Getting people to use the staircase than the escalator

Getting people to throw into the garbage bin

Getting people to iron their clothes

“Ironing clothes can be a boring task and getting the creases removed from your clothes perfectly is next to impossible. Now all you need to do is place your shirt on a customized iron board with sensors. You need to define the task. What is to be ironed? Shirt, trouser etc. The board defines your play area with lights depending on your selection. Creases are highlighted. Place the mini road roller iron on the shirt, sit back and let the fun begin. With a remote control you need to guide the road roller around the highlighted creases. If you move out of your play area, you lose points. If you get all the creases sorted in quick time you gain points.”

Getting children to clean their rooms

So what?

I hope to keep this inspiration in mind whenever I’m building products for others to use.

P.S. Go vote for the best entries before January 15, 2010!

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There was this guy who had come in for interviews for a technical role. He passed all the tech interviews with flying colors, the team liked his personality and felt he would fit in well, and the manager was all smiles. In the last HR-style round with the group head, he was informed that the team works on products that are completely owned by the Bangalore-based group and that there won’t be any travel to USA. The guy was taken aback. He told the group head “Sir, please let me go to USA for just one day. If I have a USA stamp in my passport, I will get one crore dowry.”

Needless to say, the guy was not offered a job.

I’m sure you can draw your own lessons and observations from this incident, because it will come into context below, about a discussion we’ve been having on Twitter. It all started with @debabrata who read my previous blog post on the magic of foss.in and asked:

why this ‘5 years limit’ applies to Indian software pro ? In other countries people are happy being programmer after 20 years .

I asked the tweeps for their opinions, and it got very interesting.

@cruisemaniac said: society defined age to get married and settle down = ~27 = 22+5 failing which u’re an outcast! and: also, post that age, ur risk apetite goes down due to family and other commitments…

to which:

@HJ91 said: True. Very true. Outcast is the right word, and its sad. Outcast. Insulting, hurting and pathetic.

Wow, this feeling runs deep.

so I asked:

You mean risk appetite or time commitment? … how does risk appetite relate to interest in coding?

And the replies came pouring in:

@mixdev: One of the reasons why brilliant people end up being (just) tell-me-whatto-do-n-leave-me-alone software engineers

@cruisemaniac: I’d say both… U cant risk a new tech and venture 4 fear of financial security… U want tat cozy safe zone and pay packet.

@cruisemaniac: time is a big costly commodity 4 us… we indians cant afford to spend it at our will with spouses and children at home…

@mallipeddi: It’s very hard to keep getting bigger paychecks yr after yr if you’re a 30 yr old coder. You’re expected to become a mgr/MBA

@abhinav: I believe the reason is our society. We tie success to degrees, and later, more ppl you manage more successful you are.

@abhinav: Where in western societies your idea fails, here it is you who have failed! Our society doesnt appreciate risk takers

@abhinav: Yes, more money, higher status, easy life. And most importantly, more dowry!

@mixdev: Because our goals are set by the society & achieving them also in their control. You get bored faster.

@debabrata: I guess to the great extent our society dictates us what we want to be unlike the west

I found it surprising that the situation why people cannot remain coders in India is almost the same as why people want to become entrepreneurs! It’s like this: The passion for coding will remain only when you’re doing cool and interesting stuff. But big companies (at least in India) want only stability which implies boring tedious jobs with standard languages and libraries. There is no room for experimentation. So the coder will have to move to a smaller company or a startup if he/she wants to continue to like coding (I’m ignoring the case of research laboratories for obvious reasons of numbers).

But moving to a smaller company or startup is, by definition, not encouraged. As @abhinav mentioned, there is societal pressure for more money, higher status, fancier cars and bigger houses. There is nothing wrong with wanting this, but don’t force it on other people! Alas, it is hard to reason regarding this. I remember having a long argument with an uncle of mine, he was, hmm, “strongly” suggesting that I buy a car and I reasoned out why it makes no sense (after all, most peers of mine use the car only for weekend drives, not for everyday commute) but it fell on deaf ears.

So I’m conflicted here: Are there not enough people who are actually interested in coding, or is it that the interested people are being peer-pressurized into “moving up” into managerial roles and hence lose touch with coding? Or are we completely off the mark here?

Update 1: As suggested by Peter, read this entry tited “Stuck in Code” by Ravi Mohan for his tale on this topic.

