Follow Winners and Become One – The Twitter Way December 6, 2009
Posted by simarprit in Twitter.Tags: Be a winner, Management, Twitter, Winner
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Two years and one month of Twitter life has made a difference to me, and what I am working to be.
I have always seen myself as a winner, optimism and go-for-it have been consistently on the overdrive. I have been restless & naive and savvy & cautious at the same time. Post Twitter, I am wiser, following winners across various domains have redefined few critical meanings for me and this post is all about sharing my experiences of following winners. Twitter offered me a platform to understand winners better and this post is a tribute to Twitter for opening hundreds of windows of endless learning for me.
- Winners are sensitive, but never beyond a point
- Winners are candid, but only where they choose to be
- Winners do help, but would wait for it to be asked categorically, rarely would they change their course to offer unasked for services
- Winners begin with an agenda and remember that commas, semicolons, colons can come at every stage and take them in their stride. They are always watching out for periods/full-stops, forced with an unplanned full-stop, they would ensure that they walk away from the situation and would bear the cost of it
- Winners believe that there are times “when you can have your cake and eat it too” they enjoy these moments and never miss them when they come their way, but they always eat quietly
- Winners always know that there are more from where they themselves came, and are early to recognize one
- Winners do have their biases, but their biases are never carried on their sleeves and seldom acknowledged in these many words
- Winners do their fair share of mistakes, but they seldom drag them too far
- Winners know that they are obsessed with themselves, they also know that many around them know about it and are comfortable with it
- Winners have few dreams and they are always far between. Their dreams come back night after night and push them to convert them into reality, maybe they just dream what they want their future to be and work for it
- Winners never lose the sight of winners of yesterday who ultimately lost, prejudge turbulence and ensure that it remains local
- Winners think positive and negative, of course they think more positive than negative. Looks like only positive thinkers may crash land more often than the positive & negative thinkers
- Winners do take breaks, and they often take breaks when conventional wisdom says they should be sticking out
- Winners reward loyalists, leaders and never ignore sycophants, they use them intelligently
- Winners don’t mind hiding truth, they are never into tell all mission
- Winners are aware about “stiff upper lip” and “never explain, never complain” privileges which come their way, they do use them, sometimes even often
- Winners watch other winners in their domain but avoid getting into direct conflicts
- Winners go out-of-the-way to court bigger winners in their non-related domains
- Winners trust others, but never more than they trust themselves
- Winners are accessible, but they would never tell the route to access them, if you find out they welcome you and treat you as a winner
Each of the above takeaway can be mapped with at-least few of the winners I am following in my Twitter account. To say that all attributes fit all winners would be an incorrect statement.
How Well You Tweet? November 22, 2009
Posted by simarprit in Twitter.Tags: Analysis, Klout, Reviews, Sites, TWAnalyst, Twitter, Twitter-Friends, websites
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With the growing reach of Twitter, there is also an increasing desire to know how good I am when it comes to tweeting, at least with me it is. This desire has led me to explore many new websites being launched to cater to this segment of twitterverse. I can’t cover all, but here I briefly review three of them which I visit at least once in a month.
TW – Analyst – Looks like this is amongst the early movers. The site analyzes your tweets on the basis of writing and on the basis of frequency of your tweets. Simple, no-nonsense one page analysis approach is followed. The site is focused on sharing its judgement about your tweeting. For me it says – Your tweeting is already tip-top! No improvements needed – but check back here every so often to make sure your reputation is being maintained! But it was not always like this, there were suggestions and tips which lead me to incorporate them in my style of tweeting and bingo my report card starting improving.
Twitter Friends – Based on the basic logic behind TW Analyst – Twitter Friends adds lots of bells and whistles to make you spend more time and gives you more reasons to come back. It allows you ego boosters like comparing you with followers or the ones you are following or just about with anyone else. It has interesting graphs which tell you how selfish, greedy or sharing you are when it comes to tweeting, of course they use more diplomatic words to make statements like that. Twitter Friends has also influenced my style of tweeting I realized that when it came to replying to others or doing RTs I was selfish, not anymore!
Klout – Klout is by professional in its outlook and development. It looks most focused towards founders making money by an early exit. Interesting UI, beautiful graphs and charts and a revisit value, Klout has it all. Klout doesn’t focus on tips and tricks of Tweeting it simply works on how good you are what is your overall clout when it comes to comparing it within your circle and the twitterverse in general. Klout is not yet a self-improvement tool on tweeting, it is what it says and encourages you to move towards the right extreme corner of the graph.
