Twitter: A social experiment

I signed up on twitter due to buzz created by celebrities way back in mid-2009. I followed only celebrities and let the account lay fallow for two years. Sometimes I visited twitter what some of the dumb celebrities and some very good celebrities were saying all about their life. I got never interested in twitter in spite of being one of the early movers in India.


After I completed my engineering, my free time increased by leaps and bounds. Slowly I started to visit twitter more often. Trends following on twitter hooked me and I used to randomly follow people whose tweets I used to like and it mostly contained the twitter crowd from Mumbai or Delhi.


Slowly I started to follow bloggers and people who tweeted random and funny stuffs. I un-followed dumb celebrities who promoted their carp movies and tried to keep a tab on people who tweeted good links about any aspects of life.


I started to tweet naturally. My total tweets in two years were around 77 to be precise and suddenly I was tweeting around 10 tweets a day and it was increasing daily. I began to interact with random people having crazy twitter handles and insanely awesome people. Some people were kind enough to follow me back. Some celebs and prominent journalists even replied to my tweets which I had never expected in my life. Some tweets were meaningful while others were usual chatting about random stuffs happening in neighbourhood.


The timeline is a fun place every time I logged in. Sometimes a fight crops up between two random people, someone’s account gets hacked and then all hell comes down to earth. Blog posts directed at someone are countered back to the same user. The topics trending on twitter are the most funny ones. The one that I vividly remember is #YoAdvaniSoOld.


Twitter is used actively for promoting a brand or any festival. All the big brands have presence on twitter. The makers of blackberry, RIM took a very bad beating during the BBM outrage so did Airtel. RIM and Airtel, both had to provide compensation to their customers in this competitive environment. It was the effect of twitter users forcing big companies to give in to demands of customers. I got free Airtel mobile internet for 3 months, that too on 3G network. Many brands take a very bad beating if large number of people are not satisfied with your service. If you are in service industry, buckle up!


Twitter played a very important role in the Arab spring uprising so did it play a bad part in London riots. Twitter is carving a very own place among the social networks.The 140 characters make you apprehensive about the formation of a sweet and short tweet that can be broadcasted to the world.
Being a tech addict, I got behind the scenes to actually know how twitter actually works. Twitter bases its application programming interface(API) off the Representational State Transfer (REST) architecture. REST architecture refers to a collection of network design principles that define resources and ways to address and access data. The architecture is a design philosophy, not a set of blueprints -- there's no single prescribed arrangement of computers, servers and cables. For Twitter, a REST architecture in part means that the service works with most Web syndication formats.Web syndication is a pretty simple concept: An application gathers information from one source and sends it out to various destinations. There are a few syndication formats used on the Web. Twitter is compatible with two of them -- Really Simple Syndication(RSS) and Atom Syndication Format (Atom). How does twitter store so many tweets? Go out and find out the answer yourself! 


Twitter sometimes waste your time. The more the time you spend on twitter, your productivity gets reduced(Not always) Some users are on twitter day and night. No limitation at all. People updating on twitter via FourSquare are the most irritable tweets you don’t want to read. Does the user want to get stalked by people by updating their own position every now and then! Twitter addiction is bad for health and sex life!


Twitter has carved itself a special position among the crowd of social networking sites that are jostling for publicity. Twitter has along way to go.


PS: Facebook gets a very bad beating via tweets. My twitter handle: @rohittalekar Follow me!

Half ticket

Yesterday, I was traveling in a state transport bus.

I was enjoying the cold morning wind and a pleasant ride.

A couple along with a child was sitting behind me. The child was on the lap of her mother.

The state transport bus was commanded by a fiery woman conductor for a good 400 kilometres run.

After taking a ticket from me, she suddenly went to the next seat and asked the innocent child- In which standard (grade) are you studying?

The child seated comfortably in the lap of his mother said-First Standard (1^st Std.)

Lady conductor- Two full and a half ticket will be issued since his age is greater than five years.

Mother- Madam, he goes in kindergarten. His age is less than 5 years, so no ticket.

Lady conductor- Don’t try to argue with me. Your child said his correct age and you will be issued a half ticket.

Hence, a long argument started between the mother and lady conductor. The lady conductor argued that if the flying squad comes for checking in the bus, you will be fined double the amount of the ticket. It’s a better option that you buy a half ticket or else it will prove a costly affair to your family. The mother was adamant that he goes to kindergarten. The fiery lady conductor pulled out two and a half ticket from the vending machine and the family had to pay for two and a half ticket.

In the whole situation, her husband was a mute spectator. Typical thinking of men-why to leap in a fight going on between two ladies? Better keep quiet. May be he knew that his son was indeed in first standard.

Imagine the boy beaten black and blue by his mother on reaching home for causing loss to their family and straining the finances of the home that the mother manages in today’s era of high inflation. After a bad beating, he would have finally understood what to say when the next time a bus conductor asks his age?

The fact is that we are being taught from childhood that being dishonest is indeed beneficial to the family. There goes in drain the moral of a story that you were taught in childhood- Honesty is the best policy. A family looks at the narrower picture that the money saved by not buying the half ticket and imbibes dishonesty in their own child. The bigger picture lies here is that they are spoiling their own child by imbibing wrong values in his mind. By saving a half ticket, they are causing loss to already cheap public transport that benefits them daily and saves lot of money for the whole family. A private bus operator charges double the amount for the same distance compared to state transport operator. A family first looks into their own need before looking into needs of the whole nation. The child dishonesty in early years of life will ultimately harm him in future even if he escapes next time without ticket traveling in the bus.

The problems with Indians are that we are dishonest. That leads to all vices in our society including corruption. A wallet dropped in the middle of road will never reach you and you will spend many days trying to get duplicate license and blocking your credit/debit card. This leads to loss of productivity which in general caused loss to the whole nation if you look at the bigger picture.

We Indians act like greedy people in general because sometimes the whole system causes us to behave in that way. The system will change if we start to think about our nation first. Someone has rightly said that passing Jan-Lokpal bill will not completely stem out corruption in our country. Changing our mind set will help root out corruption more than passing the Jan-Lokpal bill.

Remember what John Kennedy said to his countrymen-‘ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country’

I wish some of our dumb politicians make some sensible statements in public.