When I started learning to drive a car, I found a good driving instructor, who took me around our block for half an hour everyday in his battered Maruthi. While he was a good instructor by Indian standards, what he did not know and could not teach was how to parallel park. So I went home and Googled ‘parallel parking’ which led me to many YouTube videos showing me different styles of parallel parking.
Three months earlier when I had my first baby, I wanted to find out what was the best way to change his diaper without getting all messy. This time, I instinctively went to YouTube and found hundreds of videos that show me how to change a diaper. And when I wanted to write an article about net neutrality, I again went to YouTube, where I found videos explaining the principle of net neutrality and hundreds of personal video blogs of laymen expressing their views about the contentious topic. Though, I never gave it a second thought, when I was told that YouTube is the second biggest search engine, it gave me a pause and after a little poking around the web, it dawned on me that it is right and people like me who are going to the video sharing site to learn things like changing diapers, making iPhone apps, cooking chicken Biryani, checking game play in Call of Duty are pushing YouTube’s status to being the second largest search engine in the world.
YouTube, the video-sharing site started in 2005 above a pizzeria by three former PayPal workers has become an integral part of online lives and has become the go-to site for online search. Though it can be used for only video searches within five years of inception it has reached the point where for every 11 searches on the internet, 8 are done on Google’s engines, and 3 are done on YouTube’s. This leaves Yahoo and Microsoft far behind YouTube. Google keeps mum about YouTube’s status as the second largest search engine but is happy with YouTube’s meteoric rise, because it bought YouTube in 2006, and because YouTube is one of the main reasons that Google as a whole, has passed 10 billions searches per month. Ask the modest co-founder of YouTube Chad Hurley and he would only say “I just wanted to create something that I would use and others would find useful too”.
In India, this is not much more different. According to comScore, the online marketing survey agency, Google sites accounts for around 81% of searches done in India and around 30% of those searches come from YouTube. From a survey done in January 2011,comScore also found out that 7 out of 10 Indian web users watch online video in a month. With 30 million Indians watching online video, mostly on YouTube, that is 72% of Indians who come online every month. While this is still less than the 85% viewing in countries like USA, industry watchers predict that exponential growth of broadband will push for more online video viewing and consequently will grow YouTube as a major search engine the world over and particularly in markets like India and Brazil which have tremendous growth opportunities. Joe Nguyen of comScore says “online video viewing is quickly becoming a central activity for Internet users in India...as broadband penetration continues to increase, we expect to see online video continue to grow”. And needless to say the growth is being led by YouTube.
Ask Kalyan, the 36 year old engineer about what he goes to YouTube for and he says cricket matches. Ask Sphoorthy, the 21 year old medicine student and she says movie trailers. Ask Shyam, the 58 year old activist and he says video blogs. For the 10 year old Rani it is finding solutions to her maths problems. For an IT developer like Jai it is about finding online Java tutorials.
Exactly this divergence of being all things to all the people is what is pushing YouTube to be what TV has always aspired to be. YouTube is an education tool, a blogging tool, an encyclopedia, and more than anything, an entertainment tool as evidenced by the meteoric rise of YouTube starts like Justin Bieber. What radio was to our grandfather’s generation, and TV was to our father’s, YouTube is to our generation.
Sunday 3 April 2011
Sunday 20 March 2011
The drift of twitter
When a massive tsunami was ravaging Japan last week, the third most popular twitter trend was Godzilla. It was trending because people,despite the huge tragedy, were making jokes about a Godzilla coming out of the Fukushima nuclear plant if there was a nuclear disaster. For a topic to trend on twitter, millions of its users have to use that hash-tag. On this particular instance they were divided between a majority who were making fun of the disaster and a minority who were condemning the jokes.
Since its inception in 2006, the microblogging site has achieved quite a lot. For one, it single handedly killed blogging as we knew it. People are no longer writing long passages about their opinions but are posting their thoughts in 140 characters. It grew into a global phenomenon after Facebook and at last count has 190 million users, half of them American and about 1% Indian. It is credited with toppling dictators, finding jobs, crowd sourcing, writing books,and at times like when Godzilla is trending , making you lose faith in humanity.
