8/13: Dabba

Back when I was single and looking, one of the criteria I had with respect to the potential partner was that she should be willing to indulge in what I would call as “arbit conversations”. Arbit conversations can be about any subject, and the only rule is that it need not make sense.

So you can reply to anything with anything. Digress like crazy. Crack stupid, and potentially offensive jokes. Talk nonsense. Complete nonsense all the time doesn’t add value, of course, but some amount of nonsense can make the parties laugh, and keep things happy.

My love for arbit conversations started with my favourite hobby from the time I started working. It initially began on Orkut where I’d occasionally leave nonsense scraps on friends’ walls, and they’d reply with more nonsense. Prior to that, of course there was the “.:Arbit:.” discussion group in IIMB, which was created with the explicit purpose of talking nonsense.

And then sometime in 2006-7, Google decided to add all Orkut friends to your GTalk list, and soon Orkut started getting spammed by “franship seekers”, and my favourite hobby became opening a number of conversation windows on GTalk and simply talk to people, irrespective of whether the conversations made sense.

When I told some friends that I was looking for someone “who can make arbit conversation”, I’d already started talking to Priyanka, and she was of course one of the people with whom I’d indulge in such conversations. So when I declared her as a “super common minimum program“, I already knew that she was capable of arbit conversations (in hindsight, I realise why she was a “super CMP”. I used to talk to her so much that I’d anchored my expectations of a potential wife based on what she was like. In that context, it’s obvious that she’d ace it).

What I didn’t know, and was delighted to find out later on that she can also be “Dabba”. Now, this doesn’t have a good synonym in English, so I continue to use the Kannada word. It’s hard to even describe what being Dabba entails, but both of us are Dabba and we love each other for it.

Being Dabba means you don’t take everything too seriously, and are willing to see the lighter side of things. Being Dabba means finding some random stuff funny, and laughing endlessly about it. Dabbaness can sometimes mean talking in a strange accent, or pronouncing words wrongly, on puropse.

Being Dabba also means that you are willing to tolerate some amount of shit, and not get disgusted by it (if we don’t train her properly, Berry might grow up being disgusted with our Dabbaness). Being Dabba also means occasionally acting far less polished than we’re capable of, just for a few laughts. And so forth – hope you’re getting the drift.

If you’re a Dabba person yourself, it’s hard to reconcile with someone who’s not as Dabba, since you might get disgusted and feel let down at times. In that sense, I feel incredibly lucky to be married to someone who I think is at least as Dabba as I am. There are random things that Pinky finds funny. We have many inside jokes, especially related to 1990s Kannada popular culture, that makes us burst out laughing at times. There are words we pronounce in a particular way, to the extent that we pronounce them that way even when we don’t intend to.

Both of us being Dabba allows Pinky and me to connect better to each other. There are so many subliminal things we “get” about each other that we wonder if we’ll be able to get along at all with someone else. And of course, another thing that we should keep in mind is that we’ve been training each other for the last 7-8 years, effectively merging our respective brands of Dabbaness!

That’s possibly a great way to describe a relationship – where you train each other on your respective Dabbaness, and over time become so similarly Dabba that you’d find it hard pressed to be Dabba-compatible with others!

1/13: Leaving home

2/13: Motherhood statements

3/13: Stockings

4/13: HM

5/13: Cookers

6/13: Fashion

7/13: Dashing

Google Plus – Initial thoughts

Hareesh sent me an invite for Google Plus early on Wednesday morning. Thinking it’s another stupid thing like Wave, I ignored it. But feedback from twitter revealed that the product did show some promise, so later that evening I joined it. I’ve got some 150 friends already (god knows how long it took me to get to so many with either Orkut or Facebook), though I haven’t started using it yet. Some initial thoughts:

  • I like the concept of circles, and that it’s so easy to segregate your friends. This has become a huge problem in social networking, especially after all uncles and aunties got on to facebook. So far I’ve made an attempt to classify all my contacts into disjoint circles of “friends” “family” and “acquaintances”. I also like it that circles need not be disjoint, so I can make an exception to my rule and put the wife in both “friends” and “family”
  • I like that it’s a directed graph. That you can follow the public posts of someone without them having to follow you back. I don’t know why but I simply like this. I hate putting friendship requests and waiting endlessly for responses and stuff. So this directed stuff makes a lot of sense for me.
  • I need to find out how to import my blog there. Then I can close my blog feed on facebook which is infested with uncles and aunties. On Plus, they’ll be safely tucked away in the “family” circle which won’t be able to see much.
  • I don’t like being the “cut-vertex”. I don’t like being the one guy who links two subgroups of a larger group. On a similar note, I don’t like to go out simultaneously with disjoint sets of friends (i.e. two groups that didn’t know each other previously). I feel too tense trying to make sure everyone’s comfortable and clued in on what’s happening. Similar with conversations on facebook. So yeah, I’ll probably segregate my circles further and have more cliquey groups.
  • Again, directed graph means I can peacefully put ignore to people, without appearing rude. On FB, if some uncle comments and I don’t respond, he might take offense, and I’ll be cognizant of the fact that he takes offence. And I force myself to reply. On G+, if i”m not following him, I can peacefully put well left. Like I sometimes do to @Replies to me on twitter from people who I don’t follow

So seems promising. Too early to say if it’ll make me give up both twitter and facebook. I’m sure I won’t give up twitter for sure. Let’s wait and see.

