sankara.me

So many social networks have come and gone. I have tried almost everything. Orkut, Yahoo 360 (anyone remember it?), MySpace (yeah I had a profile there too), hi5 and so many others I signed up but never used. Orkut was the first social network I was serious about and it was also the one that brought a lot of my friends together; long lost school friends esp. However, it was love at first sight when I saw FB. I instantly moved away from Orkut. But it took more than a year before the exodus from Orkut completed and it's three years since then and I have finally deleted my Orkut profile.

FB kind of had everything perfect, initially. Photos, sharing links, everything just worked. Not to mention, the interface was pretty and usable. So it wasn't much of a question for me to move away from Orkut. But as the exodus started, the feeds started getting polluted. Mafia wars and Farmville while attracted people towards FB also started freaking me out. There was an app request every few mins and the feed was congested. FB did act fast, they enabled features to hide posts by user and by applications. It helped. People got mature too. Discussions were getting better and things started improving. And then the mass exodus happened. All of sudden everyone was on FB. Won't you be freaked if a broker who helped you find a house 5 years back and your office account came up as suggestions. Oh and there are a few friends who deleted their FB accounts because their aunts signed up on FB too ;).

To add to that, privacy was just namesake from day one. (How many people realise that if you liked a friends photo, the entire album was instantly visible to your friends; not just the original poster's friends?). Totally freaky. I had to remove a bunch of photos and untag a lot people. I also refrained from liking or commenting on personal photos. Of course, the original poster could have enabled tighter controls, but the interface was clumsy and unusable. To sum it up, FB took the evil route to get everyone on board and keep them “entertained” (same route as orkut of course). Privacy aside, the chatter was also too much. FB's 'Top News' only aggravated the problem.

And then came Google+. As of today it has the perfect balance of privacy and sharing. The best part is twitter like public sharing but unlike twitter only select posts can be made public. Oh, what a boon! Want to share your photos with only your friends, done! Fun birthday pics at office to be shared with your work friends, done! It doesn't freak me out anymore to post my thoughts freely or share my photos! I'm listing down a comprehensive set of features where Google+ shines towards the end.

The best part however is that there is no concept of “friend”. It’s not a mutual link anymore. The positive side is that you don’t have to be freaked out if someone totally random sends you a friend request. Just happily let them follow you; there is no condition that you have to follow them back or give them access to all your personal photos. (And a disclaimer, all features that I mentioned above are there in FB too. For example, you can follow someone’s public posts. Try finding out how to do it :))

But is everyone you want on Google+? Nope. Will they move anytime soon? Nope. Change is inevitable but change is slow and almost everyone uniformly resist change. So yes, it’s going to be another long year of wait before most people move to Google+. But I’m confident that they will eventually.

Features I love about Google+

1. Concept of circles (aka friend list) from the ground up. As in real life, friends circles don’t overlap anymore.
2. Privacy.
3. Follow anyone you want. I now follow a lot of people from Robert Scoble, Tim O’Reilly, Linus Torvalds to Muhammad Yunus and there are some really amazing photographers like Ben Canales and Trey Ratcliff. I don’t have to say it; these guys are never going to accept my FB friend request ;)
4. Stream – Filter by circle. Want to see your friends posts alone? Quite easy.
5. Sparks – This is not one of the widely popular features yet but one that has tremendous potential. Makes it really easy to follow topics of choice.
6. Hangouts – I can’t use it much as most of my friends are not there in G+ yet and that’s the only reason it is way down below. But unarguably this is the best feature of Google+. Group video chat, who thought that would be so easy.
7. Photos – I have long been a fan of Picasa and Picasa Web and it paid off well. (Effectively) I now have unlimited storage for my photos, the interface is one of the best, easy but controlled sharing. Everything is super good.
8. Huddle – This is a mobile app only feature which has a very good potential to dislodge BlackBerry messenger, whatsapp, Kik and the likes.
9. SEO – Oh well, I don’t personally like it so much but businesses are going to love it.

My opinion – Google+ has the best ability to keep FB on its toes and it’s good. Competition is good.

Economic Times Coverage of the Investment is below:

 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Some Other News Coverage Of The Investment:

• Times of India
• Economic Times
• Livemint
• The Wall Street Journal
• Financial Chronicle
• Yahoo!
• MSN
• Pluggd In

About Walden International

WI is a leading international venture capital firm that provides investors access to cross-border, IT opportunities with the advantage of an unrivaled Pan Asia network since 1987. The firm’s funds total over US$1.9 billion in committed capital. WI’s investments include Creative Technology (SGX: CREAF SP), MindTree Ltd (BSE: MTCL IN), SINA (NASDAQ: SINA), Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp. (NYSE: SMI and HKSE: 0981.HK), WebEx (acquired by Cisco). For more information, please visit www.waldenintl.com. 

Everyone would have faced this hurdle some time or the other. It is difficult to change; it's even more difficult to change others.  Be it changing your favourite shell, IDE, version control system, release process ...etc. or in the real world - changing city, habits… name anything. Here is a simple list of the arguments put forward against change and what I typically feel about them.

Argument: I'm used to X. I'm comfortable with X. Why should I change?