1984 Anti Sikh Pogrom (Riots) and Twitter November 1, 2009
Posted by simarprit in Sikhism, Twitter.Tags: 1984, Being a Sikh, Delhi, India, Sikh, Sikhism, Sikhs, Twitter, Twitterverse
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Twitter is a medium which shows everyone naked, instinctive statements taught a lesson to a host of thought leaders on eating crow. Shashi Tharoor, Barkha Dutt, Vikram Chandra, Pritish Nandy, Rajdeep Sardesai were all stopped in their tracks and requested/asked/ pushed to clarify their statements and use of words. Some like Pritish Nandy were extremely quick in clarifying their views and stating their position where as others like Barkha Dutt, Rajdeep Sardesai and Shashi Tharoor took a circuitous route to reach the same place. Shashi Tharoor was quickly reminded of his “Cattle Class” misadventure on Twitter and decided to go absolutely silent on this question after making one simple clarifying statement.
The clarification seekers came from all geographies and belonged to all communities, however Sikhs from India, US, UK, Australia and Canada outnumbered everyone else due to obvious reasons. Sikh, Sikhs, Riots, 84 and 1984 remained critical words in all tweets. Rough estimate of number of tweets pertaining to 1984 Anti Sikh Pogrom puts the number close to 100,000. One could see instinctive collaborations happening simultaneously in putting across point and countering thought leaders, in some cases to a great pounding effect.
A random check of profile and age group of those who were actively countering or correcting the “thought leaders” talks a lot about the even spread of community across diverse verticals and 1984 atrocities hurting all age groups. An 80-year-old tweeted about re-living the partition mayhem and a 21-year-old talked about his being brought up listening to first hand stories from elders who faced it all and survived to talk about it.
On Twitter the Sikh community emerged as a Virtual Nation and grieved as one.
Stay Young, Drink Twitter Every Day October 27, 2009
Posted by simarprit in Internet, Twitter.Tags: Gul Panag, India, India Fashion Week, Twitter, Twitterverse, WLIFW
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When I woke up today morning I had a strange thought, do I eat Twitter or do I drink Twitter. I asked myself where this came from. The answer is plain and simple, Twitter has become something which I must consume everyday, my day has to begin with it and my day must end with it. It has become an addiction, which I am proud of. So, the question remains, do I drink Twitter or do I eat Twitter. I think in my case, I drink twitter everyday, reason is plain and simple drinking is done more often than eating. You can’t begin your day with eating something but you can always start it with drinking something. You can’t go to bed after eating something it will make u feel heavy, but a drink just before sleep is perfect.
Having given an answer to myself to this strange thought, I asked myself who else is drinking Twitter around? There are many, the 1st and foremost name that came to my mind was of Gul Panag. It looks like Twitter has become her favorite drink, specially the way she is going about the Wills Lifestyle India Fashion week tells you that she can drink as much of Twitter as is offered to her or she can lay her hands on. On an average she is doing about 60-70 tweets a day either from the desktop or handheld and her every Tweet whether it is generic to specific to the Wills Lifestyle India Fashion Week or it is one-to-one tweet, you can see the adrenalin rush which she has in abundance reflecting in it. Now, why am I observing it so closely, it is because a part of the action which she is doing involves one of the projects passionately incubated by me, Twitsanps.com. Gul Panag has been using Twitsnaps since many months but the way she is driving the mileage out of the site is making me wonder on why we didn’t identify this dimension of TwitSnaps
Let me just allow random thoughts to flow and these thoughts are just throwing up zillion words, Social Media, Lifestyle, Fashion, Glamour, Connectivity, Networking, Integration, Bollywood, Miss India, Charisma, Fan Following and I can go on and on and on. What Twitter has done is that it has brought forward a platform where you can create a potent mix of absolutely unrelated disconnected, disjointed entities floating around in the world. No wonder the new name Twitterverse makes lot of sense to me. There is a separate thought with which ITC would have gone and created Wills cigarettes, there would have been a surrogate advertising thought with which they would have created Wills Lifestyle as an apparel brand. There would have been an altogether different thought with which Ministry of Textiles would have conceived India Fashion Week, now bring in a former Miss India who is now a Bollywood actress who has always had a dream of doing news coverage using Twitter to cover an event aided with a photosharing site which was conceived with a very different objective.
I am sure what Twitter is doing with me it is doing with Gul Panag and with many others. It is just making us younger with every tweet we do. The minute we Tweet, we allow unrestricted flow of thoughts to float around in the universe. We know if all these thoughts are connected together, it would truly reflect our persona which for people like me is the root cause of addiction. I have always felt that I have never been understood and I think many of us do that, but if you tweet and you tweet passionately and you tweet straight from your heart and your tweet carries the finest your gray cells have to offer, you know that you are home, you know that you can simply go and tell someone that if you want to understand me go and read my tweets.
