Modi asks Facebook to modify news feed for Indians to suggest “achchhe din” are here

Modi asks Facebook to modify news feed for Indians to suggest “achchhe din” are here

Thursday, July 3, 2014 / No Comments

Soon after coming to know about Facebook’s secret psychological experiment, in which they found that showing overwhelmingly positive or negative posts into members’ news feed affect their mood accordingly, Modi government has approached the social networking giant to show only those posts to Indians that suggest “achchhe din” and induces them into positive mood.

“I can make you happy or sad”

Although there is no official announcement regarding the news, government sources tell Faking News that last night Prime Minister Narendra Modi called up Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to discuss the issue.
“Modi ji is very impressed with findings of Facebook’s experiment, and he sees great value in it. In his half an hour call to Zuckerberg, Modi first explained to him the models of development that Facebook could employ, and then asked the Facebook co-founder to help him realize his dreams of achchhe din for Indians,” a PMO official confirmed.
As part of his achchhe din plan, Modi government is planning to bring back the “feel good” factor that Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s government had created. And for this, Modi has sought help of Zuckerberg.
“Prime Minister has requested Zuckerberg to avoid showing inflation related news and other such negative posts into an Indian users’ news feed, because as per ‘Emotional Contagion’ experiment findings, that will consequently result into negative mood and thus no ‘feel good’ factor,” the PMO official explained.
Sources say that Modi government, which is facing bad press for recent hike in train fares and fuel prices, wants to bring down public anger by using indirect ways.
“A large part of population, which makes the loudest noises about governance issues, is quite active on social networks, and they spend a considerable amount of time on Facebook. If they are continuously exposed to positive news and posts, such as news reports about stronger rupee, rising SENSEX, cute puppies, and Bollywood gossips, it will certainly make them less cynical and they will stop criticizing the government,” explained famous psychologist Dr Manovigyani Batra.
Latest reports suggest that Zuckerberg is analyzing Modi’s proposal and discussing it with his market research team to know how beneficial it will be to have people always happy while visiting Facebook.
“A small experiment about this achchhe din posts could be carried out. We will see whether a user is more vulnerable to click on an advertisement in a positive or negative state of mind,” a Facebook source told Faking News, “If the result says positive, then Zuck may accept Modi’s offer.”
Meanwhile after this story was broken by Faking News, Congress has blamed Facebook for conspiring to create a negative wave against them, which played a major role in their election debacle.
“It is not the fault of Rahul Gandhi,” Congress leader Kapil Sibal claimed, “It appears that Facebook had experimented on whole of India and had shown only negative news during 2012 and 2013 as part of their ‘Emotional Contagion’ experiment, resulting in negative mood among voters.”

Facebook Messenger Finally Gets An iPad Version

Facebook Messenger Finally Gets An iPad Version

/ No Comments

Three years after Facebook acquired Beluga and turned it into Messenger for smartphones, its dedicated chat app today got a version specially designed for iPad rather than just running as an enlarged iPhone app. Messenger for iPad features a multi-window interface showing a list of threads and your current conversation at the same time. Messenger had over 200 million users as of April across devices, but now Apple fans can mobile message on a larger screen.
Messenger for iPad comes with most of Messenger features, including stickers, easy group chat navigation, and VOIP calling. It’s only missing the latest additions, including the split-screen selfie camera and tap-and-hold quick video recordings. Facebook hasn’t mentioned anything about an Android tablet version.
The app will surely be nice for Messenger users who are tired of having to juggle their iPhone while working or playing on their iPad. If you have both Facebook and Messenger installed on your iPad, tapping the Messages button in Facebook automatically fast-switches you to Messenger. You can then tap bar at the top of Messenger to return to Facebook.

Getting more devices supported for Messenger is important to Facebook’s long-term goal of disrupting SMS and owning the mobile chat space. While Facebook is known for its News Feed and profiles, people only spend so much time a day sifting through broadcasted content. Direct, private messaging has become a constant part of many people’s days, though.
Messaging is also intimately connected to the concept of social networking and your social graph, which is why Facebook is so desperate to own it. Chat is a foundation that other social interactions can be built upon. That’s a big reason Facebook spent a stunning $19 billion to acquire WhatsApp. Beyond just being a free SMS replacement that now has 500 million users around the world, it also included a status update feature that Facebook surely feared could steal attention from its feed.

