator advertising the TV learning on national media, it might perhaps be better to find other alternatives in digital interactive content to differentiate your brand in this increasingly competitive market. This can be anything like simple how to videos or as simple an application as ‘M-indicator’ which is a huge convenience for travelling in Mumbai. Of course, all these services can easily be accessed on the internet. But more people, especially housewives, know to use their television remotes than their computers.