Its about the connections
In my inbox I have emails dating back till 2004. I don’t like to delete my mails as they store a lot of information for me – phone numbers, postal addresses, and people’s designations among other things. My work email has always been forwarded to Gmail so that makes this data richer. If I opened another account, I would have to continually keep switching between these accounts to find what I needed.

Syncing
These are exciting times. I see data being synced across so many different platforms and applications that it makes me giddy with excitement. Take the case of my addressbook itself – I primarily use my Gmail addressbook simply because I have so many contacts there. This is what happens:

• My Gmail addressbook is synced with my iPhone – phone numbers and email addresses are merged in one contact.
• Facebook app on the iPhone updates their profile pictures and birthday details in my addressbook and Gmail calendar.
• Gmail calendar is synced with the iPhone.
• My Outlook program has the LinkedIn plugin which syncs my addressbook with company and website details of contacts to Outlook.
• When I plug my phone in the computer, Outlook syncs with iPhone, which in-turn syncs with my Gmail addressbook.

Thanks to this configuration, I now have a PIM system that automatically updates birthdays, contact details and company details of every person I am ‘friends’ with online.

The data
There is 6 years worth of data in my inbox – all kinds of reports, presentations and stuff that friends have sent me over the years – all of this in one convenient place.

Its USD 5$
I pay that much and more for a weekend out with friends, so its not that expensive for me.

The reasons I give above are for my unique use case and I realise that they may not work for everyone. If you are still unconvinced about paying up, I recommend you read Q&A: When GMail Overflows sent to me by Mahendra Palsule.

In all these discussions, conversation has always veered towards how privacy rights will be advocated in the future. Frankly, I don’t give a damn about privacy, but turns out many people do.

I heard a very insightful comment from my 12 yr. old cousin the other day. His generation has grown up with Orkut and now Facebook and I have known him to play with computer user interfaces and get the hang of things in 2-3 attempts – in contrast to my parents who still struggle with common website UI.

Turns out he was gifted a mobile phone recently (looks like 12yr olds these days are really lucky!) and for him this was like taking a step backward in technology. He called me within an hour of owning the phone and told me that he had stored my number in his contacts and I couldn’t do anything about it – I realised that he was referring to the social networking philosophy of managing contacts where everything has to be approved and can be given various information access levels, aka privacy rights.

It’s amazing how today’s generation of pre-teens are growing up with the notion of privacy in-built into their systems without even thinking twice about it. They expect to be able to block access to information and assign individual access rights.

Here are some more things I have come to know since:

• He was appalled by the fact that he couldn’t put a password to his SMS inbox.
• He thinks calling at 50p ~min is expensive – I don’t think he knows these are one of the cheapest cellular tariffs he’ll pay in the world.
• Surprisingly, he doesn’t SMS, says it’s too costly and will rather call friends and ask them to call other friends.
• He uses the phone mainly as a camera – he will take snaps of anything dead or alive. Consequently, his Facebook gallery has become more grainy and yet ‘richer’. That said, since I get to see loads of trees and pebbles and other such arty snaps, I suspect am on a limited access list on his Facebook profile and he has more snaps with friends hidden away.
• Does not have Internet on his phone.

I am just truly fascinated by today’s kids and their thoughts on technology. I remember a comment my mom made to me a few years ago when I was playing on the computer – “When I was your age, I thought the adults in my house were all stupid. They didn’t know how to operate the telephone either. Now when I look at you on the computer, I feel life has come full circle“.

I wonder what my kids will do. Scoff at the explanation that we had to pick a device and place it to our ear to make a call – maybe? Whatever the case may be, privacy rights will become the trump card for services that become more and more integrated with each other.

1. Why I paid for extra storage on Gmail

My interest was piqued when ShareThis posted a social bookmarking study on its blog which explores the social engagement value of sharing and I have mentioned my thoughts below.

The ShareThis study breaks down the stages of interaction into share, clicks, and engage.

From the graphic above, you can see that email is still the most popular way to share content on the internet.

Its interesting to see that while most people will share content via email, a lot of the recipients dont respond by clicking on the article link in the email. On the other hand, those on other social networks like Twitter and Facebook have come to accept links and readily click on them.

What Twitter and Facebook Users Are More Likely to Click

According to a user sample released earlier this year by Chitika, Twitter users most frequently clicked links directing to information about current events and news.

