/home/dhananjay

Earlier this morning I deleted one of my twitter avataar and account @d7y. This was primarily meant for communication with friends, and people at large for topics not related to software engineering. Which meant pretty much a whole bunch of trivial and non trivial topics.

Twitter is a firehose. And for a brain which thrives on information its an addictive firehose. That was something I had dealt with a little earlier and felt comfortable I had worked around. It did require continued effort to make sure it didn’t become a waste of time.

I realised some aspects of twitter which worked negatively

a. Twitter is a great way of expression. But increasing incidence of #wtf and #fail made me realise just like others I was using it more (even if I didn’t tweet the specific hashtags much). In general when you find yourself in a world where tons of people are out criticising tons of other things – the negativism levels rise even if you don’t want to feel negative. Much as in my mind I malign the younger generation of thinking too highly of themselves (an accusation that probably applies to any generation from the one preceding it), I was realising twitter is an environment where if you are not careful, it is quite possible to start believing yourself to be more important than you deserve to be.

b. Twitter debates do not have the real life feedback so necessary. There are no facial expressions, no grunts that warn you etc. And it has some extremely opinionated and expressive people. In many ways I thought it provided the right fertiliser for my argumentative outlook. I like being argumentative but did not like that over a period of time twitter was reducing the threshold at which I became argumentative. And that was not good for others and certainly not for myself.

This is not to say twitter isn’t a good tool. Its just to say its a tool and so long as you can wield it creatively and effectively its great. If it starts wielding you – its time to say good bye.

That does sound counterintuitive indeed. But here’s why as you twitter more, using friendfeed is only going to help you get better at it.

Brief Introduction

Friendfeed is a lifestreaming service. You create an account and link it to many other of your information sources eg. your blog, your twitter account, delicious, flickr, google reader etc. This is called your feed. Anytime you post a blog entry, bookmark on delicious, post a photo to flickr, or share a post on google reader, friendfeed’s watching you. It pulls it all together into one feed – your friendfeed. Friendfeed has a similar subscription model like twitter as well. You subscribe to your friend’s friendfeed. You now start getting their unified feeds getting streamed into your home page on friendfeed.

So how does using friendfeed help ?

Friendlists

Friendfeed gives you three friendlists – Personal, Professional and Favorites in addition to the default Home list. You can create additional friendlists. eg. I create lists like interesting, geeks, social-media etc. etc. The people I would generally like to monitor, I put them in my Home list. In addition people whose tweets/feed items I don’t want to miss – I put them in the Favorites list. In addition, I classify people into other lists based on my preferred categories for following. Now I know that even when I am back to my computer after a long time away, I can still follow my favourites by clicking on the Favorites group. People I may choose to follow only infrequently, I can move to a list different from the home feed. Use it whichever way you want. A little experimenting and you’ll be on your way.

Twitter Integration

If you are a power twitter user, the first thing you would want to do is link your twitter account. This is bidirectional. All your tweets will appear in most cases near instantaneously on your feed as well. In your settings panel there’s a link called “Twitter Publishing Preferences”. Click on that and that will allow you to have the entries in your friendfeed getting posted to twitter as well. Make sure to tick the checkbox “Link to source site instead of FriendFeed conversation (does not apply to comments)“. This will ensure that whatever gets tweeted to from friendfeed will not point back to the friendfeed entry but to the source entry instead. You can also selectively choose the feed items that you would like to push to twitter. Now anything you tweet is pulled into friendfeed and anything you post to friendfeed (and the entries it pulls in from other sources as well) are pushed into twitter. Sometimes all you’ve to do is to just click an hyperlink to tweet it (eg. Like).

These are the things you no longer need to explicitly tweet (assuming you’ve set up the integration and the feed into twitter).

