Category: Blog

To the so called Social Media Experts …

The term 'Social Media Expert' has kind of lost it's meaning on me since 50% of people who add me on Twitter are one of them and a lot of people whom I already follow are self proclaimed experts. So to the so called SMM – please stop giving unwanted and ineffective conventional wisdom on Twitter. Just linking to SMM, social site news and talking about privacy does not make you expert. If you really are expert and really want to add value, why don't you help out couple of businesses on Twitter for free [you can pick them] and let the results do the talking for you. Let those businesses do the talking for you. I doubt that at the rate you tweet your ineffective and no results links, you would find any links on Twitter anyway.

What is it about Apple Products?

This evening I found myself arguing and defending Apple and it’s awesome products when talking to my good friend Nirav. I have often wondered if I really care if my friends and other people really get the awesomeness of Apple products and why I keep on applauding and taking sides with Apple. Upon thinking hard, I don’t care if my friends get my point or not. Not because they are right, but some just don’t want to accept the point and some have never experienced the Apple way and with the remaining ones, they have their own philosophies to protect and defend [don’t we all do!]. 

This makes me think that what is it about Apple and it’s products that I keep on passionately evangelizing about Apple and it’s products for free? I would have convinced loads of people to buy an iPhone and some for Macbooks. At some stage I used to be an unpaid evangelist for Microsoft but never this passionate! 

To me: 

  • Apple has become a way of life. Apple’s passion for it’s products and it’s service. Apple’s passion for the products they deliver
  • Apple’s arrogance. Their vision of their product comes above everybody else’s definition of what is right and what is wrong.
  • Using Apple products, I just get the things done. This can be in the form of bringing joy to my daughter using apps, getting to my email when I need them or checking local Yellow Pages to get a business detail quickly. The beauty is in it’s simplicity and the philosophy or ‘Working Out of the Box’. I would have saved countless hours not having to worry about tweaking configurations that realistically do not add value to what I do.
  • Being passionate about service and delivering are two different things. Apple is both passionate and they deliver. Everybody enjoys getting good service on a consistent basis and I have experienced this consistently with Apple more than any other business I have dealt with. Apple sure has taught me a lesson or two about retaining customers.
  • iPhone is an example of keeping it closed and keeping it simple makes it an awesome product. If I had the option to dumb all exciting web stuff on my option, I would have done so. I love technology and it’s byproducts. But in doing so, I would have made my phone prone to lot of issues. Having a close fenced ecology of apps, means I play with what I am allowed and thus causing less issues and saving me heaps of time.
  • Apple are constantly building good to great products from a music player to a media centre and from iPhone to Macbooks. I am more comfortable dealing with one company for my needs and dealing with similar interfaces and philosophies than getting to know and understand 10 different companies.
  • I don’t know if I am more productive or I think that I am more productive on Apple products, but for sure I have been getting more work done on my iPhone and my Macbook than I used to using other products before. At the end my perception matters to me, right or wrong!
So all in all, the above things and more is what make me more of an Apple fan boy. I just don’t follow because millions of other cool people are OR it just sounds like a good idea. What are your reasons?

At the end of everything “Simple if Effective”

Every now and than I reflect on my own workflow and how I do things, just to make sure that I am focusing on the things that are important and I am not complicating matters than they should be. Along the way I have learnt and re-learnt the fact that having "things" simple is an effective way to deal with "things". I wish I was doing it more often.

Remember when RSS feeds were HOT, a lot of people [and I mean a lot] were subscribing to 1000's of feeds {me including} and were immersed in the reading. When Twitter was just getting HOT, it was all about following people and getting more people to follow you. It went to an extend that people would unfollow you if you did not follow them back. Thus you accumulated 1000's of followers and followed 1000's in the process. The story on Facebook was somewhat similar, a lot of people followed almost everybody [some living their bosses out of their networks] they knew and more in the name of social networking.

Fast forwarding it, it's getting difficult if not totally impossible to keep track of those 1000's of Twitter updates in the stream everyday. RSS Aggregator has not been touched and has more than 100K items unread. It is becoming difficult on social networking side of things, as there are 100's of updates on Facebook and a lot of them is just as good as SPAM. Now we look for simplifying "things" to make it more effective. We start creating Lists on Twitter to separate important tweets from other 1000's of updates, we create folders in RSS Aggregator {I have a folder called 'Must Read'} to keep track of important posts and we create categories on Facebook to separate our 100's of friends.

If at the end, all we wanted to do is focus on reading updates from a bunch of people. Then why did we waste a lot of time creating a chaos for ourselves. When we can just think of what is going to be meaningful for us and keep things simple and effective from the beginning.

It is a skill and comes from more practice.

Even my notes are digital now

via photosonthego.posterous.com

Today I bought myself a digital pen from Livescribe http://www.livescribe.com. The need arose from constantly getting distracted when brainstorming digitally and I wanted to spend time away from from my screens. I wanted the comfort of my lounge or a friend’s house and wanted to bring those notes later on in a digital format. Livescribe seems to be a perfect solution for now.

How are you managing your notes and are you combining your offline notes into digital notes?