Of late every website wants you to spend more time on their site. Realizing the current craze of people is of posting 140 characters or less, every social media site worth its salt has put in a similar feature and asks you a question to type in something.

Here's the sites that I am on, want me to say...

- Twitter: What are you doing?

- Google Reader: Have some thoughts to share?
- Orkut: Set your status here
- GTalk Status: Availability and Status
- Blogger: Post Articles & Status updates
- FriendFeed: Posts and Updates

- Facebook: What's on your mind?

- Linkedin: What are you working on now?

- Yahoo! Mail / Y! Messenger: What are you doing right now?
- Flickr: Status updates
- Yahoo! 360: What are you doing now?

Depending on the region you are in, I am sure there are a number of other social sites that you might be on. A few popular ones that I could think of - MySpace, Wordpress, Typepad, Delicious, LiveJournal, AIM, hi5, myYearbook, Friendster and Photobucket...

Now, that's a lot of sites asking you to be on them and keep updating!

A few days back, I saw Hans Rosling visualize HIV data in this presentation at TED talks. I was looking for (to purchase or create) such a graphing tool for quite some time (incidentally, my requirement is a combo of heat map, bar/pie chart & motion chart). A little research revealed that Google purchased Trendalyzer, the graphing tool used in this presentation, from his company Gapminder in March 2006. A version of it has been integrated into Google Spreasheets as Motion Chart.

Luckily, I found some Indian Mobile-GSM subscriber data during the same time, cleaned it a bit, added some data and here's how the trend looks...

Gave this question a long thought during the rains a few days back and realized I had answered this question in the B School interview I gave during my Engineering!

Not in any particular order...

• Infrastructure
  
• Education
  
• Health Care

These are the 3 fields I would like to be in long term. And, regarding my interest in Technology? I guess, it would be the "basic" and "differentiating" enabler to whatever I do in any of these fields.

Managed to get a download of all travels I did using my Amex. It makes for an interesting analysis.

Chennai was my favorite destination (for software trouble shooting), Delhi (for business) and Hyderabad (surprise! for personal work)

The first week is spent planning. Then, I slog a lot during mid month and do end of the month target achievement trips.

Again mid week is when I travel the most.

And overall costs have been fairly stable I should say except for the occasional foreign visits.
With the overall costs / trip coming down.

Ever since status messages gained popularity to communicate thoughts and messages, I was looking for an option to sync my statuses across all social networks I was on.

First tried this...
Then realized that Ping already offered a nice service...
After a few days, realized that not every message is apt for everyone (across networks). Now trying for a better way to manage my updates based on classification of users. And I still have a few sites to integrate.

Update 30th July 2009:

• This page gives you info on how to link Google Reader & Twitter using Friendfeed. But, didn't find the options working for India.
  
• Twitter Feed has since upgraded and now offers better control of posting from Google Reader.

10th of June was a very hectic day for me! Started work at 8:45 AM and went on non-stop till 11 PM. At 8:00 PM, my computer gave up and crashed after spawning up innumerable windows! Tried closing as many as I could, gave up and had to finally reboot.



Unable to fathom why this happened. I guess its because of the updates that my company runs, but not sure. Any explanation of why this happened is welcome.

Then, a couple of hours later, this happened on Facebook! I guess this had something to do with the username setting opening up at that time.



Luckily, no errors occurred during work :)

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Having handled complaints and now experiencing trouble with a few service and product providers, made me think of the entire Complaint management cycle that a company should have...

A few basic thought starters in random order
- Are you selling a product or service?
- What is the value of this product or service? And what is the premium you are charging?
- Who is the complainant? Internal or External? If external, Customer or Consumer?
- How critical is complaint resolution and management to the brand equity of the product?
- What types of complaints will be your liability and to what extent will they be entertained?
- Till when (time) should you take the liability (and extent) of ensuring the quality of the offering?
- What is the resolution process? Internal and Externally visible processes. Time between processes?
- Is the treatment the same for both internal and external people?
- How long should the final response time be?
- How much of information on the complaint will be shared with the consumer?
- How do you measure satisfaction of the entire complaint resolution process?

Sunspots anyone. BTW, summer's over, take that ad out!