• Interesting Pages : Use the Friendfeed bookmarklet to mark the pages you like. They now find their way to twitter.
• Bookmarked Pages : Friendfeed will pull your entries from delicious and push them into twitter.
• Pages in your RSS feeds : Just share them on google reader and they will be soon tweeted to your friends.
• Photos : Just post the photos to flickr and your followers on twitter will know
• Interesting messages : Just click ‘Like’ against the same on Friendfeed. This is similar to retweeting

Come to think of it – isn’t it a reasonably large proportion of your tweets ? Notice the pattern ? You are doing your actions right at the source. You now no longer need to come to twitter, typing a message, adding a URL and then tweeting it – its all automatic.

Not all my twitter friends have an account on friendfeed

For starters you can have friendfeed scan your twitter friends to check if they are on friendfeed and you can start following them immediately. There are some who may not be on friendfeed. There’s a solution there too. Add that person as an imaginary friend, and against that imaginary friend set up his various streams (eg. twitter, blog, delicious etc.). You’re ready to go. Note having a friendfeed account helps all your other friends too since they do not need to create and maintain an imaginary account for you. If you are not on their must follow list, they just might choose not to spend that effort.

But the twitter web api / tweetdeck gives me a way to scan replies/references to me on twitter and create search streams

Fear not – that has a solution too. Run the search on twitter (for replies/references use “@twitter_user_id” as the search string. You will see a RSS feed corresponding to that search. Now take that rss feed and plug it into another imaginary account as an RSS feed, and all the search results will now be visible on your home feed (or in the group feed wherever you’ve associated that imaginary user).

Other services

Well, as an example I cited your blog, delicious account, and google reader account as information sources. Friendfeed supports tons of them. So the integration into twitter can be extended to (amongst many other possibilities)

• Tumbles into tumblr
• Stumbles on StumbleUpon
• Books you recommended on GoodReads or LibraryThing
• Pages you dugg on digg
• Posts you voted up on reddit
• Any other status messages you posted to facebook or brightkite
• Music on iLike or Last.fm
• Comments on backtype, disqus or intensedebate
• Videos you posted on vimeo or youtube
• Presentations you posted to slideshare
• Events you posted to Upcoming
• Any other RSS feed you may want to send out to the twitterverse

Thats quite a bit. What else ?

You can click on the best of day / week / month to find entries made by your friends which were liked the most. And if you are into cyberstalking, you can really get a virtually realtime capability by creating an imaginary friend and then linking it to all the services you want to follow for him/her (I know I am being mean – but what the heck – friendfeed pulls in only the publicly available information)

I am now getting greedy. Sure there’s nothing more

Hmm .. you can create groups and subscribe to them along with many other friends. Any specific focused topics you are likely to get into that you don’t want to bother a large part of your followers with ? Don’t send the messages to your default feed – send them to the group. Now these will only get delivered to the friendfeed users subscribed to the group and your twitter followers can have a easier time because you don’t suddenly flood their twitstream with (in their perception) arcane / irrelevant stuff. And have you ever irritated your facebook friends by streaming your tweets into facebook just because you didn’t want to enter status updates twice ? Well now you can stream facebook into friendfeed into twitter. So if you want the update to be in both twitter and facebook, just enter it in facebook, and if you would like to see it in twitter alone of the two, enter it in either friendfeed or twitter.

So get cracking – create a friendfeed account. If you are not too sure who to subscribe to, I’m a nice person to follow. On both twitter and friendfeed, I maintain two personas. d7y (twitter, friendfeed) is the personal and free wheeling side of me, while dnene (twitter, friendfeed) focuses on programming, software design and architecture aspects. See you on friendfeed and twitter simultaneously.

Why ?

Setting up a friendfeed room for collective liveblogging serves many purposes :

a. Provides realtime feedback to the livebloggers at the event from other livebloggers at the event on the same page (without having to subscribe to each of their feeds). Makes collective realtime liveblogging feasible.

b. Provides external followers a single URL to be able to view all liveblogs. I think they can even stream the feed to gtalk etc.

c. Provides both attendees and external followers to comment on the liveblogging stream in realtime against the original post/tweet

For Pune Blogcamp 2 I’ve set up the friendfeed room as http://friendfeed.com/pune-blogcamp-2-liveblog

But I use twitter for live blogging :

No probs – all the stuff you liveblog here can be fed to your twitter account as well. Your twitter followers will continue to receive these streams as well.