Update 2: A related article in NYTimes recently titled “In India, Anxiety Over the Slow Pace of Innovation”

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Post tags: fossdotin, twitter

The Good

Attending foss.in/2009 felt great for me because I took comfort in the fact that there are still people out there who are passionate about code and passionate about software. That is becoming rarer and rarer off late. I think it’s the “5 year limit” that I have observed in batchmates, most of them don’t want to code any more, and have moved on to so many other fields. While that is okay, the problem is that it has become a fashion to dis IT and software field.

Another factor was that everything is in the cloud and everything is a website these days, so does open source as a process matter anymore? First of all, the applications are not open source and even if we have the code (rare situation), you and I can’t fix the application/website unless you host it yourself.

But the foss.in community made me remember the joy of coding and joy of hacking.

Kudos to Team Foss.in for making the only community event and only IT event that is worth attending. It was fantastic to see how the concept of workouts had just taken off. And everyone’s been saying that all the keynotes have been fantastic.

In case you are wondering, I’m not the only one who was so enthralled by the event, for example:

See Lakshman’s writeup on the same. And so on.

Bottom line? Shut up and hack!

The Bad

Will miss the direction of Atul Chitnis.

What was missing

What I felt was missing is a discussion on the state of the art of software in each field, not just specific PoTDs. And I think this is more of a community perspective rather than the organizers’ perspective — organizers just provide the platform, community provides the content, as Atul keeps reminding us.

For example, consider my pet topic, the state of NoSQL databases – what’s good, what’s not, is it strange or expected that so many of them have come up in the last 1-2 years and all of them are open source (or at least the ones that we hear of). Taking it a step further, how it affects other fields of software. I’ve attempted to ask this before in a session at barcamp on whether webapp frameworks will adapt to NoSQL.

Similarly, what is the future of compilers, will LLVM + clang replace GCC (as @artagnon was speculating)? Will WebKit and V8 take over the world and leave Mozilla + Tracemonkey behind? Why are there so few projects using AGPL? What does it take to get full database dumps out of Wikipedia ? Will open source phones never take off? How does Eucalyptus help have an alternative with EC2? How does appscale help have an alternative to GAE? And so on.

In toto, I think there are three parts to this and I believe only the third part of which is done well already by the community and organizers: (1) what are the different fields and layers of software, (2) what is the state of the art of open source software in those fields, (3) getting people started and involved. I feel that only when we think on these lines, we will achieve Atul’s stated vision of “open source being the mainstream, proprietary software being the special case”*.

Thoughts?

* No flamewars please. I believe that the world will be better off by having all the infrastructure as open source software and having only the business logic / trade secrets as the proprietary part. At each stage of evolution of software, the stack grows higher, and the infrastructure/open source stack can grow higher along with it. For example, Robot Open Source and the Hadoop umbrella.

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Post tags: fossdotin

Note that the problems listed on the site is not for testing your algorithm skills, there are many sites for that already.

This list was inspired by repeated requests and suggestions from readers of A Byte of Python for homework problems at the end of each chapter to exercise the skills they have just learned. So I thought why not make it applicable to any language and multiple programming skill levels. And it’s a good topic that can be collaboratively worked on with the programming community, à la Stack Overflow.

All the content will be licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 India License so that anybody can reuse this content, especially in classroom situations.

I also had my own specific goals when implementing this side project:

1. Solve the lack of “homework problems” for people to exercise their programming skills, especially in the context of learning a new programming language.
   • I am not trying to replace existing lists but rather focus on making the reader active (providing exercise problems) than letting him/her be passive (reading code listings).
2. Learn how to do website layouts, specifically how to use YUI Grids CSS.
3. Learn how to pick colors for website design; ColorCombos turned out to be useful.
4. Learn to use Google App Engine.

It has been a fun side-project, spending a few hours here and there. It is very far from polished, but the basic functionality works. There is still more to do — adding a search functionality, conforming to standard UI design patterns, caching for the rendered HTML (from Markdown), optimizing the housekeeping code, and so on.

This site itself is a good example on the kind of problems that beginners can work on, but they would not know what kind of problems they can solve and what level of expertise (beginner / intermediate / advanced) would be needed. That is where this list of problems can help.

I request you to spend 5 minutes of your creativity to add a few problems so that beginners and intermediate level folks will have interesting problems to test their learning of a new programming language. Thanks!

It might be helpful to you as well when you’re going to play around with functional languages (Haskell, Erlang, etc.), funky new languages (Ioke), or new languages by big companies (Go).

