Been discussing about Facebook lately with many people and there is a lot of action on the internet as well in terms of how powerful it is and how it is transforming the web and the way we use the web.

I was originally using Orkut and before Facebook there were plenty of social networking websites such as MySpace, Hi5, Orkut, etc…I used to wonder why there is such a big deal about Facebook that everybody is talking about. After all it is a casual website where people mostly share photos and post things like “My cat ran away”, “Don’t feel like getting out of bed. Lol”, etc…In fact I read an article where one Silicon Valley Venture Capitalist called Facebook as nothing but a photo sharing website. And yeah, now there is a movie about Facebook and a book released. And one Russian investor bought 1% stake for $330 millions valuing Facebook at $30+ B. And that is about 1/3 of what Ford or GM is valued today (they are more than 100yrs old) in about 10yrs since it was built in a dorm. And yeah, the CEO is 28 years old and it has 500M users. Dot.

I was really very curious as to how such a simple service can be massively hit and why so many people love using it. When you really look at how users interact with Facebook, probably you get a hint why Facebook really matters and there are reasons why people spend like 40B minutes a month in Facebook (as claimed by FB engineering).

When I post a comment on one of my friends’ post, FB tells in my wall post that “I commented on his post” and it appears on others’ wall as “Raghu posted on that person’s post”. Similarly, if you look all around the way the posts, comments, photos, likes, videos appear in the feed you will notice things like “You and Amit like this post”, “Kumar shared a video”, “You and 330,000 people like Starbucks”. Even though it is just a way of letting the information display on a page, I think this is the whole deal about it. It gives a whole human feeling/touch in terms of saying “I like this”, “He said this”, etc…Now that’s how we interact with people and things in real world.

Few years ago, we used to maintain an address book online where we used to have the email ids of people. Now Facebook is our address book. And people in our friends list are real people. We used to have Yahoo IM friends like cooldude007, sweetgirl92. But in Facebook our contacts have a real identity. They are our college friends, co-workers, relatives, etc…And Facebook gives us a platform where we can interact with them easily. Now that was something missed out in Orkut, MySpace and a bunch of other Social Networking websites. They probably never got Social right.

And to realize the true power of Facebook and how it is transforming businesses, Honda India has a Facebook page where its customers regularly post complaints and Honda’s representatives respond mostly within a day. Now that’s a traditional manufacturing company being so active in Facebook. I read somewhere that a massive Colombian people revolution against the Guerillas started as a single Facebook page created by someone who was utterly angry against the Guerillas.

And Facebook can probably give a very tough life to Google too. Google today is probably the single company that has access to all the data that is getting created on the web. They make their money through the advertisements that they place on the web by crunching all these data created in the web. Google’s vision itself is about organizing information on the web. But the question is, what if all the information that is getting created in the web is created inside Facebook and Google has no access to it? For example, if you look at the companies that Google has bought in the past, like Blogger, Youtube, etc…these are products where internet users were creating data and Google wants all the data that is created on the web. What if people are creating Facebook Pages instead of blogging…Video links being posted in Facebook instead of Youtube. Facebook already has massive amount of organized data. Google invests so much amount of time in figuring out who created what kind of data, who is looking at what pages, etc…But Facebook already knows “Raghu likes this Page”, “Aamir likes Sachin Tendulkar”. It already has access to organized information and that is probably a big deal. These days, your competitor need not always be from your own domain. Microsoft would have never thought that Google will be its competitor and Sony wouldn’t have even imagined about Apple (iPod). Probably the same thing might happen for Google as well (Facebook).

And as a software developer, I am really amazed at the scale Facebook is operating and how their systems are built. I am already a fan of the “Facebook Engineering” page in Facebook. I am amazed at even imagining the kind of social graph that Facebook will be storing in their servers and how it will go through those graphs to tell me one small information like “You may also know Sunil” based on the “n” degree of connection in my social graph. And if I am a fan of “Sachin Tendular” page and there is a post on Sachin’s latest six in the Nagpur test, probably I and 330,000 other people would have “liked” the post. If it visit that page again and when Facebook says “You and 330,000 others like this” that is actually massive operation behind the scene at run time. Cannot imagine the data storage and caching that Facebook has built.

