Author: Rahul

Pleasantly surprised it’s still around. Addictive. Youhavebeenwarned. Spent many a post-lunch hour at IBM 2004-05 playing GTG followed by fantastically productive afternoons.

From Paul Adams, Facebook/ex-Google:

I feel that we’re at the beginning of a cycle in business where we move away from this idea of “influentials”, and instead focus marketing activity on small connected groups of close friends. I think this is what marketers are starting to think about, and will be the prominent theme for this decade.

Correct. Have seen this brewing. New fashion. Expect flood of upstarts. Expect incumbents struggle pitifully to adapt.

BUT.

Here is what I think reflects reality. Farhad Manjoo, on Slate:

… as Paul Adams says, we keep multiple circles of acquaintances in real life. But it doesn’t necessarily follow that people want to take the time to reflect that behavior online. After all, in the real world, managing your circles of friends is usually an implicit thing—you hang out with your school friends when you’re at school, you hang out with your New York friends when you’re in New York, you talk to your coworkers when you’re at work.

Which is essentially what I said yesterday. Only one circle in real-life at any time is worth having an online equivalent for, and that circle is likely to be some some past phase of your life.

Unless you make a spectacular online equivalent. Is that + ?

Google+ is like a VCR. I know exactly what I can do with it. But I cannot figure out how. Maybe I’m slower in the head now, but I remember within minutes I was using Orkut in the same way that I would always use it. Ditto Facebook. Then again, it was probably because they’re such simple, single-textured attempts at replicating real connections. + is more ambitious.

+ is supposed to be the notFacebook network. The gentleman hero that gives back to the meanings of ‘social’ and ‘share’ the nuance they had lost for the last five years. To create social circles of people that really matter to you. To share with them pictures, plans, numbers, confessions that couldn’t make it to Facebook. To boldly go…, so to speak.

But now I find myself being ‘added’ by the same people I’d spent time weeding out of my Facebook friends in an attempt to create those private spaces that + was supposed to let me create in the first place. I herded the party out the back only to have them stagger in the front door.

And what does ‘added’ by someone mean? Would I begin seeing things they shared? Would they see what I shared? Was I part of circles I didn’t know about? Frustratingly, for a network that was supposed to let you create social connections on your terms, I couldn’t even refuse to be ‘added’. Logging in to +, for now at least, seems like walking into a party blindfolded.

But you can retreat into your own circles, can’t you? Yes and No. Maybe I’m the social weirdo here, but I can’t tell just what my today-in-real-life-circles are. I mean I can group/circle the guys from school, the folks from IBM, my first roommates, my then-close friends at IIMK. Each group corresponds to people in distinct phases of my life, people that have remained prominent as the others have faded.

The group reveals itself only after the phase has passed.

And then it also strikes me. That I can only recollect a single group for each phase should tell me something – I really _belonged_ to only one group at a time. It tells me that groups like ‘work’ and ‘family’ and ‘cousins’ and daily commute gang’ and such are really just only contexts for interactions. You can force-create + circles for them, but they’re really freeform amoeba-like shapes, and will change. Not even snap, just thin out at points and separate into other blobs without much emotional ado. Attempts to share ‘stuff’ with them on services like + will peter out in weeks. Or days. I mean what would you share with your ‘work’ circle that you wouldn’t share publicly on Facekut? And how long would you keep sharing with ‘cousins’? Google weakly suggesting ‘Acquaintances’ as a possible option demonstrates just how hard it is to find more than one meaningful, binding circle in your life.

Maybe I don’t get it. It meaning having real-life connections. Maybe + is really a move-to-the-next-curve improvement in social networks, and I’m a bottom-of-the-curve hermit.

Or maybe doing life in software really is hard.

This is a goldmine. @somethingtoread is a Twitter stream for “a hand-picked selection of the finest articles and essays saved with Instapaper.”

Follow immediately.

You know what’s common among the “How I Work”s of  Jason Fried or Matt Mullenweg or anyone who’s building ‘cool’ software today?

Take Fried, for instance:

Of the 16 people at the company, eight of us live here in Chicago. Employees come to the office if and when they feel like it, or else they work from home. I don’t believe in the 40-hour workweek, so we cut all that BS about being somewhere for a certain number of hours. I have no idea how many hours my employees work — I just know they get the work done.

Or Mullenweg:

…my preference is to work from home. We’re very much a virtual company where everyone primarily works from home (or their coffee shop of choice). The half dozen of us in the Bay Area will go in on Thursdays to have a little company, but six days out of the week the space is usually empty.

