Though the user interface is terrible, the site contains a lot of resources which are free and also contains demos and videos as well. Also came Cloudera in the HN Comments. Even they have a few nice training resources. http://www.cloudera.com/resources/training/.

This is now added to my ever expanding list of resources. I hope to go through a few of their lessons/courses when I find time. Meanwhile, I hope they work on improving the UI and offer their users a better on-site experience.

They have outlined a idea called the Generation Flux which it believes are people who are able to thrive in such a scenario. These are the people who embrace instability and are not afraid to learn new things and adapt themselves. Being future focused is one of the traits of this so called Generation Flux and trying to replicate the past is a sign of vulnerability.

There are a lot of things one can learn from the so called Generation Flux. One of the major things that we can and should try to instill in ourselves is to keep learning new skills. According to GenFluxer danah boyd*, being able to live on one set of skills over a career is not realistic. Raina Kumra, another of the Gen Flux says that she is a ‘skill hoarder’. She says, “You keep throwing things into your backpack, and eventually you’ll have everything in your tool kit.”

Other important skill is to be able to manage information. “To manage large amounts of information is super important,” says Baratunde Thurston. “And the ability to tell a story is more important than ever. Coalition building is an important skill, the ability to connect. Flexibility of skills leads to flexibility of options. To see what you can’t see coming, you’ve got to embrace larger principles.”

According to boyd*, Kumra and other gen fluxers, there is no fixed path, no one to point your way. There is no role model. Anything settled is vulnerable. The article comes back to the theory of natural selection outlined by Darwin -  ”It is not the strongest of the species that survives; nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change.”

*She doesn’t use capital letters in her name

Internet is driven by content creation and it is one of the prime reasons for the staggering growth of internet startups. Photographs, Videos, Podcasts, Designs, Blogs everything is content. Most of the websites rely on the content created by its users and try to enhance how others interact with it. Twitter’s Tweets – content. Facebook status update – content. Flickr photo upload – content. Blog post – content. Email – content.

I for my part have been contributing a little content once in a while. Either through one of the rare blog posts here or through tweets or through comments etc on various blogs that I read regularly.  I also regularly take photos when I travel. Though the photos are not equal to that of a pro, it serves its purpose of preserving memories and capturing the fun of the moment.

So when I came across the blog post about Kiruba’s experiment of writing 500 words before 9AM, I was influenced. I too decided to try out the experiment. I hope to write everyday. But not necessarily before 9. I’m not exactly a morning person (with the exception during trekking when I get up before sunrise to enjoy the feeling). With greater quantity it would be easy to improve on quality. So I will write. It can be a blog post here or an entry in my personal online diary, Oh Life or probably a set of tweets or some or all of them.

Both articles are though provoking and definitely worth reading. Each of them have valid points. Clay Shirky says that the digital revolution is in fact increasing the intellectual range of the society. The Net also is playing a very important part in restoring reading and writing as the central activities of our culture. As for the funny videos, spam and other perennial distractions, Shirky says that whenever media becomes more abundant, the quality falls and increase in quality will happen gradually as we bring in more controls. According to him, in the print media, we had erotic novels coming up over 100 years before the first scientific journals.

One point that I having strong feelings about is where Shirky says that:

“Reading is an unnatural act; Literate societies become literate by investing extraordinary resources, every year, training children to read. Now it’s our turn to figure out what response we need to shape our use of digital tools.”

Nicholas Carr also has some very valid points on his side of the arguments. He focuses on the division of attention due to the internet affects our ability to focus the mind and sustain concentration. It also is not limited to the time when we are using our digital devices. It also changes the habits of our mind adapting to the use of technology. He says that to read a book is to practice an unnatural process of thought. Reading a long sequence of pages helps us develop a rare kind of mental discipline. It is this control, this mental discipline, that we are at risk of losing as we spend ever more time scanning and skimming online.

Rather than letting the medium take control, we should be in control. Of course, it is true that we have far more distractions than what our parents or grandparents had. It is our responsibility to recognize that and assert that control over the medium.

You should definitely read both articles if you haven’t already read them.

That is when I realized that while getting the site up from the server error, I had deleted most of the plugins because one of them had been causing the problem I didn’t know which one. And at that time, I had also deleted the Akismet plugin. It was the one, which was protecting me from thousands of spam comments all these days. It had come preinstalled with all versions of WordPress shipped after 2.0. I didn’t actually realize its importance until it was gone. Akismet has premium plans as well as free plans. If you are running a small business blog or something that doesn’t run on WordPress, Akismet is a definitely a service worth paying for.