Fact: In most cases it's nothing but pure laziness.

Experimentation; have an open mind and be ready to try out things without any prejudice. Make it a fun cool thing to do and enjoy yourself. The flip side is that you might end up, or perceive as, wasting your time once in a while. I'm sure most people can easily identify those that aren't worth a single unit of their time and push it out. Anything above that is definitely a learning. If not switching/changing your favourite, you'll most likely get an idea of what features are good in your favourite and that's an important and  necessary condition to becoming an expert.

Argument: I'm an expert at X and I don't want to learn Y

Fact: Most cases you would have falsely assumed yourself to be an expert. If you are reasonably expert at X you would have by now realised what is good and more importantly what is bad with X. Only knowing the deficiencies and shortcomings of your favourite fully qualifies you to be an expert. (The real gurus would have not just identified the issues but would have also fixed them. They are people who can be the change.)

When Y comes along claiming it's better at features a, b, c ..etc.  of X the real expert would quickly realise that Y is what they have been waiting for and would jump ship. It's not that easy to jump or switch habits of course, I'll come to that.

Argument: What if the alternative is actually not as useful to me as it seems? Blah, Blah, Blah ...etc.

Fact: Fear of change. People use shallow arguments when they are afraid of change.

This is actually the biggest problem of all. Most people I have worked with in my past or present company are some of the brilliant minds I have ever met. Most of them are experts in what they do and very clearly understand their craft. These brilliant people in most cases vaguely know that the new (not as in shiny new; new to you, new to me) cool stuff is actually not just cool but also better than what they currently use. A couple of my personal experiences are with  Eclipse vs. IDEA and SVN vs. Git. But they won't just be ready to try out the suggestion.
How to overcome this fear? There is no straightforward answer. I'm no psychologist ; but I would say face it head on. Just go try it out. What is there to lose anyway. Try it in something minor, something with limited scope but go try it out.

Argument: It's so hard and painstaking to switch.

Fact: Yes, it requires determination.

Once you are convinced that you are better off with the alternative it boils down to determination. When that determination is achieved it's about systematically  learning the new stuff or unlearning the old stuff. Your determination will guide you through the rest.

Suggested reading: 'Who moved my cheese?'

A commenter mentioned it's a war on Amazon. True. It is Apple's war on Amazon. As such Amazon stands tall in customer perception and satisfaction. If Apple removes Kindle app from Appstore that might very well backfire. But would it be enough to disrupt the iOS ecosystem? Will people ever realise the autocratic rules of Apple around the iOS devices? Will there be a regulation to get rid of such ridiculous practices that try to suck the last penny out? Will users' interest prevail over monetization?

One of my brother's friend recently became a Lieutenant in the Indian Army. He is now with one of the elite forces and has been posted in one of the most strategic locations. He didn't get there overnight. I know him from 2002. He has always talked about the country and was very passionate about joining the Army. Coming to the point; he is one of those rare breed of people who had a clear aim and a strong mind to follow their heart. Of course not many agreed with him. In fact very few actually believed he would get there. He is now a very proud man and very happy doing what he does. Even after 30-40 years I'm pretty sure he would be happy with his decision and his accomplishment. And now for all of those who don't have a clear goal in life; who don't know what they want; who just follow the crowd; who are just after the money, good luck. And those who know what you are doing; the next time someone asks why aren't you becoming a <add-a-fancy-title-here>, show them the middle finger.

I'm pretty sure everyone's aware of the outage that happened at Facebook. There is a very good hypothesis on what could have happened in the High Scalability blog. One of the very basic things I learned with working on a distributed system is "if something is bad, don't make it worse". Almost any retry mechanism I think of these days would be an exponential backoff solution (right, it all goes back to the basics of networking). Retries are not bad by virtue. What I'm puzzled is how could someone dealing with things at the scale of Facebook didn't think about this basic stuff? Or is the real issue different from the hypothesis?

I have always pondered on the applicability of the “freedom movement” or FOSS for webapps like Gmail. An article (link obtained from the footnote of open source vs  free software by RMS himself) crisply defines some of the salient points of free software:

1. Users are free to use the program for any purpose.
2. Users are free to examine the source code to see how it works.
3. Users are free to distribute the program to others.
4. Users are free to improve the program.

This definition uses the word "program" but I believe web applications do qualify as programs; after all, Gmail is a web application aka program (hosted by google) that helps you send, receive and manage emails, isn’t it? Now let me apply the logic to Gmail and try and understand if it qualifies as free.

1. There are restrictions on how you use Gmail as defined by their terms of service.
   1. 5.2 You agree to use the Services only for purposes that are permitted by (a) the Terms
2. Don’t even think about it.
3. Let’s exclude this for the moment.
4. If greasemonkey scripts are considered improvements to the program may be yes. But I doubt google’s TOS would explicitly allow modifications to even the user interface of Gmail by using a thirdparty browser extension.

