Feature request for Twitter

Earlier this month, I got a user feedback survey questionnaire from Twitter in my account. Here are the 3 things I had asked for:

1. Smarter way to consume tweets in my account. If I manage to log in twice a day, I have several hundred tweets in my stream for the ~180 people I follow. If this is the volume with daily usage of twitter, I pity those following over 500 or 1000 people and accessing twitter once every few days. The current solution is for one to skip the tweets stream altogether or mute people, both of which defeat the very purpose of following others in the first place. One solution could be a smart summary of relevant tweets or a digest that brings one up to speed since the last login.

2. Better profile stats for a twitter account. While looking up the profile of an individual, I'd really like to see more than a simple listing of thousands of tweets & followers of a user. It would be nice to show an aggregation of interested categories, activity and how aligned is the person to my network. Today, its impossible to look at your own summary of historical activity level, unless you get an offline archive.

3. Smart recommendation of who to follow and what to read. Yes, there is some recommendation in place of 'you might be interested in', but that can get a lot smarter by going beyond the direct network. Bubbling up to most relevant tweets by interested categories / location / user's network would do a world of good to exploring the twitter-verse better.

In summary, context-relevant tools, content discovery features & a smarter analytics layer can make Twitter even more awesome.

Germany after Hitler - an interesting history

While visiting Bonn recently, the erstwhile capital of West Germany, I made a stop at the Museum of Contemporary History, a highly rated local attraction. The museum had free entry, but the real surprise and relief was to find an English audio guide! Perhaps because of the historical western influence for this part of the country, most boards were in English too.

The gallery entrance was setup like a rubble from the bombings of war, with signs proclaiming the allies' final push towards capturing Berlin in the Second World War. This, was the theme of this museum - to trace the history of Germany from 1945 until present day, covering all aspects of the final Nazi defeat, surrender treaty, reconstruction efforts by the victors, division of Germany and the eventual unification, while also abundantly covering the economy, culture and people aspects of the past 70 years. I thoroughly enjoyed the museum, spent my entire day there, learning quite a bit about these oft-missed aspects. 

Enough has been written about the world war, Nazi atrocities and the various battles, but the trials and tribulations of picking up a country that was all but destroyed in a major war, and tracing the path of its recovery back to world dominance is a commendable topic that needs detailing. Germany is promoting this museum to let its people and tourists learn this checkered past, and it was heartening to see a lot of families and locals spending time educating their kids on their national history!

Collection of interesting pictures & cartoons

Here, I share some of my favorite pictures & brilliant cartoons split across 3 key phases of this history:

1. Culmination of WWII and the Nazi defeat

This shows the final days of war & internal deep discontent on Nazi rule. Actual bomb shells, bricks and recovered household items are used to recreate real war scenes, combined with posters of the joint rule established under Soviet-US-UK-France. Heart-wrenching is the gallery on millions of missing civilians & the re-tracing efforts. The actual TV clippings of orphaned kids shown on TV, in an effort to trace the parents is poignant, where most kids are so young that they just smile innocently at the camera.

Entrance with actual vehicles used..	Partial structures built with actual bricks
...and a lot of war rubble & bomb shells	Map with occupation areas after Nazi defeat

2. Germany's Division & twin diverging paths of reconstruction

The stark contrast in the reconstruction efforts of West & East Germany under the US and Soviet rules is highlighted. Interesting stories about the controversial Marshal plan, Candy bombers, rigged elections and historic events of nation building are covered through excellent articles, videos & samples. The events leading up to the Berlin wall and massive casualties suffered therein are captured too.

Cartoon showing different approach of US & USSR	Germany's Rulers
Creative setup of 2 zones showing conditions in the East & West	Cartoon on policies

Cartoon shows East Germany starving & isolated	Powerful cartoon on Hitler vs Stalin

The Berlin wall & the Geographic division

3. Socio-economic progress, Economic miracle and resurgence of a unified Germany

This is a heart-warming section on setting up of a social market economy and the Economic miracle led by German scientific progress & brand building - Beetle, Braun, Zeiss lenses, Adler typewriters, Steiff toys, Bayer pharma and hundred others are shown with earliest products. The impact of reconstruction on culture and everyday life is tracked through changing nature of day-to-day objects & actual posters. And yes, there is also a separate gallery celebrating Germany's miraculous 1954 Soccer world cup triumph!

Brilliant cartoon on lowering of post-war restrictions for Germany

Early products of the brands that made Germany..	Why Balance of Trade?