How ?

Here’s how :

1. Get a friendfeed account if you don’t have one at http://friendfeed.com. If you use a separate liveblogging account for twitter, may I suggest you create a separate friendfeed account too ?
2. Login to friendfeed and goto http://friendfeed.com/pune-blogcamp-2-liveblog
3. Now do you see the Subscribe link in a blue bar at the top left just below the pune blogcamp icon ? Click it to subscribe. (If you see Unsubscribe it means you’re already subscribed – don’t click that)
4. If you’re going to stream to twitter too, do you see the checkbox just below the text area between “Cc:” and “Twitter” ? Select it. It will pop up a new window for OAuth (ie. to set up the authorisation for your friendfeed posts to get automatically tweeted to your twitter account). Enter your twitter login credentials (userid / password) here and click allow.

Thats it you’re setup.

Now just post whatever you want in the message box / text area. If you’re streaming to twitter pay attention to the no. of characters (they shouldn’t go beyond 140). The count of characters appears just before the Cc: text after you start typing in a message. Even in case you exceed the 140 char limit, the tweet will have a link to a friendfeed page containing the full text (I think thats how it will work for photographs too).

Update: If posting to twitter as well, PuneTech Liveblogging suggests its best to restrict yourself to 122 chars to account for the additional chars used by friendfeed url.

And if you want to post photos or other files, right below the message box you see hyperlinks to photos and files. Use them.

Now you can post to friendfeed, watch everyone else’s posts show up on the same page and your posts will get automatically tweeted to the twitter account if you set it up and have the check box against twitter on.

Not sure if this is such a good idea but I decided to post the draft of my Pune Blogcamp 2 presentation in advance. Here’s the slides. Note that given time constraints slides 4-9 run the risk of being snipped.

Update: Have now replaced the earlier draft presentation with the final presentation

Pune Mirror ran a fairly comprehensive feature on twitter today on the centrespread by @vedaaggarwal. It included quotes by @sahilk and myself (@d7y and @dnene). I found it flattering since I came out sounding far more cogent and articulate than in real life. Since I couldn’t find a online version of the article, I put up a scanned copy of the same. Unfortunately the scan contains only a small portion of the full centrespread dedicated to the twitter feature. So go pick up the copy while you can to read the remainder. And thanks to Pune Mirror in advance for not objecting to my publishing the scanned writeup (since I didn’t seek their permission in advance thats the least I could do ). And if they do come up with an online version of their feature, I shall certainly link to it as well.

Click on the thumbnail below to get the readable medium resolution picture. Note that it is about 2Mb so could take some time to download.

Pune Mirror writeup on twitter

After observing a conversation turn quickly dysfunctional on twitter, decided to post some of the practices I follow to avoid conversations getting dysfunctional on twitter. These are some quick random thoughts in no particular order. Feel free to add any other tips in the comments section below.

• The window view is not the world view :
  We are a product of our experiences and these experiences are our window view of the world. While real, it is not a comprehensive view. Thus before contesting someone’s experiences ask yourself if there is a possibility that his window view is also a reasonable window view even if not consistent with one’s own view. Remember the humanity thought for a long time that the sun and stars and planets revolved around the world before it was conclusively proven otherwise.




• Be clear if you are looking for expression or conversation
  Twitter and blogs are a great way to express. They also are wonderful medium to have a conversation. However the rules of the game between an expression and conversation are different. It is a little easier to get away with treating the twitter account or the blog as just a soap box in hyde park a.k.a a Speaker’s Corner if one is looking for expression. However if you are conversing, rules of normal civil conversations apply. Once you apply the rules of conversation, you have to decide how much you want to temper your freedom of expression. Thus aggressiveness, profanity, bravado are all fair game, if you have established that as accepted conventions with the other participants. If you don’t know them – play it safe.




• Avoid being judgemental if you can
  This is one of the most important rules of a conversations. Focus on issues and avoid labeling tags on each other. Moment you attach a judgemental tag, the entire conversation shifts around a debate over the judgement than over the issues.