But chances are you spend two hours commuting to and two hours from work. Or have to punch in and punch out. Or have to spend a minimum of 8 or 8 1/2 hours at work. Or have a limited number of holidays. Or have to take permission to work from home. Or all of these one-size-fits-all policies.

And but still, but yet, Management would concede that the folks at 37signals and Automattic are, by any measure, more productive than their employees.  And also that there’s a positive causal relationship between autonomy and productivity. So why aren’t more companies… why do policies at your average co overwhelmingly SQUELCH autonomy?

Management is uncomfortable with issues of autonomy [1], but they will tell you (sotto voce) they don’t trust their employees to be productive without a nurturing environment, oh forget it, without external control and supervision [2].  That’s tragic. Whyever hire people you can’t trust, watched over by supervisor watched over by supersupervisor watched over by all the way up to top management?

Because if every employee was someone you could trust, was as good as the best employee, there’d be no problem.  So why not hire everyone who’s as good? Because, <impatient shake of head>, because you can’t afford to pay everybody what you pay your best employees.

And then, doggedly you ask, but then would you need as many people? Wouldn’t you have fewer people, better people, autonomous people, sensible productive happy people, if you hired just the really good ones? And Management responds, reflex-like, <check!>, and where am I going to find these people?

There.

What Management has is a problem of time. Finding these people, these really good people, wooing them, getting them excited, selling the role to them and selling them on the role is intense, time-consuming work.

And but running co is a daily operation. That moment when co becomes too big for Founders (the very who metamorphose into Management) to run effectively, that moment is the moment when Founders need to spend time, emotion, effort finding and netting those good people and it is also the moment when they can least spare that time, emotion, effort.

So it goes. From Founders to first-rung Management to middle Management to all the way down, supervisoring and supersupervisoring. So then what do you do?

What indeed?

—

[1] or with any issue involving people except for the stuff the people produce for the co.

[2] Except for their best. And they can’t make exceptions for those they can trust because that’d make the rest resentful.

Some great ideas for operators to better utilize (and monetize) their assets: expose users’ location data, expose their social graph, building micro-payment systems that make sense, become verified ID providers. Just reading the article will set your head abuzz.

These are solid, solid ideas. But they require operators to think of themselves as platforms, making money off access to APIs. And that is just not in their DNA. Rather, in their rush to corner every buck there is to be made in the mobile space, they have tried to integrate vertically – running businesses from cell phone towers to handset applications, doing only a few things well.

They’ve attempted to jump from being a pipe to building applications bypassing the development of platforms in between – for identity, social, location, payments – to build good applications, not one-offs.

Too bad. That’s stunting the development of an entire, first-of-its-kind-in-the-world mobile ecosystem in India.

Speaking of threats to freedoms from government, the “Information Technology (Electronic Service Delivery) Rules, 2011” describe what content may not be published online, in terms so vague that anything could be considered to be in violation of these rules. Medianama has commentary:

… these rules give the Indian government the ability to gag free speech, and block any website it deems fit, without publicly disclosing why sites have been blocked, who took the decision to block it, and just as importantly, providing adequate recourse to blogs, sites and online and mobile businesses, for getting the block removed. These rules are applicable to intermediaries, through which access to content will be controlled.

Examples include forbidding blasphemous content without a blasphemy law in place, having ISPs remove content within 36 hours of receipt of a complaint (without proof of violation), and forcing disclosure of private information to any agency dealing with ‘cyber security activity’.

Every so often comes a reminder that government over-reach and license raj is still very much alive. Last week, BookMyShow was instructed by the Andhra Pradesh state government to stop selling tickets online because it (the government) had ‘passed an order’ allowing only a single entity (not BookMyShow) to do so (for the next ten years, extendable).

This is not apathy; this is a government actively working against its people. And whether driven by incompetence or rent-seeking, this act showcases just how easily your freedoms – as an individual or business – can be taken away by the government of a free country.

In the past two months, I’ve read 37signals’ ‘Getting Real‘ and (re)read Tim Ferriss’ ‘The Four Hour Work Week‘. The overarching takeaway, seems to be the fanatical application of the Pareto principle.

A variant of 80-20, much easier to apply to mundane, near-subconscious situations every day is to ask ‘does it matter in the larger scheme of things?’ (define ‘larger scheme’ as applicable). Do I overtake that slowcoach in the fast lane from the left? Does it matter in the larger scheme of things? Should I microwave the water first so I can set up the coffee filter in parallel? Does it matter in the larger scheme of things? Should I boot up my computer first so it downloads email while I check up on the team? And on and on. It gets easier if you ask yourself.

Discovered in the last 24 hours: LongReads.com “The best long-form stories on the web“, and from the May issue of The Atlantic, “Nearly 100 fantastic pieces of journalism“.