I am really amazed at how Facebook is actually transforming our lives and the social, political, economical impact that it can have in the future. And this is something that will be interesting to watch out as more and more people stay always connected.

1. Go and drop off your vehicle at a friend’s place in T.Nagar
2. Start walking towards the Mambalam railway station (through some crowded Ranganathan streets)
3. If you are a person who always has that extra space in your stomach to send something inside, you can send in some dosas and coffee on the way (20 mins killed and probably couple of minutes of your life too)
4. Reach Mambalam station and get a ticket to Park Station – this would cover almost half of the EMU (local train) route
5. Skip one train and catch the next one (20 extra mins killed)
6. Meanwhile you can check your weight in the weighing machine. Quietly ignore the number being shown on the card and start reading the “well-wishing” message on the back of the card
7. Get in to the train
8. On the way discuss on what’s to be done after reaching Park Station
9. Come up with the wonderful plan of getting MRTS ticket for Park to Velachery (That’s the complete route of MRTS)
10. Reach Park Station – by this time you would have killed another 20 – 25 mins
11. Try to figure out where this MRTS station in Park Town is – get info from nearby shops
12. Reach Park Town Station and get a ticket to Velachery
13. Wonderfully kill another 45 mins – the train goes through the heart of the city – Mylapore, City Centre, Mount Road (near the new Secretariat building), etc
14. Get down at Velachery and walk slowly towards the bus stop – on the way you may grab couple of Mirinda bottles
15. Reach the bus stop and leave couple of buses – reasons may vary from “too much crowd”, “don’t like the yellow color painting” to anything under the roof
16. Catch a bus to T.Nagar
17. In another 40 minutes types you would have reached T.Nagar back

Total distance covered – 40+ KMS
Total cost – 16 Rupees
Cost per KM – less than 50 paise

You can easily kill 3hours and if you get more creative can spend half a day like this. You can reach Central station and go till Ambattur side or may be Chengalpet. And once you reach there or on the way you can think of connecting routes and the next plan.

You end up with a happy feeling of going around the city and the best part of “no-dent-in-your-pocket”

…means “beloved” in malayalam and is a song in Vinnai Thandi Varuvaya. When VTV audio was released, I wasn’t really impressed with it immediately. But as the saying goes, you really got to listen to ARR songs again and again and it will fill you and elevate you completely.

This Aaromalae is another masterpiece from ARR. The song starts with a slow guitar and has a deep base in it. The wonderful part I liked is that the song depicts some kind of sadness and happiness alternatively. A deep cry of soul for the sadness and on the other side the person undergoes immense happiness for some kind of achievement – that’s what I could make out from the song. The song mixes Indian classical music and Rock towards the end. The song which starts with the slow guitar transforms towards heavy guitar in the end.

More reference to the song at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaromale and http://groups.yahoo.com/group/arrahmanfans/message/129768/

And I haven’t seen the film yet and will not be seeing it in all probability, but I guess this song appears when Simbhu gets a director chance from a producer and at the same time Trisha must have ditched him – and he must be traveling. A wild guess having known the crux of the movie.

Here is the lyrics with translation – takes me immediately to the beautiful world of Kerala

Mamalayaeri Varum Thennal (O Breeze, blowing through the mountains)
Puthu Manavalan Thennal (O Breeze, decked up like a bridegroom)
Palli Medayae Thottu Thalodi Kurushil Thozhuthu Varumbol (Coming after worshiping the cross at the altar)
Varavelpinu Malayalakkara Manasammatham Choriyum (The Land of Kerala would grant permission for welcoming it)
Aaromale…, Aaromale…, Aaromale…, Aaromale… (O Beloved… O Beloved… O Beloved… O Beloved…)