Link: http://codinghomework.appspot.com

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Post tags: coding

What is interesting is that this may help complete beginners who stumble in getting started with IDLE, etc. The most common email that I get asked is when people run python abc.py on the IDLE interpreter prompt and wonder why it is not working – both the concepts of two command lines as well as the concept of running a program is not grokked well by beginners who are getting started, especially people who are self-taught. From that perspective, this is an interesting approach to the problem.

I am still not convinced about this approach because people cannot bypass the learning of how to edit, compile and run the code in the native environment, because that will be needed when writing new programs. It will be interesting how the two opposing needs will be balanced.

But I hope beginners will try it out and see if it helps them get started.

A full size video of a walkthrough of the software is available at the Roorky website.

Note: Be warned that it is a beta software.

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All the successful apps that are making money are transaction-based. For example, ngpay takes a cut from every movie ticket you buy through it. This is only possible for entertainment-oriented apps. The only other successful ones that I see are, of course, communication apps such as Gmail app. I see almost nobody using utility applications on their phones.

Things can improve only if internet-on-mobile was affordable! I think we need 3G for mobile app market to grow in India, but it is delayed yet again (Apparently, the government is not satisfied with the expected 250 billion rupees).

Let’s take a look at few numbers:

• 93.2% of Vodafone India subscribers are prepaid customers, which means it is unlikely they subscribe to monthly fees for internet-on-mobile. Right?
• 96% of Urban Indian mobile users are not accessing the Internet and 48% of Urban India mobile users accessed the Internet on their mobile only 1-3 times a month, on average!

Of course, there is no denying that there is growth year-over-year, but for an entrepreneur, it is not enough yet. Because you can’t build yet-another-social-network nor can you build content unless you have tie-ups with the big movie/music companies. The top websites in India for internet-on-mobile conform to the core needs list that I wrote about earlier, especially entertainment. The free wallpapers from zedge.net seems to be the hottest thing right now. Or as Rajesh Jain keeps stressing (and practises), focus on SMS and Voice for now.

Let’s hope the IAMAI will help things move forward.

Even when we get affordable internet-on-mobile, I wonder if ad-supported free applications will be the only popular ones always. Where’s the money?

Maybe I completely mistaken or I’m just whiny, because MediaNama paints a much brighter picture, from comics to unlimited music for Rs. 99/month to movie rental and chocolates. Hah! There is a gotcha there — all those announcements are from big guys. Where are the mobile app startups?

I am planning to attend Silicon India’s Mobile Conference this month to gain more perspective on this.

To round things up, here are some rough notes that I jotted down when Karthee Madasamy of Qualcomm Ventures talked about How to make a winning mobile startup at an OCC Meet on Aug 15. It was probably the only time I felt hopeful that a mobile app startup is possible today.

• Understand the status quo. Don’t do the status quo.
• If there are hurdles, that’s your opportunity. Otherwise, others would’ve taken advantage already.
• India 400 million mobile phone users.
• Segment the customer. Otherwise, big companies will be already on it.
• Don’t aim for 1% of ocean. Go for 50% of a small market that you undertand well.
• Don’t do today’s technology. Go for future. Don’t be 10% better, be significantly better.
• Do you have something unique that gives you strengths? Have a honest discussion on the problems and future competitors and your strengths.
• Can you partner with others in the ecosystem, support their weaknesses, and together be more strong.
• Ecosystem problems – operators, heterogenity of platforms and mobile phone capabilities, difficulty in educating customers, no Internet on mobile, etc.
• Only way a startup will succeed is by discovering a latent demand or latent technology.
• If operators are critical to the ecosystem, obviously they will charge more money! Why is that a problem because they are giving value back. Get the first million customers yourself and the operators will put red carpet for you. Startups’ strength is to turn the tables!
• Find a mechanism of educating customer about value of the product and that will obviate the need for operators.
• If only 40 million mobile Internet users, you only need half a million users to break through the barriers! People will come after you.
• Assume cost of building product or app is zero. Only building half a million customers is something.
• 120 million capable phones today. India is a fast market. Imagine 2 years later.
• Startups should change the game to their advantage. At the same time, it is NOT a zero-sum game. Make a win-win partnership. Both people should profit.
• Don’t complain about market research. Ultimately, you HAVE to understand the market better than anybody. Be resourceful. Also, accuracy is not important, the direction of the market growth is more important.
• Don’t go to VCs without 20,000-30,000 users.
• Can you scale up to 20 million dollars revenue? Then you’ll get your pay-off.
• Startups need to think how to beat the big guys.
• Make a state-of-the-art technology or business model and ask people to pay premium for it.
• First step for product management is segmentation.
• Make it clear to yourself about how you’re reaching your target customers. Don’t do it in a haphazard manner.
• Read about Ron Coase economist why companies exist.
• Read about Teece theory on who captures value in technology.