Google, in their attempt to integrate Reader with their infant social network Google+, have killed that. They have totally removed the entire setup of following others and the Reader specific ‘share’ button. If I find something interesting, I can only share it on Google+, which I rarely use. Moreover, there is a big difference between sharing on Reader and Google+. When I am in a mood to read, I wouldn’t want to wade through zillions of crappy status updates.

And it seems Google just doesn’t care. Reader is going to stay like this and it wants people-who-don’t-like-it to move on.

In all, the new redesigned Google Reader is a big #Fail. It is now just a plain feed reader but a good one at that. Despite all this, I don’t think I’ll move on because I don’t think there is a better feed reader in the market yet.

Like every year, last year too I made a decision to write frequent posts on this blog. And as it always happens, I wrote just over 20 posts in the entire year. The pattern was something like 5 in Jan, 4 in Feb, 3 in Mar and the frequency kept decreasing. Not that am busy. Just that am lazy. Can’t do much about it now though. (But there is indeed the option of making new posts appear as if they were publish in the past).

I even ambitiously set off to create a new blog in a couple of specific niches. Both have been temporarily shelved due to lack of initiative on my part. Both are in fact great opportunities that I need to utilize. My resolution for 2011 would in fact be to make the best out of everything in the year ahead and to snatch opportunities as they come.

I’d like to keep this ‘fire’ burning and would like to see the idea grow. It would be great to see the idea widely accepted and embraced by fellow alumni. It will add a significant web presence to RECAL, NIT Trichy’s Alumni Association.

Why Twitter?

Twitter is a medium using which one can gain access to new people, new information and new networks. Unlike Facebook, Twitter is an open medium, and hence helps you reach ‘far beyond your circle of friends’.. But there is a huge barrier to entry for those who aren’t familiar with Twitter, since it is a bit harder to get your arms around at first.

The usefulness of Twitter is not readily as obvious to some people as Facebook; although it may be more addictive once you get the hang of Tweeting; you get more immediate responses and it seems to live somewhere between the worlds of email, instant messaging and blogging.

Though I would love to see alumni from the 45 odd batches of NIT Trichy, this would be better applicable to younger alumni.

Alumni can post their networking need to twitter, the same way they might use LinkedIn, but in a broader, more casual way. Tweets are search-able, and can be tagged for others’ benefit.It is open for all and hence would be an awesome tool to connect with other alumni.

How it Works?

It is as simple as it can get.

Join Twitter and start tweeting about NITTrichy with #NITTrichy hashtag. Listen to the conversation that is already happening. Give your inputs. DOT

• Any discussion about NIT Trichy and things happening there would be tagged with the hashtag #NITTrichy by users
• Anyone can ‘listen’ to the twitter chatter by searching for #NITTrichy on Twitter search or Google Updates.
• ‘Spread the Word’ -Get more alumni aware of the existence of such a hashtag and the benefits of a virtual meet up. Get more people to join the chatter on twitter. This can be done by the word-of-mouth approach, giving information at Alumni meetings.
• As Prakash Murty suggested, we can use additional or modified hashtags for specific events. For eg, the hashtag #NITTConvo was used for Live-Tweeting during NIT Trichy’s Convocation on 9th Oct 2010.

Benefits?

‘It is not what you know, but who you know.’ This twitter network would accentuate the strength of RECAL. It helps you connect with alumni of NITT who passed out long before you entered college. Being active on Twitter #NITTrichy, gives you easy access to a good range of alumni info, wherever you are in the world, and continuing support with career and personal development.

This Twitter network would also be beneficial for non-NITTians who would like to know more about the institute. Taking advantage of an alumni network should start before you join the institute. School students can interact with current students and alumni of the institute to know more about AIEEE, admissions and so on.

How to take it forward?

We need some active volunteers who can take the initiative to bring awareness about the virtual meet to alumni groups. There are quite a few people who have twitter accounts but aren’t active. The first step would be to bring them back and get them involved in #NITTrichy.

Another step that would be simultaneously be started off is creating a flutter on facebook. Since quite a few of the recent alumni are active on it, we can get the news out on facebook and create some hype about the meet on twitter.

Then, we can contact the various alumni chapters of RECAL and send them details about the meet and seek their help in getting us connected with other alumni. We can have a mailer campaign to send information about the meet to reach alumni.

For now, you can give me links to some twitter lists with a bunch of alumni. (Like this one for eg – http://twitter.com/a4arvind/nitt2006-2010 )

What do you think?

