Hats off to Facebook

When was the last time you logged on to Facebook?  Yesterday?  In the morning?  Or is your browser home page set to Facebook, and your internet surfing does not start until you go through your Facebook news feed?

Although I don't like to admit it, I have become a Facebook junkie of sort.  Granted that I have to be on Facebook for work (such is the life of a guy whose job title has 'social' in it), I have grown used to instant feedback that I get from friends all over the world.

Problem with Google's new strategy

As the readers of my blog will know, I love Google products.  I cannot imagine a day without Google search.  It has become the way I interface with Internet.  Start typing keywords right on Google Chrome browser.  Google gives me all the results that I can possibly look for page after page, and plus some more on the top as advertisements.  For the service that Google provided, this daily reminder of Google surfacing winners of keyword bidding contest right on my result page, it seemed fair.  I was able to tune out for the most part the bit of lost real estate space on my monitor.

Then I saw the Google's new privacy notice.  Along with that, I found out that they will combine all information they have been collecting from YouTube to Google+ and Blogger to create master information of who I really am.  Ok, Google is not interested in who I am, but everything else that I can possibly do on the web through their service.  And there are many.

First I log in to Google Mail to see if there are new mails from over night, quickly browsing the alerts that I set up.  Then open another tab to see my blog activities and to see if I'm seeing any interesting trend in incoming visits.  Then I occasionally open Google Map to get my latest commute update, and search interesting articles that I see from my morning papers.  I do all these without really thinking about if someone out there is piecing all these information together to find out what I've been doing day in and day out, and what I am likely to do next day and next week.

Clarifying Sheryl Sandberg on three trends

First a food for thoughts from Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook.  She recently spoke at Digital-LIfe-Design  Conference about three trends driving social media.  It's worth a watch:

Twitter's tough balancing act

Twitter users everywhere are reacting to the news, and I've read several articles taking stance on the latest decision by Twitter.  They ranged from good to really bad, and you can find plenty of examples a last couple of days.  After sleeping on Twitter censorship announcement, I wanted to share a few more perspectives on the news.

Tweet withheld

Yesterday Twitter announced on its blog that they will start implementing selective tweet censoring based on geographical location.

Idea is to hide certain tweets in the requested country "only when required to do so in response to what we [Twitter] believe to be a valid and applicable legal request."

From their blog announcement, Twitter suggests that they are implementing this tweet "withholding" to meet legal requirements such as copyright infringement.  But it's not clear whether they will start censoring tweets based on government's request.  What if Syrian government requests Twitter to block all tweets that are related to anti-government movement?  Will Twitter apply their censoring to all regimes' requests?

It's a very slippery slope.  By setting up the precedence of censorship, Twitter will lose user's confidence as the global microblogging media that helped bring about 2011 Arab Spring.

Update 10:43PM PST 1/28: I've slept on this topic, and shared a few perspectives on Twitter's censorship announcement.  You can read them here.

A very thin line between bravery and foolishness

I wanted to share one story that I heard from NPR Saturday Weekend Edition.  It was a story about a team of three explorers led by a Swedish man S.A. Andree.  In the late 19th century, Andree had this novel idea of traveling to the North Pole using hot air balloon.  He devised this special mechanism to control balloon's navigation using heavy ropes, and calculated that he can reach the North Pole within 60 hours considering winds and weather patterns.

It's the user (YOU), stupid

It's been about 20 months since I said yes to this product management role.  Earlier I spent my time thinking about how to write better code, how to coordinate development team, and how to scale the product in terms of response time and through put as individual developer to development manager role.