#iranelection , twitterati and emergence of new media

Sunday 14th of June 2009 has been an interesting day for iran, media and twitter and in no particular order.
During sorting out things for the next week, i happened to catch the trend #cnnfail from my twitterfon and found people are very upset that CNN hasnt done much coverage on the emerging Iran trends, this was taken up seriously by CNN and looks like the Iran story is given prominence there. Traditionally the Newspaper and TV media are used to give people what they thought is relevant and which would captivate the attention of mass and advertisers. Looks like this law is being rewritten now. The public could express contempt of the way media behaves and the media has to listen to the public
And the term journalist which used to be static earlier has become more dynamic as the common public could easily express in real-time open media like twitter and post their photos and videos to popular social media sites like youtube and flickr. The common man who happens to be there on the spot who may not have journalistic acumen is ready to pass on the information the analysis which was typically done by the journalist has now been given to the common public.
Though this brings in chaos (most of the tweets are emotional and rumour based) , the relevance in time (i tweeted to couple of blokes in iran to get some opinion) and the flexibility that it offers is next to none.
Probably the traditional media moguls should take a note and be prepared to face the reality.
In the meantime, things are extremely chaotic in iran as per the input streams from twitter (good that twitocalypse was yesterday) and twitter once again is in mainstream headlines by serving as a gateway for various links to opinions, videos and pictures across the web.
I think for most of us it feels like suddenly stepping into the sunlight after having spent years in a dark dungeon cell, facing a flood of informations. But i think we would get used to this and refine our life styles.
Hope iran gets some peace tomorrow, will check my twitter first before checking the static media.

Amsterdam : A Social Experiment

I happened to go on a short tour de europe covering Amsterdam, Zurich and France. With diverse cultures , richness, building, cobbled streets, greeness etc, arguably europe (at least the part that i went to ) is a typical poets dream.

Amsterdam throws many a surprises for those who are typical moral beliefs. Drug (soft drug) is legal, prositution is legal. A coffee shop said "Smoking Permitted, No Tobacco". It is no brainer to understand what they intend to say and i dont understand why cant they be explicit about it. Amsterdam surely is a social experiment in liberalising the key dark wants of the human mind. Apart from drawing the tourists in tons of thousands, the argument says by not restricting these "Anyway happens" thing in the country it experiences a low crime rate etc.

To me it looks like a weak argument, if that being the case this would have been adopted by other countries more successfully and easily. There is some element which is beyond the obviousness of the reasons. Perhaps the dutch being the one of the smartest of the traders in the globe, would have realised that it is an easy way to lure people's attention towards the country if the moral ethics could be relaxed a little. Anyways there is no universally accepted moral ethics in the world, and these are enforced only for the poorer segments which cannot enjoy these benefits. While the poor man is advised to stay put with his wife loyally , the king is rightfully given permission to have a harlem.

Amsterdam is a worthy philosophical debate.

Brighton Street Performers

Brighton is very synonynous with joy and i happened to be there for couple of days during the last longweekend. Being used to be travelers than a tourists , sounds a bit zennish, we just packed up some food and stacked up some loose change. As usual with the weekends (both long and short versions of it) , trains didnt disappoint us and we have to take a circum route towards london victoria. After having bought the tickets by staring too long at the dumb terminals , we missed a fast train by a minute and took a slower one which was very adamant to stop at all the stations in the route.

The thing that attracted me most was the street musicians throughout Brighton (May is the Brighton festival time). We were watching a show by a small band in the fringe street (near Royal Pavilion) and i started thinking about the numerous street performers and buskers that i stumble upon. Performing in the street is the hardest job for any artist as the people are always on the move and not having paid to listen/see they could walk away in any moment (sometimes only the ticket money makes us stay ) . To captivate a fluid audience, the artist needs to really engage them and should have lot of perseverance and a good sunny day.

Street performing must have had its origins from very olden days as it is a form of an art which allows you to reach the common mass which cannot afford to go to the theatres (same applies for artists as well). If we take evolutionary angles, the performing can be closely linked to an attempt to attract the females and that could have gradually evolved to amuse others who are in power and have huge money. In the due course the performing has got sophisticated and has reached into the shelters of specialised buildings viz theatres and has taken many a forms through radio, tv, dvd, internet etc.

Performing in great theatres and cinemas are not reachable for everybody and those who didnt hit the jackpot, resort to various other platforms where the entry barriers are not very high. Street is full of untalented (who have an illusion of having lot of talent) and unlucky talented ones. I think it is the moral obligation of the society to acknowledge those underappretiated and hard working artists who work with passion and with a hope that somebody important would notice them and lift them to the stardom forward.

Next time when you come across a street artist, please acknowledge them as the air sorrounding you is full of their songs and music which expects to be appretiated , otherwise it could just mix up with the horrific traffic noise unnoticed.

iPhone and twitter ecosystem

The social media phenomenon is further evolving with the advent of twitter and iPhone Apps ecosystems. The twitter and iPhone platform have something in common ie they provide the basic platform and expose functionalities that you could mash up to your imaginations and be wildly creative.