What are your expectations from such a alumni network on twitter? How to you suggest we promote the network to other alumni? If you have any suggestions feel free to leave a comment.

Whenever I used Firefox, it didn’t take more than 15-20 minutes for the CPU usage to peak, eventually hanging the browser, making me reload the page again. Believe me, with painfully slow internet connections its an awful experience. Gradually the browser began to consume more and more memory and became slower and slower. About a year ago I didn’t have much of a choice other than venting out my feelings, because Chrome was at its infant stages and I surely didn’t want to return to IE.

After a few months, Chrome came along as a light, super-fast and powerful browser with all its extensions and features. The choice was simple. Here are some reasons why I chose Chrome-

Startup time – Chrome is much much faster wrt to the startup time. While it takes about 7-8 seconds on Firefox, its just a fraction of the time on Chrome. Its blazing fast.

Each Tab is a different Process – Some sites contain a lot of JavaScript, CSS and AJAX. In Firefox, when such sites open, it freezes all the other tabs. For a user like me who has lots of tabs open simulatneously it could be really troublesome. Chrome resolves this making making each tab run as a separate process.  This ensures that one tab doesn’t hang the others. Chrome even has its own Task Manager which you can access by Shift+Esc. Also see some stats by typing about:memory on the Omnibox.

Clean and Simple with the Omnibox – The Address bar at the top often called as the Omnibox doubles up as a search box. This conserves much real estate and makes the browser look cooler and convenient.

No Status Bar – Until Chrome, I had been used to the status bar. But just by it not being present in Chrome I realized that it was just an useless addition which I never really needed. This too conserves much real estate.

Application shortcuts – Google Chrome enables me to create shortcuts for most of my frequently used web applications. This too helped me in conserving precious loading time.

I have been using Firefox for so long that I won’t hate it. My loyalties might have changed but I still have feelings and the desire to use Firefox. I would love to see some overhauls and expect the browser to bounce back. I’d be willing to shift to Firefox if they are able to attract me with powerful features.

PS : I’ve just started using Firefox 4 beta 3. I’m yet to reach my conclusion of the latest version. Hoping that it turns out to be good.

Any social network starts becoming interesting and useful only after it has gained a significant user base.  And twitter started gaining traction in 2008. A few of college buddies like @a4arvind and @sathyaphoenix joined twitter. Even in 2008 I just used the site for chatting with my friends about random stuff. It was like a substitute for IM clients. But I felt the features like tagging someone using @ very useful in linking to others’  profiles. I felt it could also be pretty useful for sending info to a group of friends. But the harder part was convincing friends to join twitter. I tried a bit but failed badly. Still I occasionally used twitter for updating my status during vacation and other holidays.

Around mid-2009, Twitter started becoming more interesting due to its explosive growth. It got a lot of media coverage and a lot of celebrities started using the service. And hence general public too started adopting it. A lot of my college buddies too started using it. Eventually I migrated from the old handle to the present one that is @alagappanr. Then I got the opportunity to interact with interesting people and follow them. I started using the service more often. Though I sticked to the web interface most of the time I also experimented with a few twitter clients.

Gradually twitter was being used for different purposes than what it was originally intended for. It began to be used a major real-time news source. As a influential PR/Marketing tool. As a tool to track events. As a major knowledge source. As a way to stay connected with friends 24×7. As a tool for fun. It was so overwhelming that Twitter changed its standard question from ‘What are you doing?’ to ‘What’s Happening?’.

In the month of June in 2009 I attended Twitter Unconference in Chennai – Buzz140. It has some interesting presentations on what twitter could be used for etc etc. It was wonderfully hosted by Kiruba and Co. I got hooked to the service ever since. I have been tweeting regularly and have connected with quite a few people.

As far as the interface used is concerned I have been using the web interface predominantly. I find it simple and easy to use. Apart from that I use/used a number of services like Echofon, TweetDeck, HootSuite, SMSTweets, TwitterSMS etc. Twitter through SMS is one feature that I guess is the most useful.

As I was writing this post I found a site called MyTweet16 where you can get your first 16 tweets. It was nostalgic. My first tweet was about Orkut. Orkut is now dead for me.

Though I am still a small user with a small following, I guess I am more connected with the internet than ever before. I guess just existing on a service is not a big achievement. There is a long way to go for me to extract the maximum out of twitter.

[Find out When you joined twitter at www.whendidyoujointwitter.com] [Follow me at www.twitter.com/alagappanr]