A 2009 survey by a market-research firm found that 40% of traffic on twitter is “pointless babble”. While I doubt this may have decreased over the period since the study, twitter has become more popular and is certainly spewing more junk than ever before. Charlie Sheen is a case in point. The highest paid TV star in America is obviously mentally sick and is in need of psychiatric help. He is addicted and lost his million dollar job due to his public antics. But within weeks of joining twitter he has amassed a following of two and half million users who were clearly laughing at his “tiger blood” tweets. A man who should have been sympathized with and who should have been sent to a rehab and a psychiatrist was enjoying enormous fame and was thinking all was good because of his followers who had no empathy for him and were only laughing at him.
What old timers call as lowering of standards, in education, and in ethics around the world combined with a very bad celebrity culture is leading this twitter revolution with trending topics like tiger blood and Godzilla. What is more alarming is what New York Times editor Bill Keller calls the "the American Idol-ization of news". When the editor of one of the most respected papers on the earth says "once-serious news outlets give pride of place not to stories they think important but to stories that are 'trending' on Twitter", it is time to take note.
This is much more evident and like everything else, much more chaotic and rabble rousing in India. Five years after its conception, the government and most of the political parties do not understand twitter. And if you take some time out to check various Indian twitter accounts randomly, you will realize one thing. Most of them are people who have never tweeted but are just following celebrities from Amitabh to Barkha Dutt, people (called trolls) who use twitter to spew venom at a caste,religion, person or region and who use it to abuse the so-called celebrities. Twitter would have gotten Binayak Sen out of jail in Egypt.
Click here for the printed version..
Since its inception in 2006, the microblogging site has achieved quite a lot. For one, it single handedly killed blogging as we knew it. People are no longer writing long passages about their opinions but are posting their thoughts in 140 characters. It grew into a global phenomenon after Facebook and at last count has 190 million users, half of them American and about 1% Indian. It is credited with toppling dictators, finding jobs, crowd sourcing, writing books,and at times like when Godzilla is trending , making you lose faith in humanity.
A 2009 survey by a market-research firm found that 40% of traffic on twitter is “pointless babble”. While I doubt this may have decreased over the period since the study, twitter has become more popular and is certainly spewing more junk than ever before. Charlie Sheen is a case in point. The highest paid TV star in America is obviously mentally sick and is in need of psychiatric help. He is addicted and lost his million dollar job due to his public antics. But within weeks of joining twitter he has amassed a following of two and half million users who were clearly laughing at his “tiger blood” tweets. A man who should have been sympathized with and who should have been sent to a rehab and a psychiatrist was enjoying enormous fame and was thinking all was good because of his followers who had no empathy for him and were only laughing at him.
What old timers call as lowering of standards, in education, and in ethics around the world combined with a very bad celebrity culture is leading this twitter revolution with trending topics like tiger blood and Godzilla. What is more alarming is what New York Times editor Bill Keller calls the "the American Idol-ization of news". When the editor of one of the most respected papers on the earth says "once-serious news outlets give pride of place not to stories they think important but to stories that are 'trending' on Twitter", it is time to take note.
This is much more evident and like everything else, much more chaotic and rabble rousing in India. Five years after its conception, the government and most of the political parties do not understand twitter. And if you take some time out to check various Indian twitter accounts randomly, you will realize one thing. Most of them are people who have never tweeted but are just following celebrities from Amitabh to Barkha Dutt, people (called trolls) who use twitter to spew venom at a caste,religion, person or region and who use it to abuse the so-called celebrities. Twitter would have gotten Binayak Sen out of jail in Egypt.
Click here for the printed version..
Sunday 13 March 2011
The race to be evil
In last Sunday’s I. Witness, Edward Wasserman wrote that Google is turning into evil personified in the digital age despite its “Don’t do evil” philosophy. Quite ironically, on the same day, writing in The Observer, John Naughton says Apple is the real evil in his article titled “Forget Google-It’s Apple that is turning into the evil empire”. Though these two seem contradictory, both of them have strong arguments supporting their views. Since their articles appeared in print, some new developments have again tilted the scales in this “Evil than thou” battle of corporations.