Swasthi Swasthi Su Muhurtham (On this very auspicious occasion)
Sumangali Bhava Manavatti (O Bride! May you be blessed with a long wedded life)
Swasthi Swasthi Su Muhurtham (On this very auspicious occasion)
Sumangali Bhava Manavatti (O Bride! May you be blessed with a long wedded life)
Shyama Rathri Than Aramanayil (In the inner sanctum of the dark evening…)
Maari Nilkayo Tharakame (O star! Why are you so reserved?)
Pulari Manjile Kathiroliyaay (Like a ray of light in the morning mist)
Akale Nilkayo Penmaname (Are you standing afar… my lady?)
Chanju Nilkuma Chillayil Nee, Chila Chilambiyo Poonkuyile (O Cuckoo! Did you shake the bent branch of the tree?)
Manchirathile, Malaroliye Thediyethiyo Poonthennal (Did the wind of fragrance come in search of the flames in the mud lamps?)

Swasthi Swasthi Su Muhurtham (On this very auspicious occasion)
Sumangali Bhava Manavatti (O Bride! May you be blessed with a long wedded life)

Aaromalae… Aaromalae… (O Beloved… O Beloved…)

Kadalinu Karayodiniyum Padan Sneham Undo? (Does the sea still brim with love to serenade the shore?)
Mezhukuthurikalayi Urukan Iniyum Pranayam Manasil Undo? (Is there still love in the heart to melt like candle wax?)

Aaromale…, Aaromale…, Aaromale… (O Beloved… O Beloved…O Beloved… O Beloved…)

Aaromale… Ohh… Ho ! (O Beloved…)

Swasthi Swasthi Su Muhurtham (On this very auspicious occasion)
Sumangali Bhava Manavatti (O Bride! May you be blessed with a long wedded life)

Swasthi Swasthi Su Muhurtham (On this very auspicious occasion)
Sumangali Bhava Manavatti (O Bride! May you be blessed with a long wedded life)

Shyama Rathri Than Aramanayil (In the inner sanctum of the dark evening…)
Maari Nilkayo Tharakame (O star! Why are you so reserved?)
Pulari Manjile Kathiroliyaay (Like a ray of light in the morning mist)
Akale Nilkayo Penmaname (Are you standing afar… my lady?)
Chanju Nilkuma Chillayil Nee, Chila Chilambiyo Poonkuyile (O Cuckoo! Did you shake the bent branch of the tree?)
Manchirathile, Malaroliye Thediyethiyo Poonthennal (Did the wind of fragrance come in search of the flames in the mud lamps?)

Swasthi Swasthi Su Muhurtham (On this very auspicious occasion)
Sumangali Bhava Manavatti (O Bride! May you be blessed with a long wedded life)
Swasthi Swasthi Su Muhurtham (On this very auspicious occasion)
Sumangali Bhava Manavatti (O Bride! May you be blessed with a long wedded life)

Aaromale… Aaromale… (O beloved… O beloved)

Oh ho…

It’s almost 12 hrs after the entire internet / TV spoke/emailed/FBed/tweeted about Sachin creating history. Let the record speaks for itself – more than 20yrs in crease, closing in on century of centuries, etc, etc…This is not about that…

After all these records and the benefits that it brings along with it, Sachin now is one of the highest tax payers of the country…Has enough money for generations to come, can afford a lifestyle that anybody would aspire for, access to all the gadgets in the world (a Ferrari 10 years back!!!)…Talk about respect / fame / influence – the whole nation worships him… Simply put, he would have got almost everything that one can get in this world (at least the materialistic ones). Still he comes to the crease for every other match and takes each match seriously… Still keeps himself fit and enjoys playing for the country.

He is such a nightmare to all the bowlers despite the fact that a whole new generation of bowlers have come. The whole game has changed so much – it is so aggressive now, the schedules drain you out, the fitness requirements are more demanding, etc… Yuvraj or Dhoni do not look as fit as him…And many of the team members today and the aspiring cricketers have many things as motive beyond just playing cricket – money, fame, lifestyle, etc…But he is somebody who is still playing for couple of important reasons – the passion for the game and the opportunity to represent the country.