• Move some attacks to third person, or better don’t make personal attacks :
  Attack the issue not the person. If one has to bring in a person, is there a way to tweet in a third person context rather than a second person context ?




• Escalating debates are hard to exit out of. Quickly move to private conversations.
  Twitter supports a free flow of conversations with many people looking on. As a conversation gets intense, remember that we find it harder to exit a conversation gracefully due to fear of losing face. Quickly move to a private channel ie. a DM if feasible, even if it seems to all the onlookers that you seem to have left some points uncontested. Know that its a lesser of the two evils. If you can’t DM the other person, publicly request him for an email id over DM to carry the conversation offline. But please remember to make sure that you never, never, never make a DM or an email public. Unless agreed upon thats a complete No-No. There is an exception zone of it being for the greater good of public / someone else (eg someone threatening suicide or violence on some third party), and even in that case, make it non-private to only a select audience.




• Feed positive energy into the system :
  Realise that twitter is not just an information stream – it is also an energy stream. It is built to amplify and reflect the energies. Don’t, repeat do not, feed negative energy into the system. It will soon enough boomerang and hit you on the rear. If you have to make a point figure out how to make it in a manner where you are feeding positive energy into the energy stream. If you can’t figure out a way to say something positively, thats probably a cue to exit the conversation.


A couple of related posts on the topic :

• Don’t feed the negative energy monster
• Tips for Software / Programming blogging

WTF. #Fail.

Words we weren’t born knowing.

Words we didn’t know as young kids.

Words our parents didn’t teach us.

Words our teachers would’ve taken us to task for.

Words that would not endear our kids to us.

And many times we mean them even when we don’t use them.

And yet these are words we spout. As an expression of angst. As an expression of inability.  As an expression of despondency. We target current affairs, vendors, politicians, devices, legal agreements, human frailties, … etc. We target everyone but ourselves. In that we actually target no one but ourselves.

WTF and #Fail will not change the world. They are unlikely to inspire others. But they spread pessimism. They spread negativism. They encourage role models of negative expression. They are chemicals which gives us a temporary high.

Real life has great feedback mechanisms. It allows us to learn by taking some knocks. Positively or negatively, this feedback influences our wallets, our job titles, our status, our esteem in extreme cases even our relationships. The blogosphere feedback is exceptionally weak and sometimes quite flawed. In many a cases expressions that might have earned one severe negative consequences when made face to face, earns us page views and retweets.  And instead of having to deal with the aftershocks, it makes us feel like jocks.

Blogging and Microblogging is an information stream.  It is also an energy stream. It amplifies the energies pushed into it and simply throws it back at us.

Next time you tweet and/or blog, don’t shy away from criticism, emotions or even necessary debates. These can be healthy. Just ask yourself if you are feeding positive energy into the system. And so long as you are pumping in postive energy, feel free to use WTF and #Fail.  As a tweet that impressed me quite a bit said “don’t feed the negative energy monster”.

Image via Wikipedia

Seems to me there is a hierarchy of blog posts (inspired by Maslow’s hierarchy) in terms of blogging satisfaction. Read on, and let me know if it makes sense. Typically blog posts with the dominant category further along the hierarchy are likely to have elements which satisfy the earlier categories in the hierarchy as well. The classification is perhaps even applicable for tweets (though tweets simultaneously satisfying multiple categories are a little rare to come by.)