Creating an ecosystem where the innovators would defy mediocrity and stretch the products is not something which comes easily to everybody. While iPhone thrives out of the Apple/Steve Jobs brand clout, twitter came from nowhere and has been rocking the world. I felt there is a similarity in the popularity of both and wanted to put my points (has been quite while since i blogged last)

Opensource was probably the pioneers in getting the value based on ideas of few individuals and developing it with the efforts of an mass intellectual army. While OS offers you the full flexibility of shaping in whatever way you can, twitter and iPhone doesnt offer you the same flexibility but offer an access to the stabler platform (debatable in twitters case) which you could extend to offer varied functionalities.

Twitter has become the defacto microblogging platform and has taken varied faces in the forms of apps across browser, blackberry (twitterberry) and iPhone (twitterfon). In acceptance to its popularity spammers have started venturing into this ( wait for those ads selling viagras and mail from nigerians offering 50% of 1 billion that they have to collect).

iPhone has offered the flexibilities that we never used to enjoy (my wife searched for indian restaurants nearby using google maps which asked to share our location and ordered chicken tikka in a nearest shop for snacks in the evening) and has created a near gold-rush with every body grabbing a mac and trying to write a killer app that could make them rich.

Nobody can be sure whether iPhone or twitter ecoSystems are here to stay but may be they are just an instance of an emerging phenomenon of product vendors providing a platform that could be extended and left to the creative imagination of end users than a closed environment. This is worth noting especially with the popularity of the social media (Facebook apps).

I am very curious to see how this would affect the development of the enterprise applications, with a core platform alone and prebuilt apps at a lower cost and remaining extendable features........

In the gloomy times where everybody (you and me too ) is preoccupied in whats going to happen next, these ecosystems give us some hope that we could also make some money if we are creative and willing to burn some midnight oil. Lets all get a mac (no sight of PC version of iPhone SDK sadly(

Twitter Monetization

Twitter has come a long way in the last three years it has been in existence which is a relatively short span of time. The leading internet traffic analysis site compete has estimated that twitter’s popularity has grown by 964% compared to the same month last year (Myspace is going down). The number of unique visitors are close to 8 million. This is huge given the basic functionality twitter offers (140 characters on ‘what are you doing now?’).  What is very interesting is the fact how it is going to survive further as the VC’s would be mounting pressure on twitter team before web obsessed crowd turns their attention to something else..

Web is full of social networking sites that serve as an alternate to the decreasing interpersonal relations in a fast paced world. For millions of years ,if you are looking at a coverage for billions of years, read ‘Ancestors Tale’ by Richard Dawkins, we have been operating as groups and this desire to operate as a group has taken the shape of social networking in the web world. If we were to consider orkut,myspace, facebook etc as 3 course meals, twitter is ‘the’ fast food. Grab something real quick , have it and move on. But mind the fact that like triple whopper with loads of cheese, it is really addictive as well ( i have an urge to sign on to twitter early morning after checking mails in my blackberry, as soon as i wake up)

The factors that make twitter click are

> It is quick and easy, the 140 character limit makes is mass SMS media of the web

> It interests high profile techies and celebrities, so high chance of developing valuable networks

> Great platform to market your product and yourself (sparing those I-AM-IN-BATHTUB-NOW type updates)

> The facts are more authentic as the false information gets corrected by the ungoverned watchful eyes (same phenomenon like Wikipedia)

But How will twitter make money?

Twitter as a concept has web, mobile and 3rd party apps as its channels and hence any monetization strategy has to be different according to the nature of the channel. While web is a great medium to put adverts, mobile is not. And since twitter allows api level access, governing 3rd party apps would be too difficult. So it is going to be interesting to see how twitter folks monetize their fame , real quick.

Following are my predictions about the ‘cashing in’ of twitter

> Online contests/prizes that could earn you twitter points (nice business opportunity those chinese entrepreneurs who could employs 1000+ chinese youths to earn and sell these points)

> Opinion polls by product vendors with guaranteed freebies

> A small fee for premium twitters with more options which are not normally available to the common folks ( Linkedin irritates you with this strategy already)

> Sponsored Ads in between the twitter streams (this would annoy really)

My thoughts are based on the fact that twitter would remain textual and wouldn’t want to become another jazzy confused social networking site. In this web 2.0 era where people have multiple options to voice their opinions , companies are getting increasingly conscious of guarding their brand (bad mouthing by a lead twitter could do a considerable damage) and market their brands to the masses who crowd these sites. Anyways as long as i am not restricted in what i could do now and if i had to do a courtesy-click of some weird ads to support twitter engine going, I am perfectly fine. Go Twitter Go……

You can follow me in twitter at http://twitter.com/rsenthilk 

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