LinkedIn recos

LinkedIn in general is a useful site. It’s a good place to maintain an “online CV” and also track the careers of your peers and ex-peers and people you are interested in and people you are jealous of. If you are a headhunter, it is a good place to find heads to hunt, so that you can buzz them asking for their “current CTC; expected CTC; notice period” (that’s how most india-based headhunters work). It also helps you do “due diligence” (for a variety of reasons), and to even approximately figure out stuff like a person’s age, hometown, etc.

However, one thing that doesn’t make sense at all to me is the recommendations section. Point being that LinkedIn being a “formal” networking site, even a mildly negative sounding recommendation can cause much harm to a person’s career and so people don’t entertain them. Also, the formality of the site prevents one from writing cheesy recommendations – the thing that made orkut testimonials so much fun. And if you can’t be cheesy or be even mildly negative, you will be forced to write an extremely filtered recommendation.

Rhetorical question – have you ever seen a negative or even funny or even mildly unusual recommendation on LinkedIn? I haven’t, and I believe it’s for the reasons that I mentioned above. And if you think you are cool enough to write a nice recommendation for me, and that I’m cool enough to accept nice recommendations, I’m sure you and I have better places to bond than LinkedIn.

Anyway, so given that most recommendations on LinkedIn are filtered stuff, and are thus likely to be hiding much more than they reveal, isn’t it a wonder that people continue to write them, and ask for them? Isn’t it funny that “LinkedIn Experts” say that it’s an essential part of having a “good profile”? Isn’t it funny that some people will actually take these recommendations at face value?

I don’t really have an answer to this, and continue to be amazed that the market value for LinkedIn recommendations hasn’t plummetted. I must mention here that neither do I have any recommendations on LinkedIn nor have I written any. To those corporate whores who haven’t realized that LinkedIn Recommendations have no value, my sympathies.

Update

Commenting on facebook, my junior from college Shrinivas recommends http://www.endorser.org/ . Check it out for yourself. It seems like this cribbing about linkedin recommendations isn’t new. I realize I may be late, but then I’m latest.

The Trouble with Orkut

Some of you might have noticed that I haven’t been replying to your messages on orkut any more. I still exist there, but am not “active” by any stretch of imagination. I check my account once in a long while, when I’m feeling really bored. And make a conscious decision not to reply to scraps there, since doing so will invite more scraps, which I don’t want. I haven’t deleted my account since I’m told that doing so will remove from my GTalk friends list those people who’ve been added because of Orkut.

Speaking to other people, I find similar stories. Most people have either deleted their orkut accounts, or just let them go dormant. Of course this doesn’t include people who occasionally scrap me over there. Oh, and btw, most people are still around on facebook. I  know one guy (POTA) who deleted his facebook account but apart from that, most people are still around. So what exactly went wrong with orkut?

1. Fransips: Orkut allowed you to send messages/scraps to whoever you wanted to, irrespective of whether they knew you or not. In the initial stage, when people were rediscovering themselves and their networks, this was a fantastic facility. But once that got completed, it was used by random fransip-seekers, which drove most women away from orkut. And once the women went away, the “good guys” followed them out.

2. Random names: Orkut allowed people to change their display names very easily, and this turned out to be a huge problem. Some day, you’d get a scrap from someone with first name “going to” and second name “california” (with lots of periods and exclamations punctuating the name) and it would take a huge effort to figure out who had messaged you. It is easy dealing with standard nicknames but when people start naming themselves after something that doesn’t make any sense, and hten proceed to change their names every few days, it does get disconcerting.

3. There was nothing to do: Once the initial network-rediscovering face was done, there was nothing one could “do” on orkut. Yeah, about a year back they introduced the concept of applications and stuff, but that was more in response to facebook after the latter had drawn away most of Orkut’s users. Orkut allowed you to write scraps on friends. It allowed you to write rediff-level comments on discussion boards. It allowed you to find random women and seek franship. But that was that. Nothing to do on a sustainable basis.

4.Lack of privacy There was absolutely no privacy on orkut. Everyone could see what you did, who you talked to, what photos you put, where you had been, and in essesnce your entire life history. This, combined with the fransip seekers meant that people “shut down” on orkut. Away went the interesting pictures. Scraps would get deleted. Everyone suddenly became “committed”. People basically started lying, and hiding information. There was no way a forum that encouraged this could help sustain “keeping in touch”.

5. Spam Orkut stupidly allowed some stupid scripts to be run, and so on new year’s day 2008, i had a hundred messages on my scrapbook, all of them having been generated by some stupid script. Orkut had ceased to be personal. You could write a script which would write “hello world” on all your friends’ scrapbooks.

Once the balance had tipped towards facebook, there was no looking back towards Orkut. Orkut tried some themes, which ended up making people’s pages very gaudy indeed. The photo tagging tool was added, but navigation was tough. They tried to introduce a friend feed, but most of the feed was taken up by random thrid party apps. Over the course of the last one year, orkut has kept getting progressively worse.

If you look at it, some of hte features of orkut that enabled it to fail recently were what made it so popular in the early days (2004-07). In that golden age for orkut, people were busy reconnecting. Finding lost friends and relatives. You would crawl through entire friends’ lists in order to find that special friend who you had lost touch with. And you found dozens of them every day. It was incredible. People who you hardly talked to in school suddenly became close “orkut friends”. New relationships were built. New bonds were made. And then you realized that you had gotten back in touch with practically everyone you’ve known. Orkut was of no use to you any more.

I think there is a business school case study waiting to be written over here – about what made and broke Orkut. And it can be used in that session in corporate strategy class where they teach that your greatest strengths can turn into your greatest weaknesses.