Today when I was updating my Google profile in a section on write your brief biodata, I just wanted to write one word @simarp. So do I go ahead and change my name, maybe I should. I love eating but I must drink and my drink is called Twitter. Stay young, drink Twitter everyday.
On Twitter – Why Not Follow? October 25, 2009
Posted by simarprit in Internet, Twitter.Tags: Follow on Twitter, Tweeting Habits, Tweets, Twitter, Unfollow on Twitter
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I tweet and I have become choosy. Like most of us, I also started with following celebrities and thought leaders, good start to morning and good start to anytime of the day is what I believed in for several months. Now I have noticed that I can’t stand some Thought Leaders and Celebrities and I have decided to (un)follow them, here is a list of reasons which prompt me to (un)follow them:
- If anyone has following count = Zero (OMG – I don’t want to follow Gods on Twitter)
- 24×7 auto tweets (You may be good, but I don’t want to just see you and read you)
- Predictable tweets and too many cliche and absurdities (Hi Tarling 🙂 I am reading Tewspaper – one even went up to write Twabindranath Twagore)
- One way communicators (They don’t respond to you, they don’t respond to anyone except their pre-twitter era friends)
- Seldom tweeters (If they tweet once in several months, I fail to connect and create bonding)
- Sell, sell but never share (A good number of journalists just sell their program on Twitter, I am sorry – i refuse to watch your program, I refuse to read your tweets)
- Over exposure to – Social Causes (I am wearing a shirt which has been made from recycled cloth)
- Seeing London, Talking Tokyo (When tweets just don’t connect with the persona)
- Nothing beyond 140 (When they never link, never share, never propagate, never write- to me Twitter is life – it is a complete food experience and over a period I want to ensure that my each taste-bud is active)
- Latin and Greek (Celebrity yes, but I am sorry I can’t relate with anything you write – one celebrity tweeted I just returned my assignment advance of X Million Dollars as I was busy tweeting and the agent was bugging me)
I would work further on this post and even name them at some point of time.
Do post your comments
Twitter Fixed It – Vanishing Tweets September 1, 2009
Posted by simarprit in Twitter.Tags: Tweets, Twitter, vansihing Tweets
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It did look like a big problem to me when it happened, in reality it became very tough to cope up with my missing tweets. I kind of started loosing interest in tweeting and started wondering about how long it can last if it has so many unanswered issues. Good for me and good for Twitter, my tweets are back, to me it look like – paradise regained.
Being into this field for over two decades I have always felt that to have bugs and have errors is never an issue as long as you have the desire and ability to fix them. I am glad Twitter fixed it and my tweets are back. I am once again gung-ho about Twitter and more convinced that Twitter is bound to have huge impact on our lives, and even on lives of those who don’t believe in it as yet.
TwitSnaps And TwitPic – A Comparison May 12, 2009
Posted by simarprit in Twitter, Uncategorized.Tags: Photo Sharing, Photographs, Twitpic, Twitsnaps, Twitter, Twitter Apps
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I respect TwitPic for what it means and what it has achieved. This comparison between TwitSnaps and TwitPic is done with the intent of sharing the features developed in TwitSnaps first. Do give me a feedback and enjoy TwitSnaps. I hereby declare that I am involved with TwitSnaps from day one and have been instrumental in its development. I also declare that I have used TwitPic on several occasions and admire it for its growth.
