Poker Pursuit

Poker. During the final few months of my college this game was wildly popular and everywhere in the hostel you could see people sitting with a bunch of playing cards in their hands. Caught up with the campus recruitment season, I missed out the poker wave.

There were a couple of rooms in the hostel where you get to watch a poker game 24×7. A few guys even lived primarily off poker. I often used spend sometime in those rooms trying to get a grasp of what the fuss was all about. Occasionally I joined them, whenever it wasn’t real money that was at stake. Though I didn’t learn much there, I learnt more about it online.

Then there was this second poker wave on Facebook. It was because of yet another popular game of Zynga apart from FarmVille and Mafia Wars. Back then I used to get like 20 requests to join Texas HoldEm Poker everyday. This time I did accept those requests and spent quite sometime playing online. But still it was never equal to the fun that comes from playing it at a poker table with your friends.

Though I am considerably good at the game now, I can never be too sure unless I play more often. There truly is no replacement for real life experience. Wish I was back at college when we had ‘more time’ on our hands. Probably if I get a good gang here in Chennai to play on the weekend’s I’ll do it. Or probably I got to get back to college again.

Surveys!

Recently a friend at IIM B posted on her Facebook wall a link to a survey on Android phones. My eyes lighted up on seeing the word Android and being an Android user I was tempted to click on it.

It was a research survey about smartphones in general and asked us to compare different operating systems to each other and give appropriate ratings. The wildfire is my first smartphone and I haven’t actually used the iphone or any blackberry device. So I gave ratings based on what I had read at sites like appstorm and mashable.

My feelings about the survey was that it had a quite misleading title. Something on the lines of ‘Smartphones Survey’ would have been more apt. Secondly, they hadn’t included a brief summary about what the survey was about. Till the end of the survey I was expecting sometimg more specific to android but it didn’t have any. In the end, I submitted the survey a bit disappointed.

Surveys conducted by my office are even more amusing. Once they tried a new caterer for lunch and wanted to get the opinion of all employees about this caterer. The questions that they had was “Do you like the food provided by the new caterer?” and “Do you wish to continue with them?”. And most of us intentionally answered that the food was bad but we still wanted to continue with them. At times they come up with much more arbit questions and equally arbit answers.

They use an open source tool called “LimeSurvey“. That eventually led me to find more such tools. A few such interesting tools that I found are SurveyMonkey, PollDaddy, SurveyGizmo etc. Some of these are paid plans. And some like Survey Gizmo offer student plans which was used by my friend for that ‘Android’ survey. And more recently I found a couple of sites like GoPollGo and iQpoll.

And now Facebook has come up with their own Question-Answer system which can also be used for creating polls. And of course we can see Facebook use its gigantic user base to its advantage and try to drive traffic with arbit questions. The most recent poll that I saw was created by my bro asking his friends whether he should take bath or not?

While very few of these polls will be useful a large part of them will be random and will continue to be so.

My Three Years on Twitter

On the 13th of August this year, my twitter account celebrated its third anniversary. I joined Twitter when it was in its nascent stages in 2007. I had heard about the site where you can share stuff regarding What you were doing at a particular time. I thought of checking it out and registered myself with the handle alagappan_nitt. At first I didn’t fully understand the need for sharing my current status with strangers. And I didn’t have any followers or any interesting people to follow. I tweeted once and disappeared. I never used it for another 8 months or so.

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]

The Change

Its hard to imagine that barely ten years ago we didn’t have any Wikipedia, Facebook, YouTube,  iPhone or even a phone for that matter. Much of the decade has been shaped by the internet and the next decade too will see the same sort of enormous change.

It was in 2001 when we got our first phone. A landline phone connection for which we had to wait for weeks. Within the next few years we have had a much greater number of mobile phones. Computers and other gadgets have become essential. Times are changing. And we got keep up with the speed at which everything is happening.

What people generally consider is that change will occur at the same pace it happened. Technology changes exponentially. There is a great pace at which everything grows now and what happened in the first decade of the millenium might happen in just a few years.

The rate of adopting new ideas is doubling each day. Both biology and technology are similar. They are both evolutionary processes.  They create a capability and use that capability to bring on the next stage. With better interaction and communication this growth is bound to accelerate.

It was barely a few years ago when I first sent an e-mail. Now mail, instant messages etc are a part of life. A few days ago I made a list of the trends which I’d like to see in the year 2010. These are impending changes. Even if they don’t occur in 2010, they eventually will…

Tech Trends I’d like to see in 2010

There are quite a few things which I’d like to see happening in the year 2010, when it comes to gadgets, computers and the Internet. A few of these can also seem as if I’m expecting too much. But at the pace everything is happening, I’d say nothing is impossible.

• E-Commerce – Internet can thrive if its users are able to make money out of it. Facilities similar to Google’s Adsense and Adwords will become more prominent.
• mCommerce – Mobile Payment avenues like Airtel’s mChek Reliance’s mPay are already present and I guess in 2010 these will become more effective and useful.
• Online Retail – This is one feature which is yet to create a buzz in India. But I guess 2010 has a lot in store for online retail. Currently sites like flipkart.com are available in India for purchase of books.
• Videos and Internet TV – There’ll be a huge rise in videos created and circulated throughout the internet. Movies, TV Programmes and Soundtracks made specially for Internet audiences will be in vogue.
• Social Network and APIs – 2009 saw a huge rise in social network users and applications centered around these networks. Apps made for mobile devices will see a steep rise with smartphones combined with their App Stores.
• Real-Time Communication and Collaboration -Google Wave and Twitter are already reducing the time barrier which used to exist. With more apps and features available in the future, real-time communication and collaboration would become more easier and relevant.
• Smartbooks – A device falling between smartphones and netbooks. To be sold through mobile operators, these will be of huge use to all users. Emergence of Smartbooks might even kill the entire netbooks category.
• Mobile Operator Wars – Once Mobile Number Portability is available in India it’ll create huge price wars between mobile operators thereby benefiting users.
• Storage – Wider usage of Flash Drives and other solid state drives would be seen. Availability of these storage devices at an affordable level would probably mean the death of existing rotating drives like CDs and DVDs.

Update : One more feature I’ve always wanted. I hope this becomes feasible in 2010.

• Status Updates to the Caller on mobile phones – Whenever someone calls me, they either hear the boring ring or some song as a caller tune. Instead I’d like some feature through which I can tell my status to my callers.

Update – After 3 months.

I’ve been neglecting my supposedly ‘new’ blog for such a long time that Google still ranks my old blogspot blog ahead of the new one. The reason for the neglect might have been because of my busy schedule throughout the semester and may also be because I’ve been posting regularly at my twitter profile – @alagappanr and my facebook profile = fb/alagappanr.

My blog was crying for some fresh content. So I guess its time I start posting content on this new blog and get its ‘page rank’ up.

So by the time I’m typing this post 7 semesters of my college life are over and I’m now just a few months away from being a full engineer. For all those curious guys who want to know about NITT Placements – I’m not yet placed and I don’t intend to talk about it here.

In the past few months hundreds of things happened and that includes me writing my CAT Exam, The Great Chennai Run, a trip to Ooty+Coonoor, supposedly an agitation against the college mess, watching all seasons of 24 and TBBT, reading a lot of books among other stuff. I just feel this semester could have been a lot better and I hope the next one is.