Category Archives: fun

Twspotting

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Choose Life. Choose a Job. Choose a
Career. Choose a family. Choose a
Fucking sleek handheld device. Choose
a GPRS connection. Choose a Handle.
Choose a Bio. Choose a DP. Choose
complete strangers to follow. Choose to
be followed by loser lurkers.Choose to
update every tiny fucking bit about
yourself. Choose to Twitpic. Choose to
mention. Choose to DM.Choose
Tweetdeck.  Choose Hootsuite. Choose
Twitter for iPhone,  Blackberry,
Android and Mac. Choose to  flood
other’s timelines with Pinterest,Instagram,
Foursquare updates. Choose not to
google before coming up with grade 6
questions and asking people to RT it.
Choose no  passion. Choose no sleep.
Choose followers over real friends. Choose
Follower Count. Choose tweeting over
blogging. Choose talking over listening.
Choose Klout  Score  over IQ,EQ. Choose
Mentions. Choose RTs. Choose to thank for RTs.
Choose FFs. Choose DIY and wondering who
the fuck are you on a Friday night. Choose
sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing,
spirit-crushing tweets in your TL, stuffing
fucking junk food into your mouth.
Choose Trends, Choose Hashtags. Choose an
almost-fanatical devotion to sharing,
pruning your following list, checking
every tweet made while you were away.
Choose five year old DPs that make
you look appealing. Choose to change DPs
every 2 days. Choose to suck up to
Celebs & Achievers. Choose to Follow
and then Unfollow. Choose to Block and
Report Spam.  Choose to add people to a
random list.Choose to snoop into who is
talking to whom. Choose rotting away at
the end of it all, pishing your last in a
miserable home, nothing more than an
embarrassment to the selfish, fucked up
brats you spawned to replace yourself.

Choose your future. Choose life…

But why would I want to do a thing like that?

I chose not to choose life. I chose somethin’ else.

I chose Twitter

(Inspired from Trainspotting, Adminspotting, Pyspotting and my Love and Hate for Twitter)

Typical Twitter Newbie

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typical

Any guesses how much time does it take for a typical user to figure out @replies ?

Curious about how many people feel the same way when they use Twitter for the first time, I ran a search on
“what is twitter” and here’s what I found

what is twitter ?

This is the reason why Twitter’s audience retention rate(percentage of people signing up who return the following month) is 40 %  (via Nielsen)

While we wait n watch what (if at all) Twitter is doing about this, Let’s see
what you think can be done to improve their retention rate ?

Phishing Attempt on Phone ?

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A little while back my younger brother handed over my phone to me and said, there’s a missed call. I looked the number and it wasn’t from someone I knew, curious I called back. Here’s a transcript of what followed

Guy(on phone): Hanji Bhaiya (Hello)
Me: Kaun bol raha hai (whose this?)


Guy(on phone): Bhaiya aaj se 10-11 saal pehle Gujrat mein jo bhukamp aaya tha na, wahan mein khudayi karta tha aur wahan mujhe zameen ke 6ft neeche 4 sone ke biscuit mile hain jo mein apne gaun le aaya hun rajasthan mein. Inko bech do, aadhe aadhe paise mein.( While digging the place in Gujarat where there was an earthquake about 10-11 years back I found four gold biscuits. I have brought them along to my village in Rajasthan, sell them for half price)
Me(Clueless): aapko mera number kaise mila? (How did you get my number?)

Guy(on phone): Bhaiya Billu naam ka driver hai Dilli mein, usne aapka number diya hai. Mein aapse paise nahi maang raha hai, aap mujhse mil lo aur yeh sona bech do.(I got your number from a driver named “Billu” from  Delhi, I am not asking for money, I just want you to meet me and sell this gold)
Me: Theek hai main aapse kal baat karta hun(I’ll talk to you tomorrow)

Did I just experience world’s first phone phishing attempt ?

Ego Search

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Disclaimer: This post is just to stroke my ego 😛

I often do Google ego searches about my name and key words that should point to some post(s) that I wrote. The results tend to range from Awesome to WTF, depending on where my entry stands in the search engine results page.

I did a Google search for some keywords/phrases and was happy to find links to my post among top 15 results. Find the keywords and the screenshots below

1) Keyphrase: “LK advani marketing” , # 11

lk_advani

Rank #11 in about 155,000 results. Read the post here

2) Keyphrase: “Dev D Marketing” , ” marketing dev d”  # 3
dev_d_marketing

Rank #3 in about 322,000 results, Read the post here

2) Keyphrase: “Marketing Ghajini” , # 1
marketing_ghajiniRank #1 in about 10900 results :), Read the post here

Here’s a bonus video of SRK proclaiming he’s the God of Marketing 🙂

Book Club @ kwippy

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We all love reading books and talking about them but at times we just cant get ourselves to read regularly or find someone to discuss the books we just read with. Keeping this thing in mind and kwippy’s wonderful conversational abilities, we’ve started a book club at kwippy. The concept is simple, a bunch of people mutually decide on a book, give it a read and share their views/opinions about it. The slight difference is that instead of discussing books in person, we’ll be talking about them online on kwippy. This will not only help us have better organized conversations but also to involve more people from across the world.

