Broadband Blog

Ring Side view of Indian Telecom Circus

Broadbandblog: Daily updates?

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I have experimented with the tone and tenor of the write ups here. It’s impossible to update on a daily basis although RSS as a delivery mechanism is very powerful in it’s context; it’s easy to set up feeds to keep the updated regularly.

However, I personally feel that the sector as a whole has not evolved to a meaningful extent to report on the events. Vodafone has been dragged to the court. Airtel has botched up it’s offerings. 2G scam has caught up with its final actors. However, this is still the “tip of the iceberg”. A lot goes behind the scenes and some unlucky few get caught up in the swirl. Indeed, they are just minor fronts for the systematic loot.

Writing on all this is a chore. It’s pathetic to repeat the same thing ad-nauseum.

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Hence, I prefer to write when I get a sudden burst of “inspiration”. This blog has definitely morphed from it’s rigid confines of Indian Telecom to something more of a “digital narrative”.

I could also write on the operators elsewhere; unrestricted data does not flow uniformly. Yet, in most of the developing countries, scarcity is something that is engineered. It holds no relevance for most of us to know about what AT&T is doing with it’s T- Mobile acquisition. Further, we have distanced ourselves, not only from the , but also from reporting any sponsored events. I routinely get invitations (off and on) but they are mostly from clueless PR executives.

Daily updates is beyond the scope. Writing is a passion and needs to be stoked. Yet, there is no point in being pointless either!

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Facebook and social media: Overblown AND overhyped

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I have argued against excessive on social media; it is a stupid decision to hail Facebook and Twitter as the “next destination”. This is the problem with the marketing executives either from the companies or handset manufacturers. For example, it’s not difficult to miss the blurb that accessing is “easy” by a “single click button”.

The experience on ground is different. Let’s assume, for a moment that there are over 600 million users. How many of them are active? What is the “engagement matrix” on the web site? What is the actual cost retrieved by

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Facebook from it’s advertisers; i.e. how effective is on the platform? Is engagement really effective? I mean, it’s to see links from Facebook friends streaming in Bing (which has implemented the feature and live on to crow that they are up in the pissing game with ).

If you dissect the issue further, accumulating a number of “likes” on the platform does not mean that it likely to translate into action. I was moved by this interesting blog post and they

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gave explicit reasons why they are moving away from facebook hype: (emphasis mine)

 

1. The Facebook API changes too often. The plug-ins are buggy, the changes without notice rather often, and there are too many rules constraining how developers can use the API in building applications. As a platform, it is unstable, period. ……

2. Facebook is overhyped. Personally, even though Facebook actually has 600 million active users, developers still tend to overestimate how many people actually 1) have a Facebook account, 2) use it regularly, and 3) are comfortable using it as a third-party authentication method. Many consumers across different niche markets are simply not familiar with how Facebook works; developing applications marginalizes this segment of users, who may be substantial in number.

3. Facebook is still mainly social for most, and exclusively social for some. We are still not completely convinced that Facebook can be an effective platform for any commercial activity…….Of all the new variants of ecommerce, the one that might actually take off is, in our view, mobile commerce.

More interestingly, Facebook and other “leaders” are opposing the proposed bill to protect the user’s privacy. I am not sure how this is going to pan out but this is good enough indication that some sense has dawned to protect the users from advertising onslaught.

California could force Facebook and other social-networking sites to change their protection policies under a first-of-its-kind proposal at the state Capitol that is opposed by much of the Internet industry……social-networking sites would have to allow users to establish their privacy settings…

….like who could view their profile and what information would be public to everyone on the – when they register to join the site instead of after they join. Sites would also have to set defaults to private so that users would choose which information is public

These measures would not apply to India or it’s privacy laws though I heard they have been tightened in recent times; the impact on end users has not been discussed.

There’s one more compelling reason to avoid reliance on Facebook; falling . Countries that were on the path to early adoption is seeing a fall in the traffic (perhaps an indication of slow and waning interest).

The average decline over months has yet to become negative, though. There are other possible factors at work, too, such as bugs in the Facebook ad tool that we get this data from…. in order to identif the long-term directions here is crucial for planning how to capitalize on Facebook’s success, or lack thereof.

It is most likely to be argued that would perhaps be a “fantastic growth opportunity” but is corporate . Even if the “dark populations” are lighted up, in absence of aggressive promotion of localized content, it is unlikely to see a massive expansion. It seems that most of the companies keep their “outposts” in India to hire cheap labor for “translation” efforts. It’s not a generalized statement, but thats the reality. Again, there is NO reliable data to break up the traffic specific to the sites or universally agreed metrics to track traffic to popular sites (however, Opera Mobile‘s stats are likely to be more reliable).

Where do we go from here? It is important not to rely completely on the “social aspect” of the net. It is a matter of time before it fades away for perhaps a better “personalized approach” (more so as matures and we have better ontology) to deal with. That also comes as a rider but there is no “perfect ideal approach”. This is something that the next generation and advertising agencies should keep in mind before they can actually deliver better “”.

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Mainstream Media: Unable to grasp digital trends

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This post, was in part motivated by Shyam’s incisive commentary on FirstPost. It is promoted by Network18.

First Post primarily remains an “aggregator” of news; perhaps the underlying motivation is SEO tricks of identifying the trending topics and create topical interest by paying “journalists” to create blogs around it. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work like this. Trying to covert the into “unique visitors”, cross promoting it on other channels and identifying the “trends” to write on issues smacks of Huffington Post‘s tactics.

I personally believe that much of criticism that stems for Huffington Post comes from the mainstream media; possibly they are unable to comprehend the huge gains that this site has made in a short span of time. The owner has been able to do a web alone business, “aggregate” or scrape content, pay out dimes for it’s star bloggers and more important, get the $$$. Hence, it tends to get the ire of the “purists”.

, of course, wish to replicate a proven model. No one, wants to adapt to a new order or invest serious resources in building up a web property that has a lasting value proposition. Top of the mind recall is Techmeme and is my first

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stop everyday in Google Reader to identify the breaking stories as it happens (it utilizes RSS feeds in the background; you could search for it’s leaderboard OPML file on their site to read the stories). A simple implementation (e.g. Webmeme) would have sufficed and promoted it’s journalists to independently of the constraints of “”.

How is this really concerned with the ethos of the blog? Well, for starters, is all useless hype. Twitter and are not here to stay; Orkut was a huge failure and is growing without a service model. It still doesn’t know about advertising nor is

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there any reasonable model to influence it’s evolutiton. Nevertheless, in this internet access challenged country, this is a huge let down.

Perhaps the people behind the product are blissfully unaware of access dominating the landscape (I doubt whether they have a interface optimized) or of the “niche audience” that would be attracted to something like this. However, a cursory glance at the written articles leaves a lot to be desired.

(Highly recommended write up).

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