Firstly Google. Google has been giving the creeps to any right-minded person for years now. As Mr. Wasserman mentioned, while the idea that Google is evil comes from its manipulation of its search results, there could be much more serious issues with the way Google operates that could turn it into the Skynet of the future. Some intentional and un-intentional actions of Google in the last two weeks are giving creeps to bloggers around the world.
On February 27, Google accidentally reset Gmail accounts causing as many as 150,000 people to lose access to their inboxes. This raises two serious issues. How safe is our data that we are allowing companies like Google to save for us on the cloud? What if in twenty years, we moved to the cloud completely (as is already happening with increasing use of flash drives instead of good old hard disks), but one freak accident deleted all our photos, mails, music, documents, in-fact entire digital lives.
In this case, Google actually backed up the e-mails of all those 150,000 users and was able to restore access. This backing up, though saved the day, raises the second most serious question about how corporations have more control over our data than we have. This kind of backing up of data could prove fatal if Google starts co-operating with evil governments against whistle-blowers like WikiLeaks.
As if this wasn't scary, it was reported last week that there were 58 malicious apps on the Android Market place which 260,000 Android users inadvertently downloaded. These apps were basically trying to steal your information. While this in itself should be scary, what Google did to remedy this was even scarier. It used a remote Kill switch to delete these apps even without the user’s permission. So Google used a backdoor of itself to close some other backdoors. With Google saying there are more than 300,000 android activations a day, this Google backdoor puts an alarming amount of information in one corporation’s hands which is saying “Don’t do evil”. But the question is do we know if Google is really the saint that it is pretending to be. And precisely this makes Google a front runner in the evil corporation competition.
Before we finish with Google, we should remember two quotes by its former CEO Eric Schmidt. “We know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or less know what you’re thinking about.” That is straight out of Orwell’s 1984 and should scare any right minded person.
Secondly, he also said, “I ACTUALLY think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions, they want Google to tell them what they should be doing next.”
The newest entrant into this evil corporation race is Apple. We all love Apple. Apple sells us a product. And sells us an eco-system with it. It sells the music, magazines,books, apps that go with the product. And it gets 30% of whatever we spend. What this means is its market capitalization is $331bn and is the second most valuable company in the world. It can control stocks of SSDs or touch screen panels.
When we buy an Apple product,we either play by Apple’s rules, and go through its iTunes, or we don’t and end up with a very expensive paper-weight(Not talking about the small number of tech-savvy jail-breakers). We can buy a MacBook(it now has an App store), an iPhone,an iPod or an iPad, but we still have to live in Apple’s walled garden. We can eat all the fruit we want, but after paying for it and after the fruit has been approved by Mr.Jobs. Whatever people criticize it for, Apple will play by its rules and will never play by users rules. Use or non-use of Adobe’s Flash is a big example. However it is criticized, it says it won’t provide you with Flash because IT says it is not good for the users. Like an evil government or an evil corporation it decides what is good for us and what is not.
And again like Google, Apple has a kill switch for all its iOS devices. As if this was not enough, Apple is building a massive $1 Billion data center/ server farm over 225 acres of land in North Carolina. Rumor has it that it is planning to make Mobile-me, it’s cloud service completely free to all its iOS users. Extensive use of SSDs in its latest MacBook Airs and iPads suggests that Apple could be moving towards this cloud based model. Which means all users data will be on Apple’s servers. In another two to three years, Apple would have millions of iOS users with all their information stored on Apple’s massive servers. While this is a common scenario for any cloud computing service as Amazon showed, when it closed Wiki Leaks down, the Apple scenario is much more scary because millions of people use Apple products. Because they are mostly people who are not tech savvy, who don’t know how to secure their information, and because they are people who are attracted to the Apple garden because of its attractive UI and great design. And they could all be putting their most intimate and most important information in a corporation’s hands they know nothing about.
As a comedian once said, “If machines take over the world one day and kill all the humans , they will be shiny Apple gadgets that we have invited into our homes”. May be we can apply this to Google gadgets too, though they are not shiny and not always well designed. Only time will tell which will be proved as the evilest of all. That is unless Michael Bay decides to show us, but by blowing up the whole planet.
Click here for the printed version...
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