For now, Facebook doesn’t make any money directly from Messenger. Instead Facebook uses it to promote platform lockin. More devices means more people locked in. But Facebook has plenty of opportunities to monetize its dedicated chat app, and it recently poached PayPal president David Marcus to become VP of its Messaging Products.
At the time, Facebook said Marcus has “a track record of building great products and finding creative ways to turn them into great businesses.” That implies Messenger could soon be a source of revenue. Facebook could follow other messaging businesses like Line by selling stickers or the ability to upload you own designs. It could also earn money from movie studios, toy makers, others by offering free branded sticker packs like its recent Lego Minifigures pack.
An even bigger opportunity could be right in Marcus’ wheelhouse: payments. Messenger could facilitate peer-to-peer payments and take a small cut to make money. Right now, people around the world pay exorbitant fees, ranging from 1.5% all the way up to 20% for remittance — transferring money to family or business partners in other countries. Migrant workers often use remittance to send money home using services like Western Union, MoneyGram, Telegiros, or Remit2India. If Facebook could undercut these services, they could claim a healthy profit while reducing fees for disadvantaged laborers trying to support their families.
The iPad is likely too expensive of a device for people who would benefit the most from a cheaper Facebook Messenger remittance service. But each additional Messenger user grows the app’s network effects and gives Facebook more reason to invest in innovation and monetization for chat.

Bosses use social media more than employees

Bosses use social media more than employees

Tuesday, July 1, 2014 / No Comments

Bosses are more likely to use social media for private purposes during working hours than their subordinates, a new study has found.

Bosses are more likely to use social media for private purposes during working hours than their subordinates, a new study has found.
The research from the University of Bergen (UiB), Norway, shows that managers are more critical of private use of social media at work. However, middle managers and top executives are most negative to private social media use at work.
“It is very interesting that top executives, who are negative to private web-surfing during working hours, are the ones who surf the most for private purposes when at work,” said Postdoctoral Fellow Cecilie Schou Andreassen at UiB’s Department of Psychosocial Science.
She suggests that this can be explained by the fact that top executives have longer working hours, and that work and leisure are much more integrated than it is for employees.
“It is likely that managers are worried about reductions in output and financial loss as a result of use of private social media among their employees,” said Andreassen.
About 11,000 Norwegian employees participated in the study.
The study also found that younger employees use social media for private purposes more than older employees do.
Men browse the internet more for private purposes than women do during working hours. People with higher education are the most active social media users, researchers said.
Singles are more active on social media than those in relationships. Extrovert and nervous people are more active online, they found.
“Social media probably has a greater social function for singles than it has for people in relationships,” said Andreassen.
Those with higher education and socioeconomic status are likely more familiar with computer use, which may explain why they are more active online than those with lower education.
Their work situation may also provide more opportunities to engage in private use of social media at work compared to those with lower education.
“The finding may also reflect that people with a high socioeconomic status, are not as afraid to lose their job as those in low-status jobs,” said Andreassen.
The study also showed that people who are outgoing, so-called extrovert personalities, and neurotic people spend more time online and on social media for personal purposes during working hours than their counterparts.
People who are organised and punctual, however, spend the least time online for personal purposes during working hours, researchers said.

Get to Know Your Neighbourhood Better with Shout, the Locality Based Social App

Get to Know Your Neighbourhood Better with Shout, the Locality Based Social App

/ No Comments

An app that lets you shout anything and everything to social media users within 1 km radius, Shout is the new locality based app from Idea Labs. If you are wondering if it really is shouting, your updates are termed as shout. A tool for self-expression and interaction, Shout doesn’t ask you to add people to your circles or wait for their friend requests to be approved.

Shout was created by Ashutosh Vikram, Thirukumaran Nagarajan and Sharath Loganathan, alumni of IIM,Kozhikode.
Shout, Echo and Shut up

So basically a shout is your update. If a receiver likes it, he can echo it which increases the visibility of your shout. With each echo, the radius of your shout increases. If he doesn’t like it or disturbs him, it be can be made to shut up. Shut up is used to differentiate noise from shout. There is a comments section as well where you can talk and interact with fellow users.

The audience is default, set by the geographical position you are in. If you want to reach a particular radius, you could move and set a new one.

Stay connected to your neighbourhood

This is a huge relief. You dont have to necessarily add friends and maintain circles.You could ask for help or even say hi to a person in the specific geographical region.You could also find  the nearest restaurant or complain about the bad roads. Essentially it is a good way to stay connected to your neighbourhood.

The Alter Ego
We hardly reveal things or shout what we want to when our identity is disclosed. In this app, you could choose an option called the Alter Ego where you can mask your personality and choose to be someone else, probably with a catchy nickname. It is an opportunity to give a virtual personality to your alter ego.
Launched in April 2014, the app has around 2000 downloads so far and is being used in over 10 countries. With a user-friendly interface, Shout lets you sign up with your Google or Facebook account.
The app does not use GPS oriented location but selects it from the network. Hence the battery drain is very low. Currently focused on building a huge customer base, the team expects to monetize by creating a local marketplace within the application.
Currently available in Android, the app will soon be in the iOS platform. Click here to download the app.
There are various other apps with the same name and similar features, some even with a shouting range of 20kms! Will this app stand out?