If you are to apply this to another field or a job, what would one typically do after he/she gets so much? They would definitely like to retire and take things easy. I know some of my friends who are ready to retire now (at 28yrs!!!)

It is not just Sachin for that matter. Why would Steve Jobs still come to office? Why would Ratan Tata work so hard for Nano – he has got billions by just inheritance. Why would still Maniratnam make movies and why would kamal still act?

Just one reason – passion and enjoying what you do.

It is so important that you should do what you like or what you enjoy the most. If you do not know what that is – make an effort to find it at least.

ARHS is the abbreviation for Amplified Reverse Honking System that I am proposing for modern day Indian traffic.

Objective
As Indians, amongst of the varied things that we enjoy doing in our roads, like, Sighting, Shouting, Stunting, Spitting, Pissing, all of us enjoy this thoroughly – Honking. This proposed system is to make the best use of Honking for the Honkers, The Honked and the rest.

Design
1. An indigenously built device will be embedded in to the steering wheel (or somewhere near) of every car, truck, buses, autos, share autos, call taxis
2. The device will have multi-frequency sound emitter, amplifier, some processing logic components, GPS integration.
3. The device main purpose is to detect if the driver just honked – if true, emit at least (2-n)X of the same sound (why same sound is explained later) inside the automobile, aimed at both the ears of the driver. I call this sound as “Honk of the Monk (HOM)”. This also sounds similar to pom (of pom-pom, aka horn)

What follows below is the detailed requirement and logic based on which the sound emitted will differ dynamically according to external stimulated factors, past history and the Indian ways of doing things.

1. The device is actually an AI (will take help of James Cameron) and has got a self learning / adapting system. Every honk by the driver along with other parameters like place of honking (using GPS), time, traffic density, distance from the signal / crossing / junction, type of road (heavy traffic, highway) will be recorded by the device
2. If the driver honks during busy traffic hours (7AM – 11AM and 5PM – 10PM) then a sharp HOM at 3X will be emitted from the device. During busy traffic hours, it is expected that the traffic movement would be slower and the driver is expected to know this common sense
3. Similarly the device keeps track of the vehicle movement (GPS) and if the vehicle is in areas like “Madhya Kailash”, “Vadapalani”, “Koyambedu Jn”, etc where traffic jams are expected anytime then same logic as above would apply
4. There is a monthly max limit of honking that is allowed beyond which the device starts working on alternate routes, such as
a. Starts monitoring the blood pressure and other vital params of the driver and says “If you honk again, you will hear a 4X HOM which is very very different from all the ones you have heard before. This noise can instantly boost up your BP to higher levels there by increasing your chances of finding answers for your life such as where you will go after this life?”
b. The device will keep changing the FM station making the driver to listen to only Advt.
c. When the driver is engaged in some conversation with co-passengers it would start answering automatically like “yes, oh noo, no-no-no,mmmhmmmm,abs-f#$king-lutely, etc”. This is the Natural Language Processing ability of the device – will use some Google Engineers for this
5. The device acts more like the God’s books – you can negate your wrong doings by doing some right things. If you do not honk for a day, it would automatically cut down one of your honking entry
6. As a bonus-goodwill feature, if the driver didn’t honk for quite some good amount of time then a registration number appears in the driver’s dashboard. This number is the nearest, next available driver who is the notorious-top-honker. The good driver has the option of going in front of that driver’s car, pissing him off and making him hear that HOM. The onboard device will help in navigating to that vehicle. On successful pissing off the other driver, the same can be updated as status message in FaceBook.
7. The device syncs up the data real time with its distributed server and the data gets replicated in real time for multiple backup and availability. We will use Nandan Nilekani to design such a huge backend system. The data would also be tied to the UID system.
8. The tying-to-UID can help in getting through people who change cars and think they can get rid of their past. Next car will be imported with all the past data.

