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.
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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.

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