Tag: Social

Peerindex, Klout Beware!

Prasad AjinkyaLeave a comment

People who are in Social Media would already know of influence monitoring tools such as Klout, Peerindex, and Rapportive.

I started using Klout the minute I discovered it using the Rapportive add-on for Firefox. Measuring and monitoring your klout score seemed cool. Soon after that I chanced on Peerindex as well.

The approaches employed by Klout and Peerindex are slightly different. Whereas Peerindex considered the reach of your tweets and conversations, Klout seemed to focus on the richness. Both the web-apps seemed cool, since both of them gave you an indication of what and how to increase your respective scores. So I managed to hike up my Klout score from the low 40s to the low 60s. I was happy with what I had achieved, until one conversation with Sushrut at a Tweet-up made me realize, that a high Klout score or a high Peerindex score is not really the outcome.

The business model that both these web-apps adopt to monetize their influence measuring algorithms is pretty much the same. Organizations that need to reach out to the influencers and decision-makers in their particular niches can now do so … at a price of course. Peerindex for example, charges 50 GBP for identifying a single influencer in the topic of your choosing. Of course there are people who are willing to pay, but the question I want to raise is till when?

I recently read this article on the openview blog, and found this great directory of twitterati – Twellow. One simple search confirmed this, the application is a directory of topic-wise experts, whereas this might seem commonplace, what this means for Klout and Peerindex is that their premium services now seem overpriced. Why would an organization pay a premium for the same information which is available for free?

Agreed, that Klout and Peerindex do provide “perks” for influencers, but at the end of the day, the deliverable for which the organization is paying up good money is to get twitter handles of influencers to start engaging with them. Perhaps, if the engagement can be somehow integrated into these perks … but till then I am firmly sticking to Twellow!

Identity

Prasad Ajinkya3 Comments

There used to be a fine oak tree, in a lovely green meadow. Over the years it had grown to be a sprawling tree with lush green foliage. Travellers would often come to that spot seeking relief under the cool shade of the tree. As time went by, the oak had an acorn, and the acorn was of age.

The acorn was enamoured of the outside world and wanted to roll along the meadow and grow into a strapping young oak. The oak loved the acorn, and told the acorn that the oak would be hurt if it were to go away from the tree. The world beckoned to the acorn … the acorn was torn between the two paths of action. The acorn finally decided to play it safe and stick with the oak tree. The oak tree was happy. The acorn was happy that the oak was happy.

As time would have it, the acorn finally fell. It rolled a few feet away from the tree (as they say … the acorn does not fall far from the oak). The acorn turned into a small plant and found happiness in the shade of the oak.

Many years passed, and the plant remained a plant … it suffered from stunted growth and did not fully grow into an oak tree. The plant was competing with the oak for water and minerals and it was not getting any sun shine due to the oak’s shade. The plant remained a withered shadow of the oak. The oak noticed this, and felt sad … the acorn should have been a full fledged oak by now, yet here it was … a sapling living on the oaks resources.

In some years, the oak tree (now old beyond its years) fell ill and began to falter. It was fast losing its leaves, and looked a shadow of its former self. Woodcutters noticed this rich source of wood and decided to bring this sick tree down. Along with the sick oak, was also a weak sapling. The woodcutters took pity on both the trees and chopped them off.

Travellers who often passed by that meadow still talk of the oak tree … but few remember the weak sapling.

How many people do we meet that fail to find a voice when the occasion demands and find their identity?

RBI and the poppycock it calls vision

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Got to see a peek at the IT Vision document of Reserve Bank of India, thanks to a tweet by a friend. Go ahead, read it, I am not going anywhere. I will save you the effort though, I can summarize it in one word.

Hogwash.

In more colloquial terms, Bullshit.

There cannot be a more generic document which meanders around superfluously. It touches upon literally all the peripheral topics which one can bring up when the words Information Technology are mentioned, but it fails to take a stand on any topic.

I gave them the benefit of doubt and went to the Contact Us section of their website. After I keyed in a longish feedback to their vision document, when I submitted the request, I got a very nice error message (shown below)

Capture

Great execution of the vision RBI! Not only have you declared that your vision for technology is a blurred mixture of all corporate jargons, but also one of the most basic functionalities on your website is not working.

Further reading on the report informed me that a committee had been setup to create the vision document. Committees are the perfect excuses for being faceless, blameless and gutless. You do not have to take any stand and you do not have to do any work.

Good job o ye Banker of Banks!

Concrete Ant-hills

Prasad Ajinkya3 Comments

Yes, you read that correctly. Today when I was coming to office, this thought struck me. Aren’t we all nowadays working in some commercial complex or the other?