Some part of the code will be released as API, on top of which users can build FaceBook apps. Extensions can be built where the device can start abusing the driver in the driver’s own language

Now, on why the same sound but amplified version is emitted from the device? Some of these crazy people have these “dog-clearing-its-throat” kind of sound kept as their horn. They should definitely hear it how irritating it is for others.

I am also in the process of designing something similar for motorcycles / bikes especially the TVS-XL / M80 sounds. There is a design complexity where the vehicle is actually not an enclosed one.

Last Monday I made sure I reminded my bosses that this weekend (26-27) and the next have to be a long weekend due to pooja holidays and Gandhi Jayanthi. We just don’t have a leave calendar (start up!!!) 🙂 So last Saturday I was just lazying around at home (had some neck pain and decided not to step out of house). Towards the evening we were expecting guests for the kolu…Our family friend was expected to come and yeah he came just before the dinner time 🙂 It was nice to meet him after quite some time (read years) and generally we were socializing…This family friend has two kids and one of them is doing her Std 10. I wasn’t like really talking to her but my parents were pulling her leg a lot… By then one of my sister’s friend had also joined for the kolu. Soon there were lots of talking and my mom asked this kid to sing a song. Looks like she has just started planning to learn 🙂 But my sis’ friend readily accepted and started singing a carnatic song…It was a song about lord muruga and it was really nice…The modulations and the genuine interest she had in singing it was definitely impressive…

Sooner it was time for this family friend to bid adieu and I accompanied them to the near by but stop…I got them a auto to drop them at the next bus stand from where they have a direct bus to their place. When they got in to the auto and I waved them goodbye, this girl was waving her hand like anything with full smiles and saying “Bye anna”. She had this innocent smile on her face and she was waving her hand till the auto went out of our sight…

Towards the end of a boring day, these two small incidents definitely made my day. As I walked down back to my house the thought that struck me was that may be we (I and most of the people I know) are trying to find happiness by going after things like car, house, lots of disposable income, weekend getaways, etc…But I feel you get this real happiness in small things that happen in your day-to-day life. We mostly ignore such things and take it for granted. We want to buy that expensive mobile phone (N97?, E75?, HTC diamond?, G1?), a home theatre (25K Onkoyo?, 1.1L Premium Digital?, 2.5L Klepsch?), house (3 BR?, 4BR pent house?, independent villa?), car (punto?, City? Q7?)…As you see there are just no limits to each of these things that we generally chase…

But the real happiness lies in things like the smell of the freshly baked bread as you cross that bakery, giving a bike ride to that person desperately looking for it on a rainy day, holding the elevator for another 4-5 seconds as someone is running to catch it, giving a smile back and saying “thanks nna” to that security guard of a mall who directed you to another route as the usual one is water logged, catching up with the maintenance guy in your company and seeing that smile (as nobody else talks to him due to hierarchical stuff) when you are done with the conversation, telling your mom that the vada she made is really good (even if she makes it good every other time she cooks)…these are things that really matter…

Everyone would have heard “The Good, the bad and the ugly” theme music and I am no exception. But I never got a chance to see the movie until recently. No doubt the movie was pretty good. Every one played their part to the best and I liked Tuco’s character the most. And yeah Clint Eastwood was the man of full style, I could make out where Rajnikanth derived all his style elements from 🙂

Of all the things in the movie, what impressed me the most is the music. Most part of the movie has lots of silence in the scenes and it is the BGM (Background music) that fills them and adds to the mood. For example, towards the end of the movie, this Tuco reaches a massive graveyard and starts searching. This scene is actually pretty long and runs for about 3 – 4 mins…

Just put on a good ear/headphones and watch this video. The way the music progresses from slow to a fast one clearly would bring out what’s going on the actor’s head. Now that’s exactly what I am talking about and this happens throughout the movie. And I liked it the most at 0.26 of this video where the piano, trumphet (?) and a chime like music comes together. I would just hear to it repeatedly…

That was just a sample. There are many such scenes in the movie where the music definitely impresses. And I think this movie as such is a perfect example for all the best things coming together. Like the acting by the three lead characters, the camera, the narration, the music and editing, etc…I believe everyone who was involved in this film making would have put in their best to give this wonderful product.