The Only Lesson Product Managers Can Learn From Orkut : Nobody Enters A Dirty Cafe

The Only Lesson Product Managers Can Learn From Orkut : Nobody Enters A Dirty Cafe

/ No Comments

A lot of us would recall our first experience of an actual social network (not counting Yahoo chats) in Orkut, which also won the MTV Youth Icon Award in 2007!

For a lot of us, it was the first working version of a FOAF (Friend Of A Friend) algorithm. Orkut led to a lot of discovery of friends and ‘real-life’ contacts.

Orkut was the first real product that brought social networking to India and very soon, it meant for social networking what Google meant for search. “Orkutting” caught on as a term. One must note that this rarely happens in the internet industry.

With such a large clutter of sites to choose from, a particular site rarely defines its category in a way that Orkut did in India. When a site starts defining a category, it is extremely difficult for another site to, not just overtake it in terms of usage but also start defining the category.

In fact, by 2008 Orkut was at its peak. The social network had conquered India and Brazil, two big emerging markets that mattered the most.

And then, it all fell apart.

India Search Trends for Orkut.

What Really Happened With Orkut?

Did Facebook kill Orkut?

Well, actually not (read this analysis when Facebook was just about to make inroads into the Indian market). The truth is that Orkut was never big in US of A, and Facebook was more focused on killing MySpace than Orkut.

So who killed Orkut?
Orkut actually killed Orkut.
And here is how.

Think Metrics. Think SLA

In consumer business, SLAs are not just about hard metrics (average spent time/average engagement), but a lot about soft metrics.

For example, in its early days, Facebook just ensured that the site’s uptime is the most important factor to take care of.

“Let me tell you the difference between Facebook and everyone else, we DON”T CRASH EVER! If those servers are down for even a day, our entire reputation is irreversibly destroyed! Users are fickle, Friendster has proved that. Even a few people leaving would reverberate through the entire userbase. The users are interconnected, that is the whole point. College kids are online because their friends are online, and if one domino goes, the other dominos go, don’t you get that? [Read : So What Exactly Is A Product]

How Orkut Could Have Saved Orkut?

Well, the soft metrics for Orkut lied in controlling spam.

Orkut was massively attacked by spammers, but the team never cared about it.

Nobody Wants To Enter A Dirty Cafe

Period.

Nobody wants to enter a dirty cafe which smells bad and has spooky characters welcoming you.

This is what really happened with Orkut, which was marred with spams and privacy woes.

In fact, this is the basic premise of Broken Windows theory :

Consider a building with a few broken windows. If the windows are not repaired, the tendency is for vandals to break a few more windows. Eventually, they may even break into the building, and if it’s unoccupied, perhaps become squatters or light fires inside.

Or consider a pavement. Some litter accumulates. Soon, more litter accumulates. Eventually, people even start leaving bags of refuse from take-out restaurants there or even break into cars.

This is exactly what happened with Orkut. And then, the network efffect played its role (you left because your friends left).

Don’t let it happen to your product. Clean it up!

Pipes Is A Clever App That Lets You Track Any Topic You Care About

Pipes Is A Clever App That Lets You Track Any Topic You Care About

/ No Comments

Prepare to further isolate yourself in a world containing only the news and information you care about. A new mobile application called Pipes has just launched a simple tool to help you find and follow any topic, from Apple or Google to the FIFA World Cup, or whatever else you want.
The app is similar in some ways to short-form news reading apps like Circa or Yahoo’s News Digest, or alerting tools like recent TechCrunch Disrupt participant Notivo, as it’s also designed to offer mobile-friendly access to news and information. But in Pipes’ case, the app isn’t about offering you bite-sized summaries, but instead provides feeds of popular articles on the subject matter at hand, as well as tweets, and even the item’s Wikipedia page, for reference.
According to co-founder Vinay Anand, who built Pipes along with Siddarth Goliya and a small team of mainly 20-year-old engineers, Pipes’ backend today crawls data from over 10,000 sources every hour, allowing you to track just about anything.
“The two of us really felt the need to personalize news,” explains Anand. “We really feel that people have specific things they want to track and want to be alerted on it and that’s exactly what Pipes allows you to do,” he says.

