Imagine we have solved the food problem. We have. We produce more than people can eat. We just never figured out how to distribute all that food we produce. Imagine we only produce environmentally neutral products, all electric cars and so on. There is abundant electricity from nuclear energy for all humanity. And there is universal, wireless, mobile broadband. In that post agricultural, post industrial, post electricity, post information age, all that we know as cutting edge and exciting today will have become utilities. At that point much of the excitement will be in the service sector.
Information processing, content creation and search will always be as expansive as the human mind. There will never be any cure to curiosity. We are built curious. At that point the two most exciting economic frontiers will remain screen time and face time: information and service.
o I bring this up? Is this escapism on my part? I don't expect to see that post agricultural, post industrial, post electricity, post information age for decades. But what I do expect to see, what I am already seeing is the emergence of the same in pockets. It is already happening. Why would a Third World guy like me have an interest in those pockets? Why am I out to betray my peoples whose immediate needs are more mundane? Because you have to constantly inhabit the future to constantly seek the quickest, best routes to the present.
Twitter meets my needs in ways Facebook does not. My problem was not that I had long lost friends; there were a few, but. My desire was that I wanted to meet new people. And Twitter is great for that. But then I hit a point when I realized Twitter is a party, but it is also a broadcast medium. I have a TwitterFeed account that feeds three external sources and my three primary blogs automatically to my Twitter stream.
Having 200 followers was no longer working for me. Now I have over 2,000. I want to hit 20,000. I want to hit 200,000. Heck, I want to hit 2,000,000. You do want a small circle that you watch more closely; for that you have TweetDeck. Otherwise your larger following is great a way to make your stream more representative of the people out there.
I am interested in these people who follow me. Once in a while I will go hang out. I will go to the Twitter pages of tens of people that follow me, and I will read and reply to some of their tweets. Some of those will reply back. We exchange a few tweets. A few of those end up friends. They know who I am. I know who they are. I notice them when they show up in my stream. Many of them link to their blog or website or LinkedIn page from their Twitter page, and when you click on them and read on them, you get a pretty good idea of who they are. These are real people. I have come across some very interesting people this way.
Look at how this seems to work. I cast my net wide. I say hello to many people to end up
with a few friends. That early hello part is like a politician shaking hands along the campaign trail. I am not pretending to be family to these people. I am just saying hello. Where is the smirk in that?
To many still, after all the Twitter buzz, the online thing is not real. The social media thing is not real. Real is offline. Online is not real. I am a huge fan of offline, I am a huge fan of in person. But it is not either or. Some of these great people I have met online I would never have met otherwise. Some people you meet online, you get to know pretty well, and then you meet them in person. Is that great or what? And then you realize, not only is this real, this is the only way. There is no other way.
Twitter as a tool to connect with old friends, and make new friends does not clash with Twitter as a broadcast medium. This tool is so simple and so very powerful. Simplicity is power.
Having a ton of followers is my stated goal. Only a few weeks back 2,000 followers sounded like a lot. Now I have it.
So I went ahead and googled up the question. How do you end up with a ton of followers on Twitter?
One way seems to be to be a celebrity, or become one. Many tech celebrities, and media celebrities and Hollywood celebrities are the top followed on Twitter. But you also have to note Ashton Kutcher is not the top grossing actor in Hollywood. His massive following is based partly on his name recognition, but it is also based on the fact that he is an active member of the Twitter community and his followers feel his presence and his love.
I say stay away from those that are asking to sell you stuff that will increase your number of followers. But I admit to using a few tools. One is TopFollowed. It has a nonprofit feel to it. You sign up, others sign up. The service helps you follow each other at a steady clip. I think that is how I went from 600 to 1,600 and up. And they don't litter your stream with ads about themselves. Another tool is FriendOrFollow. There are about 100 people I follow who don't follow me back. And that's cool with me. But other than that, if you don't follow me, and I follow you, I will go ahead and unfollow you, or that checks my growth. After you follow 2,000 people, you can only follow 10% more than how many follow you. So you need some legroom to follow new people. I think I already have about 300 more people who follow me who I don't follow. So that is plenty of legroom right there.
I know how to go from 200 to 2,000, but I don't know how to go from 2,000 to 20,000 yet. Here is my guess. You manually follow new people. You give them a few days. Then you unfollow that 80% that did not follow you back. Having to follow and unfollow people one person at a time is a tedious process. That is where TwitIn comes in. You follow and unfollow people in batches. It does not always work for me. But I just followed about 50 new people and it worked.
Twitter has built in many checks and balances. You can only send out so many tweets any given hour, for example. I have hit that ceiling twice the past two days.
There are some of your followers, you want to read everything they have to say. There are some you want to read selectively. At the other end are followers, you are happy if they click on one of your links once, that's fine too. Think of social concentric circles. Not all followers are in the same circle.