• Narrative : Diary, Journal, Things that happened, Event log etc.
  These are posts of something that happened or is about to happen. While in most cases the author simply wants to share the sequence of events, in some cases the sequence itself might be meant to trigger some thoughts, analysis in the mind of the reader. In such situations, the post is actually at a very different level than a narrative.
• Informative : How to, Top Ten Lists, Presentations
  These are perhaps the lowest on the individual expressiveness and attempt to provide a lot of value to the reader. This is probably also the most dominant category in terms of number of posts.
• Opinionated : Rants, Demands, Support, Cheer, Rage
  These are posts where the author wants to be active in either supporting or declining support for some particular incident, cause, organisation, philosophy etc. These are the posts where the author is perhaps the most expressive and emotional simultaneously. These are the posts where the author would like something different from the way things exist at the moment. My slight reservation with these posts is that while they are strong in expressiveness and can collectively be made to act as change agents, given the emotion which clouds both the author’s thought process and the readers ability to interpret the content, these posts unless they are able to elevate themelves into either of the next two categories, rank very low on reader value creation.
• Analytical : Analysis, Review, Commentaries
  These are posts which use an event, a movie, a situation and attempt to draw a few inferences from them and share them with the user. These are posts where the author manages to allow his emotions to be restrained and lets his thinking cap be quite visible. These posts take on the nature of the author attempting to present his understanding of the world by taking the dots he sees and attempting to draw the lines between them to create a picture for his reader. While there is a fair amount of individual expression, these are also the posts which focus on good value creation for the reader.
• Thought Provoking : Sorry .. can’t think of any other word to describe them
  These posts could really be about anything. They don’t aim at providing answers. Heck, they don’t even provide questions. They focus on content which require the users to come up with their own set of questions, to be answered in their own sweet time. They cause the user to think about these posts long after having moved on to other content. These posts are not directly catalysts to change, they are catalysts to a more enlightened reader. To me these are also the most fulfilling to read.

Is this classification really important ? : Thats entirely upto the blogger. But it seems to be helpful to have a good idea about it up front when you write a post, so that you can have a reasonable focus accordingly. Just like its better to know upfront, how much a blogger wants to focus on expressiveness and readership value creation before starting to compose a post.

PuneTech is 1 year old today. Birthdays and New Year days are a great time to reflect upon the year gone past, and it was a little difficult to let go of an opportunity to comment.

A community is as strong as its participants. A community is also as strong as the people who bind it together. A tech community is fed by content. A tech community is also fed by character. What I have learnt about PuneTech is that even if it is modest in attracting newer people into the fold, it does a great job of binding it together. In Navin Kabra and Amit Paranjape, and supported by many others one realises one has met a set of people who really want to bind and then grow rather than grow and then bind. Important elements for a solid foundation for a community.

In the past one year PuneTech has provided a community / platform / vehicle / opportunity / facilitation for (in no particular order):

• Increased creation and sharing of Technology related content, especially related to Pune based companies and individuals
• A watering hole for people with related interests to come together, interact and grow their interactions.
• Collaboration with other bodies of overlapping interests, most notably the Pune Open Coffee Club
• Network engagement and sustainance supporting essential infrastructural needs of a network such as event organising / sharing / reminders
• Visibility driving for participants by both writing about the community participants or allowing them to write about themselves.

One of the things that does strike about PuneTech is its freshness and its willingness to experiment, learn and retry. Its not only growing but continuously reinventing itself to stay more relevant and useful. In retrospect, a part of the the Pune Technology Community is far better served today thanks to PuneTech. Kudos to PuneTech for a great year. And while in my limited knowledge, it has been more successful than any other similarly focused effort in Pune, it could grow even faster. But what I like about it is that its growth so far is much more sustainable than it is rapid. Allowing the growth to gather more momentum while continuing to retain sustainability will require many more of us to ask ourselves how we can support PuneTech and then help providing and implementing the answers. Thats the kind of nutrition a 1 year old needs.

PuneTech just published its Comment Policy. Given its role in promoting technology usage and knowledge transfer in and outside Pune and (in my perception) to maintain a strong brand perception, this is just what the doctor ordered. Its a pretty detailed policy, but the short version is cute enough to tempt me to reproduce below :

if (the comment is not relevant to the article)
     We will delete it;
       /* take your irrelevant rambling elsewhere */

  else if (the comment is a personal attack)
     we will delete it;
       /* rude people not welcome here */

  else if (the comment has abusive language)
     we will delete it;
       /* we are trying to have a civil discussion here */

  else if (the comment exposes PuneTech to legal liability)
     we will delete it;
       /* we don't want to get sued
          that distracts from the purpose of this website
          more details below */

  else
     your comment is welcome;