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Use cases

1. Every time a user wants to send across content that doesn’t fit into an email, the user has to then decide between using .doc, .docx and .pdf formats. This implies additional software that needs to be installed on the recipient’s computer. This is unnecessary because browsers already do a fantastic job of rendering content, why should that be outsourced to other software simply for the reason that they don’t have a common document format?
   • Think product help documentation, resumes, small galleries of photos, and so on.
   • PDF is pixel-level which means it is good for printing, and HTML/MHT is presentation-level which means it is good for viewing while still maintaining full fidelity.
2. Because there is simply no good “File → Save As” solution. This is especially useful to store pages offline so that the user always has access to them, e.g., the Markdown text formatting syntax, and so on.
3. Print to PDF is abysmal because most websites don’t have appropriate print stylesheets. Currently I’m using the Aviary “To Image” bookmarklet to save pages and preserving decent presentation at the same time. However, saving the document as an image means that I cannot search for text. If only the browser had a proper “Save As” solution, then we would have the best of both worlds.
4. The future is full of small screen devices — Netbooks, Chrome OS, CrunchPad, iPhone, Android, etc. Do you see PDF readers or office suites on all of these devices? Unlikely. But what they do already have are web browsers. So why not have a browser-native document format that works across all these platforms.

Format Possibilities

The MHTML format is already adopted by IE and Opera. Firefox has the UnMHT addon and also has alternatives such as the Mozilla Archive Format. Safari does not support MHTML but instead has its own .webarchive format.

Each browser supports its own file format, clearly demonstrating that there is a use case for storing documents in single files. The gap is whether browser vendors can agree to adopt a common format. That would mean that the file format would actually be useful since it does not need assumptions on the platform/installed software of the recipient.

What I’m hoping for is the browser vendors to bring the vision of the MAFF file format and KDE WAR file format to life.

Extensibility

• PDF is read-only by design. The new file format could support highlighting and annotating features such as those present in Scrapbook addon.
  • Use case: The highlighting feature means that I can save an online article, mark the parts that I think that are relevant and important and send the annotated file to a friend via email.
• If the new file format has a container structure (zip, tarball, etc.), then we can include images, videos and other multimedia, just like the office suites’ formats. Continuing that line of thought, can all the browsers adopt one of the office suite file format standards? What if every browser had “Save as DOCX” and “Open DOCX” options? DOCX is appropriate because it is a ISO standard and it will be interoperable with the most popular office suite out there.

Summary

The wish is that the “Save as MHTML” feature will bundle the webpage into a single file, which can be stored, transmitted, and viewed later using any web browser. This will also be useful for small-screen devices of the future which have browsers but not necessarily have dedicated format readers and office suites. If a container structure format is used instead of MHTML, then features such as highlighting, commenting, multimedia, etc. can be added.

I hope this sparks a discussion about whether this idea has potential and could be something useful, or is completely unnecessary.

Update 1: Thanks to “Rik|work” on irc.freenode.net#webkit, got to know about two open bugs in the Webkit bugbase which exactly talks about this — Bug 7168 – Support reading of MHTML (multipart/related) web archives and Bug 7211 – Support save as “Web page, complete” in Firefox format, and as pointed in the comments to the latter bug, Chromium/Google Chrome already supports this! So it is not an outlandish idea as it seems

Update 2: Thanks to “Mardeg” on irc.mozilla.org#firefox, got to know about the this proposal from Alexander Limi called Making browsers faster: Resource Packages.

Update 3: Thanks again to “Mardeg” for pointing out these filed proposals in Firefox – Bug 18764 – Full rfc2557 MHTML multipart/related support in browser (filed in 1999!) and Bug 40873 – Save as rfc 2557 MHTML; complete webpage in one file (filed in 2000!).

Update 4: Continuing the discussion with “Mardeg”, it seems there is already a format that can solve this purpose – SVG. It is supported in all modern browsers and Google is working on svgweb which is a JavaScript library that any website can use that enables IE to render SVG using Flash Player behind the scenes. Very interesting! If only IE natively supported SVG along with browsers and word processors having a “Save as SVG” option, this pain point would just go away.

Update 5 (Oct 19, 2009): Looks like MHT is indeed not an obscure file format, Zoho Notebook has “Export to MHT” and “Export to HTML” as the two export options for notebooks and pages.