Huge concrete towers where multiple corporates have their offices, and people moving in small “colleague huddles” from one place to the other? This is especially true in the cases of SMEs (small and medium enterprises), since they do not have enough capital to invest into a full blown facilities of their own.

So walk into any commercial complex and you will find hundreds of such firms humming with activity. With all the employees going about their day-to-day work … 10am tea break, 1pm lunch break, 5pm tea break … and so on. Aren’t these employees akin to worker ants then?

This tea break thing is a fascinating concept. I wonder if top managers know that tea breaks are the places where dissent is majorly expressed. They are the right places to tap into the corporate grapevine. An ex-colleague of mine used to do this by walking into offices incognito (since he was the CEO of the firm) and sitting inconspicuously in the canteen. Sooner or later some employees would come gossiping by and he would get his insight into the workings of that branch.

Hmmm … I wonder when this mode of working will evolve into a more individualistic nature?

LIONs are whores

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Scratch that picture of a feline with cheap make-up and gaudy mane!!

I mean the new style of declaring yourself as a LION (Largest Internet Open Networker) on LinkedIn to say that you are open to connect with one and all. In other words, you are connecting promiscuously – a connection whore.

I am not taking a disparaging view of this, since I have on several occasions done this (for building a strong gaming network on Facebook, for checking the limit of friends you could add on Yahoo Messenger, for adding folks on Orkut left right and center, etc).

It’s just funny to note that when you say LION, it sounds like self-aggrandizing.

I am a LION!!

Instead of just saying (and people don’t do this btw) …

I am a connection whore!

Interesting to see that by a simple change in analogy (whore to LION), people are suddenly willing to declare it on their profiles. Well, for me they are still the same … LIONs are whores!

Religion: A waste of time

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religion

The recent news of the Ayodhya verdict have started a spate of debates across all media (from NDTV to Facebook!).

That apart, so many discussions wherein people end up confusing religion and god. I thought it was high time I pen down my thoughts on the difference between the two and whenever such a discussion occurs, I’ll proceed to give the link instead of going into the details of explaining the difference (funda re-use!!).

All religions have been started by men in order to lay down a set of agreed upon rules and norms for their community. This community could be brought together through mutual agreement (pagans, hindus, etc) or by instilling fear. Fear of being a heretic (islam, christianity, etc). The details are irrelevant, since in either case one thing rings true – its a social construct.

A social construct which generally pre-supposes the presence of a superbeing to keep all the community within line of the norms. If you break the norms, your soul will rot in eternal hell/netherworld/underworld/etc. If you follow all the norms like a good little boy, then you have chance to enter heaven/valhalla/olympus/etc. All these created craftily to breed only one type of behavior from the masses –

Compliance.

Now this superbeing, is usually god (sometimes it is the devil), but most of the times; it is god.

You take away all these rules and faff (the stuff I generally call as कर्मकांड), and you are still left with god. So what good is god without religion.

A lot. The idea of god, gives us faith, the faith that even if one fails, by some miracle (and these do happen :)), the intended outcome will be met. God is faith, and that’s precisely why atheists and theists will keep on arguing about God … because each will not let go of their faith.

So for god’s sake don’t waste time on religion, but still keep the faith :)

Why I don’t give alms

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I had meant to write this for quite some time, was putting it off – my periodic procrastination at work :)

The day I read through this article (an NGO for every 400 Indians), it was enough to spew forth a series of questions … questions aimed at people who work in NGOs and those who invest in them. With 3.3 million NGOs (the registered number in 2009), what impact has it really done to the country? At a micro-level, I agree that NGOs would be making a difference to the concerned community, but at what cost?

Do we (the nation) really have so many problems that it is taking so many NGOs to work? Imagine the amount of funding and human capital that must be going into these. I know folks who work for NGOs, and they take this funding for granted. This is the most appalling thing!! What gives you the self-righteous attitude to demand charity? (You can expect, but the day you demand I give you the bird).

The only way an NGO should sustain themselves, is not through charity, but through generating their own revenues. If the wealth of the nation is spent on giving to the needy, then the needy will never stand on their feet – they will just spread their arms more open.

Why can’t NGOs have business models and start being sustainable? Smart people will now talk about Social Entrepreneurship … what really gets my goat here, is that how is it any different from entrepreneurship? But that’s fodder for a different post.

Personally speaking, the reason why I do not give alms is that charity is a disabling act. When you give charity, it is a positive reinforcement of the fact that begging gives you livelihood. Once a person starts begging, the first thing he loses is his dignity, and then he loses his capability … downhill thereafter.

I truly believe in –

Give a man a fish; you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.

Whenever a beggar approaches me, I offer them work instead of money. Sadly, none of them has yet to take up the offer.