Today, I had to book a ticket for by uncle and this was the first time I used redbus.in and I am pretty impressed with the service. I gave all my details including the credit card information and clicked on final confirmation and I get a error screen saying that there is a technical glitch. And I was like another failed attempt in my online booking (after the ever famous irctc). But the error screen gave me a “Case Number” and requested me to contact the customer support. I immediately dialed the number and bang…the rep picks up in first ring. He asks for my details and says there is a problem with the “Travels” side; he would check and call me back. In 5 mins he calls me and says the “Travels” side problem will get solved in 10 mins, he will do the booking for me and call me back. Meanwhile I got busy with my work and he calls me in the next 10 minutes. He says he has done the booking for me and I would be receiving my ticket in email. I refreshed my email account and the ticket was there.

OK, may be whatever said above is expected out of any paid service. But me being part of a startup and getting a product done from scratch, I could really appreciate the amount of effort and thought those guys have put in.

1. The user interface was pretty simple. Max three screens till I reached my final screen (even if its an error screen :))
2. I did my booking without creating an account with redbus. Whenever I clicked continue in the first two screens, I was expecting the login / signup screen to be presented. But was surprised that the booking went through without that. Because I don’t like the idea of signing up at so many places and remembering different login and passwords.
3. When there was an error, I immediately got an email saying “We took money out of your card but we couldn’t book the ticket. But hey, here is the cash coupon for same amount. Use this to do your booking in future”.
4. And wow, I never had an experience with a customer care which actually called me back. And they did the booking by themselves and also updated me on the same.
5. They have tied up with so many travels in India and it certainly is not an easy task.
6. The CEO of that company is of 27-28 years of age. I met him at a start up meet in Bangalore.

So on a whole it was a wonderful experience for me and I could really appreciate it from both a customer and developer point of view. And I can try out these in my company 🙂

Wolfram is the new computational knowledge search engine that has become public alpha yesterday. This one was projected to be the Google killer next gen search engine and yesterday morning I tried it for some time. First thing, there is a difference between the way Wolfram searches its database from Google does. Everybody knows Google does a keyword search on all the web pages it has crawled, cached and kept in its servers. What wolfram does is answer natural language questions instead of keywords, computes it real time and produces the results. The results are not just website links but presented in text and graphical form including graphs and charts. Some of the queries that I ran include:
When did man land on moon? What is Wolfram? Who is the american president? sin 30 / cos 30, What is the value of pi? square root of 2, pottasium nitrate, what is laughing gas, etc…

It was amazing to see the way results are presented for mathematical values. For example, when you look for the value of pi, it gives the decimal approximation (with option of showing more and more digits), series and integral representation, etc…When you search for location (where is bangalore) it brings up Indian map and shows Bangalore (Google does too, and satellite image link takes to Google maps :)) and when i ask for stock comparison (Goog Yhoo) it shows a lot of information about the two companies (not in Google). So pretty neat for all these queries. But for natural language queries, which Wolfram is trying to address, I think it is not there quite yet. Queries like “When did man land on the moon”, “Who shot kennedy”, “What happened on September 11, 2001” it was not able to produce results. Or did i read Wolfram wrong? I am not sure. But if it is trying to address natural language queries I expect these questions to be answered.

In my opinion, I don’t think Wolfram can be a Google killer. Both would co-exist. But what Wolfram has started is a very big step in terms of answering questions in natural language and real time computing of the answers. There should be millions of lines of code and a wonderful algorithm behind Wolfram which actually does this. And the way the results are shown are also pretty good. One can interpret and arrive at conclusion easily. Keywords search is still very much required until we build systems that can understand all of human queries. And that day would be the beginning of the Judgement Day when computers understand us a whole lot better 🙂 (Yeah I am in the mood of watching Terminator: Salvation :))