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“People are good and trustworthy and generally just concerned with getting through the day,” Newmark says. If most people are good and their needs are simple, all you have to do to serve them well is build a minimal infrastructure allowing them to get together and work things out for themselves. Any additional features are almost certainly superfluous and could even be damaging.”

– Craig Newmark (of CraigsList fame)

So what are there real needs?

I’m trying to (naively?) boil down all the successful software, websites and web applications out there and see if it can be mapped into as few categories as possible:

1. Communication (Social networks, Basecamp, etc.)
2. Organization (Google Docs, Flickr, Backpack, etc.)
3. Information (Content websites, News websites, Search engines, etc.)
4. Entertainment (YouTube, Nautanki.tv, Blogs/Journals/Twitter, etc.)
5. E-Commerce (Amazon, Paypal, etc.) (Category added thanks to Ankesh)

Note that the website that you use may fit into different categories in different circumstances.

The idea is to not search for a comprehensive or accurate classification.

The idea is: If you brainstorm an idea or come across someone else’s idea, can you trace it back to one of these categories? If yes, what does it mean? If no, what does it mean?

Is this a useful angle to evaluate an idea, or not?

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Stanza

My most favorite application is the Stanza app for reading ebooks.

It’s because of Stanza that I actually started to read more! Mostly because I can read a book anywhere and any time I want to. I also discovered some great books such as Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse because I could explore and download in a few clicks.

Maps built-in application

Google started giving driving directions in India a few months back and it rocks!

RunKeeper

The ability to see your pace at exactly every moment during a run is very handy. And I don’t have to carry any extra device because I’m already carrying my iPhone which also happens to be my iPod which I listen to while running. And the best part of the RunKeeper Pro app is that it announces by voice the distance and speed every 5 minutes which gives me the boost I need if I slowed down.

RememberTheMilk and Evernote

The RememberTheMilk app is one of the slickest iPhone apps I’ve used, but I started making daily todo lists which is a bad idea, so I wanted to think in terms of notes instead of lists, so I started using the Evernote app which was exactly what I was looking for.

The best part about Evernote is that I always have a notepad to jot things down whenever I have a thought. And after I started using Evernote, I realized this happens more often than you think! And it has gotten more useful with the 3.0 version of the app. For example, imagine searching for notes by the location where you created the note! Or make voice notes. Or saving photos of an article in a magazine and searching for the text in that article inside Evernote. Or sending a link to Evernote via email. And so on.

There is also the official Wordpress app for writing blog posts or tinkering with drafts.

MobileStudio and Dropbox

Whenever I need some files that I might need to use on-the-go, I transfer it via FTP to the MobileStudio app and then access it on my iPhone.

For example, in one incident, I was able to quickly open the tickets I had saved as a PDF on my phone since I didn’t have the actual printout.

Oh, and having Dropbox access online via the browser means I have all my files accessible any time.

TimeJot

See my earlier time tracking article.

tv.burrp.com

If you thought there was never interesting on TV, just visit tv.burrp.com and find out what’s on TV right now. It’s very very useful.

burrp.com

Find restaurants on-the-go. Once, a friend and myself were in Koramangala looking for a place to eat, and we discovered Fiorano Ristorante via burrp, and had nice authentic Italian food.

Reach people

I never have to worry about how to reach a person any more, I have all the methods – phone call, SMS, email, Skype, IM, Twitter. You name it, we got it.

TED Talks at night

It’s hard to turn off the music or movie and force myself to sleep. So I end up taking my iPhone to bed and watching a TED talk or two before sleeping.

Ambiance

There’s actually an app for listening to rain sounds or the crackling of a campfire or sounds of that sort. It comes in really handy when you just want to shut out all the noises outside and you’re not in a mood to listen to music. It gives you the background noise that you always wanted.

WordBook

Having a very handy dictionary on your fingertips is handy when you want to check if the word that you’re using means what you think it means.

Torch

Yeah, the Torch app comes in handy these days because of the frequent power cuts in Bengaluru.

Wishlist: ngpay

The one app that is missing on the iPhone is an ngpay app. I once called up their customer support and asked if they had plans for an iPhone app and they told me that “Sorry sir, the iPhone doesn’t support third-party applications.” I was speechless.

There’s an app for that

There are a lot of apps out there to use.