What better book to start the kwippy book club than Milan Kundera’s – The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

If you are into books, you are most welcome to join the book club. All you need to do is request for a kwippy invite here and start following the conversation thread mentioned below. In case you want an invite for kwippy, you can also drop a comment below

how it started: http://www.kwippy.com/mayank/kwips/2008/dec/20/122259/

If you’ve read the book already, you can also share how did you find it.

Happy Reading 🙂

Update: If you were looking for an online version for “unbearable lightness of being” you can find it here http://bit.ly/ebkkw Thanks lockerhaxor for sharing the link.

An algo for Twitter Authority

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This post from Loic Le Meur has sparked a lot of debate that Twitter should have a “search by authority” feature. Keeping the ego factors involved aside “search by authority” could indeed be useful for finding out what people who matter are saying about a particular topic. This will be particularly useful when finding what thought leaders are saying about a particular thing/topic and getting selected and relevant information during crisis times amongst others.

As mentioned here, follower count isn’t the right metric to gauge authority and while twitter ratio(followers/following) could be a better indicator of a one’s celebrity status doesn’t imply authority. Though there is almost zero possibility of Twitter implementing this but just for fun lets see what could possibly be a nice algo to determine one’s authority on Twitter.

1) Re-Tweet Ratio(RTR): RTR = Total number of re-tweets/Total number of tweets. A high Re-Tweet ratio can imply great content, large following and thus high authority. Going a step further if instead of posting something original, you re-tweeted someone’s content which one of your followers further re-tweeted then its credit should be added to the original posters authority and not the middle man i.e your authority will ony include re-tweets for your original content.

2) Tweet Favorite Ratio(TFR): TFR = Total number of favorites one’s tweets got/Total number of tweets. A high Tweet Favorite Ratio is another indicator of great content, large following and thus high authority. Since unlike kwippy where favoriting(and commenting) stats are out in open

, twitter isn’t open about favoriting information and you not even know if someone liked your tweet or favorited it.

3) Tweet Reply Ratio(TRR): TRR = Total replies one got/Total number of tweets . A high Tweet Reply Ratio might not be that clear an indicator about great content or large following it definitely indicates a high level of engagement which in turn can loosely be linked to one’s authority. For ex: this tweet by Chris Brogan
sent two days back got hundreds of replies and still continues to get replies.

4) Tweet Link Backs Ratio(TLBR): The most far fetched and away from reality measure could be TLBR. TLBR = Total number of link backs one’s tweets got/Total number of tweets. Though a link backs for one’s tweets aren’t tracked, if done we could include this data to calculate TLBR. A lot many times people’s tweet inspire blog posts and discussions on various aggregators. A high TLBR can also serve as a indicator about one’s authority.

Now we have atleast four parameters which we can use to calculate one’s twitter authority. If there’s a formula for calculating twitter authority it might look like this

Twitter Authority = 2 * RTR + TFR + TLBR + 1/2*TRT

Since Twitter Re-Tweet ratio is the highest measure of great excellent it’s given most weightage. Twitter Favorite Ratio comes next and is almost same as relevant as Twitter Link Back Ratio they have equal weightage. Twitter Reply Ratio, doesn’t imply great content necessarily but a tightly knit follower base it gets the least weightage.

Its was a fun post written just like that and shouldn’t be taken too seriously but if you did, tell me what you think about it ?

Goodbye Google Reader ?

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I’ve been thinking, I’ve been wanting and I’ve been trying but with no avail.

I am talking about my relationship with “Google Reader“. As much as I love reading blogs I’ve never really got too much into using RSS readers to follow blogs I like. That said, I started using Google Reader more actively a couple of months back, reading posts, sharing them and even favoriting some(do you actually go back and read what you starred ?). Things were fine till I was just following 5-7 blogs but once that number crossed a dozen, things started becoming difficult. I know, anything less than 40-50 blogs on the RSS reader is not a problem with many and some can even manage reading(or just manage) 100’s of blogs in their reader but incidentally “reading blogs” is not that only thing I do and thus have a  problem keeping track of large number of blogs and using another tool for it all together.

I happened to skip checking out my reader for a weekend(while out of station) and had a really tough time getting back following it regularly. While I was not doing any good at being regular reading post from blogs I like and the things my friends share this happened. I’ve made good friends with my gtalk and gotten it to do all sorts of things thanks to our kwippy gtalk bot. It’s been a regular affair now to check my google reader once-twice a week and to quickly glance through the new items and the way things are going I have a hunch that despite all its goodness I might just have to stop using it all together as now I can get new posts from blogs I like or what’s being said about social media marketing on twitter delivered straight to my gtalk which is nothing short of spectacular.

So, what’s your story ?