But if you are wary of a shallow followership and shallow online friendships, make the effort. Take time to say hello to new people, read their tweets. Take time to reply to people who reach out to you. Engage in conversations. Click over to their blogs. Read their blog posts. Get to know them. That takes effort and time. But I thought you wanted deeper friendships than mass follow and unfollow. The two don't run counter to each other.
If you are constantly hungry to meet new people, Twitter is one great, big party.
Remembering RajeevIt is with great sadness that I write about the passing of my teacher and good friend Professor Rajeev Motwani. But I would rather not dwell on the sorrow of his death and instead celebrate his life. ........ When my interest turned to data mining, Rajeev helped to coordinate a regular meeting group on the subject. ...... Later, when Larry and I began to work together on the research that would lead to Google, Rajeev was there to support us and guide us through challenges, both technical and organizational...... Of all the faculty at Stanford, it is with Rajeev that I have stayed the closest and I will miss him dearly.
Rajeev Motwani's death has made me think about a few things at a very fundamental level. I did not know the guy, although I had read about him a few times in passing, had taken pride in an Indian's involvement with something as fundamental as Google: I am half Indian, born in India, grew up next door in Nepal, the poorest country outside of Africa. But had forgotten his name.
Why was he alone? That was the question that struck me, echoed in my mind.
Growing up it was hard if not impossible for me to be alone. There were always people around. The first American city I got to see was Indianapolis. I was taken downtown. My first question was, but where are the people?
At a gut level I always thought of the phrase Third World to be racist. The suggestion is that the so-called Third World is two steps behind the First World on everything. And that simply put is not true.
I went to a school in Kathmandu founded by the British. Every year they would bring along two high school graduates from Britain. They would teach for a year and then go back to college in Britain. I asked one of them after they had been in Nepal a month. So what's the difference? He said he had been in Nepal a month, and he had yet to meet someone who was depressed. That was his tribute to the emotional infrastructure he witnessed.
A few years in America I read online somewhere that Nepal has been the top choice among Peace Corps volunteers during the entire half century of that program's existence.
I once read in an anthropological journal article somewhere that some "tribes" - another racist term - in Africa handled adolescence better than the American society did.
pretty hard nosed about where I come from. I don't glamorize poverty, I don't glamorize children dying from petty diseases. There is much sexism where I come from. Complaining of ethnic prejudice is almost second nature to me. I wish wealth and broadband upon my peoples.
But Global South is the term to use. Otherwise the same white people who have destroyed the environment over 500 years are turning around to lecture you on the environment. What's wrong in the picture?
Why was Rajeev Motwani alone? Why was Ramanujan lonely in England?
Motwani was in the prime of his life, both personally and professionally.
These questions also tie into my recurring theme at this blog, that the human element is central to the web as technology.
From my readings I was aware of an Indian professor at Stanford who had advised the two Google founders, but I had forgotten the name. Today it was like I discovered the Rajeev Motwani name. I was at the official Google mobile blog. From there I ended up at Sergei Brin's blog - I did not know he had a blog, I promptly added it to my blogroll. Brin's blog is not active. He has about three posts, one about his wife, one about his mother, and one about Motwani. That tells me more than anything he has written in his recent blog post about Motwani.
This blog post was going to be about Android, but I will tackle that later.
Vision Objects’ Handwriting Recognition in Android [VIDEO] You Tell Us: Cupcake… Worth the Wait? Tell us below what you think of Cupcake/Android 1.5 now that you have it. ...... I like the camcorder feature and the ability to upload straight to YouTube is wonderful. ...... Gmail improvements are great. The camera is no longer a joke. .... I used to accidentally dial people a lot (from the log). ........ Considering it was everything that should have been on Android 1.0, I'd say it was "overhyped". ...... Eclair will be the real thing, come Christmas 09. ....... Still hoping that the next upgrade brings a lot of fixes and even more new stuff to at least catch up with the iPhone in some aspects. ......... Camera support is also still primitive with no APIs for selecting a camera, inquiring about supported resolutions, decoding preview images, etc. Hopefully Donut will deal with these remaining basic issues. ......... Although this is an operating system, Google have to remember that basic phone features are a requirement, rather than having Flash which will make every page grind to a halt. ....... The improved battery life is the best part by far.uploading to youtube also rocks.I also love the auto rotate,on screen keyboard is cool ......... now it is the perfect phone ........ Android is still 6 - 12 months behind Apple in terms of UI polish and speed. Android scrolling, launching, and interactivity still has plenty of hesitation ......... Android is open-source and backed by Google, which is why I have the G1 and not an iPhone. And, I'm fully confident that with newer processors and newer OS releases this whole platform will eventually lead the field. ....... GPS positioning speed (so slow it felt broken, now it's faster than my GPS!) Moto Labs introduces Android based home energy use monitor Android may get a better Facebook app soon Google Android Ion Phone AKA Magic myTouch 3G Battery Keeps Going & Going Best. Review. EVER.