| Parameter | TwitSnaps | TwitPic |
| Size | Photos as large as 10 MB can be uploaded | Size limit is 4 MB |
| Short url | TwitSnaps uses its own url shortener to save characters | Has no url shortener |
| Profile | Creates unique profile page based on Twitter user id | No unique profile page |
| Zoom | Zoom feature, gives closer view | No zoom feature |
| Retweet | Allows Retweet of photos | No Retweet option |
| User Comments | Comments posted on photos can be edited or deleted. | No Comment edit or delete option |
| Description | Description on photos can be edited | Description on photos cannot be edited |
| Visitors | Shows latest visitors of your photos | Doesn’t show latest visitors. |
| Popular photos | Lists most viewed photos in the form of “Hall of Fame” | No listing based on maximum views |
| Search | Has search by keyword, search by user name utility | No search utility available |
| Sort | Allows sorting of photos based on date, number of views | Photos cannot be sorted. |
| Profile info | Has Snippet info, shows number of photos uploaded & viewed | No info on total number of photos uploaded by user, views. |
| Full Size View | Description and title of photos retained even in full size | Description not visible in full size. No title for any of the photos |
| Title | A unique title can be included for each photo | No title |
| Rating | Rating system for photos | No rating system |
May 19, 2009
TwitSnaps successfully implemented “Rotate it & Save it” functionality. It is amongst significant differentiators between TwitPic and TwitSnaps
May 20, 2009
TwitSnaps allows you to tweet long, longer than 140 – of course some of it a person would be able to read only in TwitSnaps and not on Twitter. Twit Snaps has also implemented Post your real URL at TwitSnaps – check here http://twitsnaps.com/focussingapore
May 21, 2009
Wow! TwitSnaps has done it again – We have gone live public beta with the Create your own watermark feature – A first for any Twitter Photograph sharing website. Watermark your images and let your brand do the talking – Upload and check http://uurl.in/gxr1
Google, Twitter and Future of Search March 10, 2009
Posted by simarprit in Twitter.Tags: Google, Search, Search Algorithms, Search Engines, Twitter
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Search engine world is full with its fair share of migraine inducing challenges, one of these challenges is prioritizing the shortlisted results. All search engines have worked on complex mathematical models to overcome this challenge, Google came to dominate the search engine world on the basis of one of its mathematical models which is commonly known as PageRank. The complexity of today’s search indexing and retrieval has compelled Google to look beyond the PageRank, Increasingly one can find results in Google’s top listings which are mint fresh and have no history on the net.
In the past Blogs brought in a tough challenge to Google’s retrieval capabilities and Google handled them very well. The success of microblogging website Twitter, where most of the micro-blogs embed a nano-blog is the new challenger to Google’s highly complex and hugely successful mathematical models. Twitter is changing the game and raising more complex questions, the question I am battling with is Should Google “Power” the Search for Twitter or should Twitter “Power” the Research for new additions and indexing for Google. The tough question is both the scenarios look very likely and bring in their benefits and both the scenarios have larger than ever conflicting complex equations which need to be resolved.
Many researchers and search engine specialists attribute Google’s success to its PageRank and anchor text weights in its master search algorithm, while it is true – the importance of other significant weights within Google cannot be undermined too, and it is these other parameters which would hold the key as Google moves into what may be called the Twitter era.
Search.twitter.com is exciting but it is not on the same page as Google Search to be considered as a challenge to Google Search. They are currently as apart as a shoe is from a spacecraft – you can wear a shoe in a spacecraft but you can’t compare the two. However search.twitter.com does give Twitter a much needed toehold into search space and also makes Google consider Twitter a bit more seriously than few random tweets around. Google is a very evolved search engine, it is almost human, it has its own mind and it resolves queries intuitively. For Google it is the other parameters and filters and independent projects like Google Latitude which may give it as edge and save the day.
A closer look at the two and what they stand for:
Google has always been good in proximity search. Twitter thrives in proximity.
Google has mastered the art and science of crawling, indexing and rating blogs. Twitter is the art and science of microblogging.
Google holds just about every content physically with itself in encrypted compressed form in its repository. Twitter treats almost all content as, use by minutes and hours – highly perishable.
Google crawls. Twitter receives.
Google understands the Internet. Twitter is creating the new Internet.
Google has conquered many operational challenges including the challenge of scalability. Twitter has tough time handling challenges and managing scalability.
Google has fueled its growth by creating and acquiring. Twitter is making its APIs do the trick for it.
Google largely works on what has happened. Twitter is more about what is happening right now.
Google is more like a monologue – Google telling you. Twitter is a public speaking platform where everyone speaks and everyone listens.
Google’s core competence is to collect, index, query and present. Twitter’s core competence is to offer an evolving platform to communicate and share.
What if, if tomorrow Google starts asking – What are you doing now and here? What if, if Google puts a Twitter bar with a tiny logo of Twitter and starts asking – What are you doing? What if, if Twitter acquires Ask.com or someone else and puts a second prompt – What are you looking for? What if, if Twitter goes ahead acquires a crawler and starts indexing pages which don’t belong to it? What if, if Twitter just replaces its own search with Google search?
All the scenarios are likely, the scenario of Google powering search for Twitter and embedding Twitter’s real time feed into Google search results looks the most winning scenario for all stake holders. Google wins, Twitter, Google regular surfer wins and and Googles committed tweeps win.
Google is rolling, Twitter is rolling, together they can rock and rock for atleast a decade.
Still writing…
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