Artifacts on scientific progress..	Interesting twist in the 'logo' tale

My first time lapse video: Super Moon

Fascinated by some travel time lapse videos I had come across earlier, I was quite excited to discover an android app, Framelapse that lets you shoot one. Luckily, the first video I shot was that of the Super Moon, on same day as the rare celestial event of Super Blood Moon. With some basic processing and music mixing (music courtesy Longzijun), here is the video:

Super Blood Moon - a Timelapse Video from Ganes Kesari on Vimeo.

Later today, the rare blood moon will become visible during the eclipse, only in a few countries. Look forward to see some pictures, and perhaps a time lapse video as well.

Great Ideas failed by poor Execution: the Helmet Dilemma

Couple of weeks back, the Telangana Regional Transport Authority (RTA) made it mandatory to purchase helmets before your 2-wheelers can get registered. Definitely a well intentioned move to promote road safety. However, the roll-out and execution of this plan has been very poorly managed.

Waiting in the RTA office with all documents ready to register my two-wheeler, it was a nightmare to see the local official walk into office and past a 'new circular' that was active with immediate effect. This mandated all 2-wheelers to be sold with a helmet, and hence all registration documents had to furnish this new bill. Vehicle Showrooms & agents were clueless about this and people scrambled to comply by getting their invoice bills re-printed, in case they had already bought a helmet with the vehicle. What should have been a straightforward 30-minute registration process wasted over half a day in the confusion, for most people who were office-goers.

Interestingly, the Indian 'jugaad' fix-it-all adapts fastest to such bureaucracy and responds with amazing alacrity. In hardly a couple of hours, the agents had modified their 'rate card' to include this new 'product' to make some more money:

Registration without license :    Rs. 500  

Registration without helmet : + Rs. 300

What should have resulted in more people buying helmets and improving adoption, ended up as a money-making scheme for agents and local officials. Perhaps, it calls for a lot more than plain 'noble intention' to do some public good.

Information explosion: Can someone save the mobile users?

There is an explosion of digital content today. With mobile phones turning into the primary mode of consumption for a majority, there is an ever-great reach and availability of users to consume all this content. One has a continuous stream of messages on Whatsapp, Facebook newsfeeds, Twitter updates, RSS reader feeds and the periodic pushes from each of the apps installed. 

This reach and availability of people creates a feedback loop and converts this into a vicious cycle, to end up in creation of even more content and updates. The content creation has also been democratized, with almost no entry barrier for anyone to create and broadcast stuff. 

While there are some good aspects around this, content overload is an undesirable effect. Its a nightmare to stay on top of the updates, let along manage all of this. There are enough parallels of this with the Web 1.0 days, when there was a similar explosion of content online for the first time, albeit as a one-way channel from broadcasting sources - websites, media agencies & other content creation companies. It took several years and a Google to really organize the information to a manageable (and searchable) extent. 

In my opinion, the need of the hour is a similar aggregation and sorting interface, this time only at a personalized level, embedded in each of our mobile phones. How nice would it be if there were a service that automatically plugged into all the other apps and feeds to aggregate all inputs, organize them by category, sort out the spam (or irrelevant content), prioritize the feeds (a la Google Priority Inbox) and let one consume them in a sane and civilized manner! With the level of authorization that most apps already demand (access to contacts, messages, calls, location etc), privacy would be least of concerns and none would bat an eyelid before giving full access to such an app or service (yet again!). 

At such a deep level of embedding and engagement with consumers, and the universal access that they can have to all worthy sources of content, the revenue opportunity for a company that cracks this problem could be immense. This could become the launch pad for one's activities on the mobile, though much smarter and integrated than today's dumb mobile notification panel. Are the mobile OS players (Android / iOS?) already on it, or is this opportunity eyed by some of the large search, content distribution or mobile app companies (Google / Facebook)? This, sure will be an interesting space to watch!

15 countries in 4 minutes: a time-lapse video

I recently came across this travel video on Tripoto. Though I setup Tripoto app on my mobile around the time I decided to go backpacking, I have hardly used it after that. However, the app has been regularly pushing interesting content once every few days, with breathtaking pictures and interesting, short travel diaries.

This was one such nice post, and this was the first time-lapse video I have seen in a while. The concept and execution is cool, while the condensing of almost a year's travel into a 4-minute video of 15 countries serves as a nice trailer for any aspiring traveler. With the first video going viral, the author has made a second one with 17 more countries, and that's the second video below. Take a look.

Celebrating our Independence

Wishing everyone a Happy 69th Independence Day!

Its always a nice feeling to participate in the multiple Independence day themed celebrations - with family at home, with neighbours in the community, with colleagues in office and also virtually in the digital world. In Gramener's fifth year of celebrating the Independence day, we had a fun time in the office and here is a group picture of the Hyderabad team amidst the festivities.