How It Works

Pipes is well-designed and straightforward to set up and use. From the main screen, you just click a plus (“+”) button to add a new pipe (aka, topic). You then enter your search term or keyword, and tap to add it to your homepage. You can also shake your phone for a suggestion of trending pipes to add, which is fun, if a bit less practical.
After adding your topics, each appears in its own section on the main page, waiting to be explored. You tap into these for lists of links to news articles, which pull in the full article’s text in most cases via RSS feeds. From here, you can also bookmark items as well as share them via text, WhatsApp, Email, Google+, Twitter and Facebook.

You can also customize push notifications for your pipes, while controlling their frequency.
Separate sections point you to the topic’s Wikipedia page and related tweets. I don’t care for the decision to only pull in hashtagged tweets here, however, as I find there’s a lot more content discussed on Twitter than the tweets from those devoted to hashtagging everything they say. Plus, Pipes’ selection of tweets feels curated and stale, as it didn’t update with a pull-to-refresh gesture during testing. The tweets aren’t time-stamped either, so their only purpose now it seems is to give you a sense of the conversation, or to point you to other articles that may have been missed in the “News” section.
Meanwhile, a “Top Stories” section on the Pipes main screen lets you break out of your own little world a bit to see other popular news items.

 

The overall look-and-feel of Pipes and the functionality it provides is compelling. However, ultimately the app will have to face down other more popular competitors like Flipboard or Bloglovin for casual news readers, or RSS feed-reading utilities like Feedly or Reeder for hard-core news consumers.
The co-founders have worked on several business ventures together in the past, including two that failed, one that Anand describes as a “moderate success” and now Pipes, their fourth venture. This time around, they’re funding development through money from Doodle Creatives, their Mumbai-based design and development shop, but have not taken in outside funding.
Pipes is a free download on both iOS and Android.

Hike Messenger Hits 20 Mn Users, Offers 100 MB File Transfer and Hidden Mode

Hike Messenger Hits 20 Mn Users, Offers 100 MB File Transfer and Hidden Mode

Monday, June 30, 2014 / No Comments

While WhatsApp and Facebook are working aggressively to get their app on every smartphone, Indian Instant Messaging service, Hike reached a new milestone by crossing 20 million users* mark. And interestingly, 5 million of those users have joined in last three months — after WhatsApp’s 19-billion dollar acquisition.

Hike Messenger, which was launched in 2012, crossed 15 million registered users in February, clocking a 10x growth in user base. A month later, Hike raised $14mn from Bharti SoftBank.

To lure in more customers, the IM service has launched several unique features like ‘Hidden Mode’ to keep users’ private chats invisible from other users.

Also, recently, the service introduced ‘Big File Transfer’ feature that allows users to transfer any file format up to 100 MB each. (It’s 100MB, and not 100GB as reported by Hindustan Times).  This is rather a very handy feature that many users might find useful, since most email providers limit the size of files attachment to 20MB. Also, interesting since none of the competitive service — WhatsApp, Viber, Line allow the transfer of non-media files.

Around 90% of the Hike users are from India, and among those 80% are under the age of 25. Kavin Bharti Mittal said that they are aiming for the 100M active mobile internet users that are in India. The app is available across all the popular mobile platforms: iOS, Android, Windows Phone, BlackBerry, S40, S60 and Nokia X.

However, there is one more thing that we wish Hike Messenger introduced very soon. And that is voice calling feature. In a country as large as India, voice calling feature could give it an edge over others and it should get it very soon, since WhatsApp is reportedly introducing that feature later this year, and Facebook Messenger and several other popular IM services sport calling functionality.

Google bans Facebook and other self updating Android apps

Google bans Facebook and other self updating Android apps

Sunday, June 29, 2014 / No Comments

Google just released a new Play Store version 4.0.27 that, contains only very minor tweaks and Google has changed the rules of its Google Play Store to put an end to the practice of developers updating their apps through their own means rather than the official Google Play channel.

Shortly before the Facebook Home launch, some users noticed a new version of Facebook was available on their device, but it wasn't through the Play Store. Instead, the update came directly through the app, bypassing the Store altogether.

Under the "Dangerous Products" section of the Google Play developer policies, Google now states that "an app downloaded from Google Play may not modify, replace or update its own APK binary code using any method other than Google Play's update mechanism."

Essentially this means that once an app is downloaded by an Android user it cannot contact home base and auto-update its own operating code. Instead, it has to use the official Google approved channel.

Google says that its Play store is “trusted source for Android application downloads” and that it is “committed to providing a secure and consistent experience.” Allowing apps to update themselves could possibly lead to some less-than-secure scenarios as the initial download from Google Play would be safe while the in-app updater installs malware.