I’m just glad that I finally got a kinda-PDA device that I always wanted. Now I never get bored waiting for someone because I can actually spend that time finding out the latest news and I can check Wikipedia for the members of a rock band during a discussion with friends

© swaroop for Swaroop C H - India, Startup, Technology, Life Skills, 2009. | Permalink | 12 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: iphone, Mobile Phone

I started using Twitter as an experiment, and it was the first and only social network I really participated in. It was great because I actually made new friends that I went on trips with, got the opportunity to follow the thoughts of interesting people, and whenever I was in a quandary, I just had to holler a question and would get plenty of answers and advice in return.

But I was uneasy because I was feeling jaded. I thought it was because of the typical “overdoing it” reason, but there was more to it. It was affecting my ability to think critically/deeply about a subject.

Why am I thinking so much about a social network? As David Allen once said, “Pay attention to what has your attention.” And clearly, Twitter had more of my attention than it should have.

Since my attention span was reducing from books to blogs and then blogs to tweets, I was being converted from “from a thinker to a clicker”.

So I’ve gone back and started reading books and paying more attention to offline friends. And I’m not alone on this, many people have expressed similar opinions.

Getting your Fix

I think of this situation as getting your fix. Think smoking vs. coffee. Both are stimulants. Both are legal. But since smoking actually affects others, people have to go outside to indulge in it. Hence, it is less convenient. Probably that’s why there are more people addicted to coffee. Because it is more convenient. There is a sufficient barrier to smoking. Even though this analogy may not be true, consider reading blog posts vs. reading books. There is a sufficient barrier of attention to the latter, that is why more people prefer reading blog posts. It is more convenient. The same for reading blogs vs. tweets. The latter is more convenient. Then, going down this path, your ability to think becomes restricted to 140 characters. Twitter gives you that instant high that you published or read something, which means you lose persistence which is required for longer reading, hence tend to think a lot less and quick wins prevent you from going after bigger wins.

The problem with the shorter fix is that you will indulge in it more often and it will have lesser stimulation in the long run. Consider the difference between, say, having a 5-day 9-hour work week with 2-day weekends vs. having 6-hour work everyday with no weekend and no holidays. Which one would you prefer? This is how I argue that a book once in a while will give you more stimulation than a hundred tweets. For example, consider the signal-to-noise ratio – only tools like filtrr.com can filter out #ipl talk, etc. whereas a book would give a broad understanding about a particular subject. In the long run, it is more enriching to go deeper into subjects, not to be “restricted” to a buffet of subjects.

As a sort-of substitute for Twitter, I’ve shifted to a del.icio.us network. After all, most of Twitter is sharing links and delicious doesn’t have the downside of frivolous tweets. Also, delicious shows how many people have bookmarked a link giving another indicator whether something is worth reading or not, and even better, they are tagged appropriately so I immediately know the topic to expect for an article, instead of “This is cool <insert link>.”

The Attention Psychology

Let’s think about attention in terms of psychology, which I am trying to understand a little about from The Mouse Trap blog:

Maximizing utility

U = E x V (where U is utility of act; E is expectancy as to whether one would be able to carry the act and if so whether the act would result in desired outcome; and V is the Value (both subjective and objective) that one has assigned to the outcome.

Maximizing Predictability

While selecting an action we maximize reward and minimize punishment, basically we choose the maximal utility function; while choosing which stimuli to attend to we maximize our foreknowledge of the world and minimize surprises, basically we choose the maximal predictability function; we can even write an equivalent mathematical formula: Predictability P = E x R where P is the increase in predictability due to attending to stimulus 1 ; E is probability that stimulus 1 correctly leads to prediction of stimulus 2; and R is the Relevance of stimulus 2(information) to us. Thus the stimulus one would attend, is the one that leads to maximum gain in predictability. Also, similar to the general energy level of organism that would bias as to whether, and how much, the organism acts or not; there is a general arousal level of the organism that biases whether and how much it would attend to stimuli.

As per my understanding, the first part means that because we expect much utility about something, it’s perceived utility is higher, making it’s value higher. And because Twitter gives that dash of randomness that we desire, it’s utility is much higher than it really is.

The second part means that we want to know more about the world in order to have lesser surprises, and hence we tend to read more and more, especially if it is information that we perceive as relevant to us.

Bottom line: I question whether more and more information and more and more immediacy is really necessary/required for us?

Think of all the great things that have been achieved whether it is a motor engine or a music stereo, would it have been created if the to-be-creator was constantly distracted and with low attention span? Where is the time to get inspired if we’re always mentally tired?

Why Can’t We Concentrate?

I will finish up with excerpts from this excellent article on Salon called “Why Can’t We Concentrate?”:

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Read the rest of Twitter vs. Why we can’t concentrate? (981 words)

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