• Current events and news: 28.49% of referrals
• Movie-related sites: 22.56%
• Technology sites followed with 13.39%
• Medical sites: 7.98%
• Video games: 4.64%
• Celebrity: 3.94%
• How-to: 2.88%

Facebook users, however, click differently:

• Technology sites: 30%
• Lifestyle: 18.29%
• News: 18.25%
• How-to: 4.55%
• Movies: 2.96%
• Medical: 2.62%

The ShareThis study also found that visitors to your website from Twitter are the least engaging and visit an average of 1.66 pages per visit. In contrast to this, when you have managed to gain a visitor via email, they are likely to visit 2.95 pages per visit.

In all of this data, one thing that stands out is the performance of other social networks apart from the big three – twitter, facebook and email – and to put it bluntly, its abysmal. If you fancy bookmarklets, its best to keep them to a bare minimum with email, facebook and twitter.

The way forward for the Social Bookmarking industry would be to provide analytics for shared articles via every active button. Apart from that, it would also help to see which layout of buttons works best. The icing on the cake however would be to see all this data integrated with Google Analytics.

1. The Bit.ly Click Summary of 5000 Organic Clicks in a Month

I have been using Bit.ly to shorten hyperlinks of articles that I find interesting for a while now and the service has evolved into a very robust tool over time. The biggest advantage of using Bit.ly is that it provides analytics support for short URLs in a way that leaves competition far behind.

I was looking at a month’s data fro November 2009 from my Bit.ly account’s Click Summary and noticed some interesting stats and figures!

The figures above just show that twitter is a great platform to use if you want to spread info quickly and to a large number of people.

For me, it was interesting to see that most clicks don’t originate out of India. That could be attributed due to the fact that the Android and E71 accounts update mostly during the night in India and therefore visibility on those accounts is low in the region. Also, the Registered Applications column under Referrers Detail refers to the Seesmic and Tweetdeck twitter clients.

Its brilliant to see this kind of analytics support from a free tool like Bit.ly, lets hope the new year brings more goodies along the way!

Much love,
- Asfaq

Someone else’s tweets make our RTs look cool. I had this epiphany here.

This is also exactly why am gonna stick to the old way of retweeting for the time being.

by Aalap Deboor

by Alisha Coelho

Citizens’ wall beautification project plastered with posters of Bollywood’s upcoming releases just hours after they were painted

Angry artists and tweeters ripped apart film promoters on cyberspace yesterday, accusing them of ruining their attempts to beautify the city.

The second phase of The Wall Project (see box) took place on Sunday. To the artists’ horror, it took less than 24 hours for their work to be covered with posters of movies like Aladin, Gair and London Dreams.

Said Tweeter Salil Deshpande (26), an associate producer with a media firm, “I got up at 6.30 am on a Sunday and spent four hours trying to do my bit for the city and this is what I saw in less than a day.

“It’s horrible. We’re planning a tweet up (Twitter lingo for meet up) on Friday or Saturday to manually pull down the posters if they have-n’t been removed by then.”

Mumbai Central resident Asfaq Tapia (25), said, “I was there from 11 am to 5 pm.
It’s so easy to put up a poster, but people don’t realise that a painting is a place where people either pour out old memories or make new ones. Film producers really need to educate promoters about where to put up posters.”

Wall-To-Wall: The second phase of The Wall Project at Senapati Bapat Marg took place on Sunday. In less than 24 hours, the art work was covered with posters of movies like Aladin (in the picture), Gair and London Dreams.

Boycott?
Twitter was also filled with messages directed towards Aladin star Riteish Deshmukh and director Sujoy Ghosh and London Dreams actor Asin Thottumkal.
The tweeters warned that they would boycott the movies if they weren’t taken down. Meanwhile, BMC Joint Commissioner R A Rajeev said, “The posters are illegal. We’ll take action against them.”

The Other Side
Aladin director Sujoy Ghosh seemed extremely sorry about his film’s posters being put up on Senpati Bapat Marg.

He said, “I cannot apologise enough. Pls send us the location we’ll have it removed asap. Really really sorry”.
This was followed by, “Totally agree and this is not to save my a**. Wall posters should be banned or put up only in authorised spots. Never again a wall poster. Promise”.

Actor Riteish Deshmukh  too offered apologies on cyberspace. “Sincere apologies for the ALADIN poster that been put on the wall. Insensitive n incorrect. Will look into it asap. Sorry guys,” he tweeted.

The Wall Project
In an attempt to beautify Senapati Bapat Marg, over 200 artists painted a 1.5-km stretch between Mahim and Matunga station in August.
The second phase took place on Sunday. The project is a citizens’ initiative supported by the BMC.