Almost every web-application would fail to qualify the definition of “free” software. At least a MS Word document is my property; my Facebook profile is not. I have absolutely no control on if or whether I would be able to export my Facebook profile. Effectively instead of just me, now my data is locked in too. But I rarely hear FOSS enthusiasts to be critical of it. Stumbled upon a Sep 2008 interview with RMS in The Guardian; here is what RMS has to say about web application:

"One reason you should not use web applications to do your computing is that you lose control," he said. "It's just as bad as using a proprietary program. Do your own computing on your own computer with your copy of a freedom-respecting program. If you use a proprietary program or somebody else's web server, you're defenceless. You're putty in the hands of whoever developed that software."

That quote was specifically on cloud computing; I might be wrong but I guess it would extend to other webservices as well. I wasn’t able to locate much about the applicability of FOSS for webservices nor did I see anyone criticize these webservices. FOSS.in is in twitter afterall (@fossdotin).

I’m seriously not an expert in the area of FOSS and definitely not a lawyer to interpret the intricacies of the various licenses and TOCs. But I do believe that “free as in speech” simply cannot apply to most web applications and web services. I am not a believer by any measure (I do use proprietary software); but I’m interested in understanding how the free software movement applies to the web of today which has evolved so much to even make an OS “almost redundant” (think Chrome OS).

Chanced upon a Bill Gates interview back in 1986. It's very interesting to see his view points on various things - from programming/programmers to mathematics to CD ROM. Bill Gates has suggested a few technologies to come to the fore front; a few have succeeded, a lot haven't.

Original interview: http://programmersatwork.wordpress.com/bill-gates-1986/

Excerpts (more of notes to self than anything else):

Great programmers are critical to create software products. But we don’t believe in a prima donna approach, where just because somebody’s good we let him not comment his code, or not communicate with other people, or impose his beliefs on everyone else.

 At certain levels we’ve got business managers, but we don’t have non-programmers really managing programming projects.

... but I think you’d find that the programmers who sit down and code at the beginning are only using that as a scratch pad. It’s what’s going on in their heads that’s most important.

Little inefficiencies can slip into the program along the way, and if you want to really feel good about it, you’ve got to maintain the thought that you’re not going to let that stuff creep in. …. I’d go back and recode other people’s sections of code, without making any dramatic improvement. That bothers people when you go in and do that, but sometimes you just feel like you have to do it.

Excerpts:

Some people just jump in and start coding, and others think it all through before they sit down, but I think you’d find that the programmers who sit down and code at the beginning are only using that as a scratch pad. It’s what’s going on in their heads that’s most important.

Well, first of all, the programming team has got to be made up of people who respect each other, because the work is really intimate; it’s like being in the same play together. So much judgment and creativity goes into a programming project. Some of the great programmers can’t work on teams; they just like to work on their own. But I think there’s an element of greatness that comes in learning how to work with other people and teach them.

Things have changed from what used to be the case with BASIC but high level languages haven't really gone any far on this one:

Software tools are getting so much better. It is possible that we will eventually be able to take just specifications and a description of what the machine is efficient at, and then have some super high-level compiler do a lot of the work that programmers do now.

Its like people who play cress. When you’re really into playing chess, it’s easy to memorize every move in ten chess games, because you’re involved in it. Other people look at that recall in chess players, or in programmers, and they think it’s like some freak show. But it’s completely natural.

I still think that one of the finest tests of programming ability is to hand the programmer about 30 pages of code and see how quickly he can read through and understand it.

INTERVIEWER: Is studying computer science the best way to prepare to be a programmer?

GATES: No, the best way to prepare is to write programs, and to study great programs that other people have written. In my case, I went to the garbage cans at the Computer Science Center and I fished out listings of their operating system.

If you ever talk to a great programmer, you’ll find he knows his tools like an artist knows his paintbrushes.

I doubt this ever took off to such a large scale. I keep hearing one or two people talk about rule-based programming but that's about it:

What’s going to really be different is rule-based programming. It’s different, because instead of just writing the program and saying: “If this happens, do this and if this happens, do this,” which is the way programs work now, you’ll write rules, and then you have this little reasoning engine that looks at the current set of facts and the rules. Then it tries to derive new facts and act appropriately.

This is the master piece:

Our goals are very simple. We’re going to create the software that puts a computer on every desk and in every home.

And then there's a whole lot of discussion about CD ROM - funny to read it now.

We really believe we’re going to have CD ROM machines in every car and in every house. And when you go to a new area of the country, you’re going to stick that little disk in there and pan around and have it show you routes, and have it tell you about points of interest.

What Sony Ericsson service said would take one week, total data wipe out and Rs. 12K to replace the entire board and resurrect my K790i was done by a vendor in a 2.5ft wd shop in Richie Street in 1hr and the phone was restored back to the exact same state before it went dead/dormant for a year.

http://shekharkapur.com/blog/2010/07/a-blackberry-addict-discovers-grassroots...

Paul Graham’s Hackers & Painters is a very interesting read for anyone looking to make a living out of programming. Here is an interesting quote:

Great software, likewise, requires a fanatical devotion to beauty. If you look inside good software, you find that parts no one is ever supposed to see are beautiful too. I'm not claiming I write great software, but I know that when it comes to code I behave in a way that would make me eligible for prescription drugs if I approached everyday life the same way. It drives me crazy to see code that's badly indented, or that uses ugly variable names.