One of the reasons we – the consumers or the end-users of the internet – are relatively unaware of the meaning of Net Neutrality (NN) is that, we have always had it good and took NN for granted. We were not aware of internet being any other way.

But now the moment has come when you have to necessarily know the meaning of NN. Because you have the rights to know what information you have access to and what information you are deprived off as an information consumer. Because we risk somebody else altering what we experience on the internet. The current attempts to fiddle with NN – if successful – will be another demonstration of American capitalism.

So let’s get on – what is Net Neutrality (NN)?

NN simply means the contents on the WWW are delivered to the end-user by a straight-forward, unfiltered, unprioritized, unbiased transaction from the content provider to the user. There is nobody altering the contents delivered to you. For example, if we both are from the same geographical area, and google a search term, we will (and should) get the same results. And that is a simplistic definition of NN.

Who can take NN away from the end-user?

There are two key players – the content provider and the internet provider. Take search for example. In my case, Google would be the content provider and Comcast will be the internet provider. Lack of NN, these two parties can decide what I will see on my computer, based on my profiling. My profiling could be based on a number of factors, but in this context mainly based on how much I pay.

What would it mean to not have NN?

Think of China. Think of many of the pan-Islamic countries. They don’t have NN. But their neutrality is defined based on government policies. And at least, all residents of the country have access to same content. But in American context, it is purely commercial and is likely to give different internet experience to different people.

Will this affect countries other than USA?

I think it will. If they get away with NN, content providers (a vast majority of who are in the US) are likely to charge tiered access rates to international internet providers also. This means, whether you are in Bangalore or Baltimore or Budapest, this will likely affect you in some way.

Can we do something about it?

Though the internet is certainly larger than any number of corporations, the steering wheels are in the hands of few large corporates. Besides, NN is largely a gentlemen’s agreement and laws supporting NN are weak and manipulatable.

Are reasons why the NN killers might be right?

Content providers and internet providers cite many reasons – such as improving quality of content, prevent identity theft and internet related attacks etc…, but I think we are risking by putting control into the hands of few people.

Why is this news now?

As you may have read, Google and Verizon are working on clearing their way to a new business model, which would effectively betray NN. This is a developing news and you may see the stories are constantly evolving.

Open discussion

If you can think of good reasons to abolish NN or have ideas on how to prevent the efforts to kill NN, please comment.

I tweeted sometime ago that “if a template is all you offer, you really don’t have much to offer”

Let me explain.

For the purpose of this post, the term “customer” can mean anybody you interact with – not just money-paying person seeking products/services.

Too many times, we get locked into this mode of supplying a template somebody comes to us for an answer. This could be in a business transaction or employee motivation or anything for that matter. No emotions, no empathy, no niche, no expression of desire to help. “Here, please fill up this template and send it back!” And by the way, templates don’t always come in spreadsheets. They take many forms, but usually have a rigid set of solutions around the “if-then-else” logic. But life and business hardly present us problems that can be resolved with templates or templatized mindsets.

Why is this gesture bad?

Whether it is a person-to-person transaction or a multi-million dollar deal, all of us have the need to be heard and understood. By giving somebody a template, we are basically telling them we’ve empowered ourselves to not spend any time thinking about your problem, instead try to fit it into a set of rules.

Are templates evil?

Templates are not bad. In fact, they are great. Templates are a checklist for the person providing the answers. A solution provider is supposed to be an intelligent and human, with the checklist serving the purpose of making sure s/he has covered everything, to which there is a hitherto chance of erring. Templates help standardize, maintain consistency and completeness. But standardization also means repeatable, industrialized and most importantly, emotion-less. Especially when template is not accompanied by a human emotion.

Besides, what is your role anyways?

Just think about this. If all you do is provide templates, exactly why are you required? The job of providing templates is rather mechanical and could potentially be done by another person (in the flat world, I must say – another cheaper person)

What can you do?

Take this from me. People don’t really need an expert, when all the expert does is supply templates. And even if they don’t tell on face, here is the truth: they do not value him. What can you do? You can be remarkable; you can be human by remembering a simple rule. The template is for you, try not sending the template (email is another evil, but that’s off-topic). Instead pick up the phone and ask them the same questions as if you genuinely meant to ask them. Call it value add or niche. I tend to call this emotional labor. Of course, emotional labor is not everything, rather a humble start.

Updated Aug 15, 2009 10 PM – Here is a recent techmemed post that contemplates some similar ideas about Twitter.

Updated May 16, 2009 6:15PM – Mark Cuban says most of his traffic is now coming from Twitter/Facebook and less and less from Google!

FTOTW

We restarted this series in my previous post.  First, Nancy Dixon, a top expert in Organizational Learning has a brilliant post on the history of KM.  Hal Sperlich will be proud of this – 619,284.5 Miles on a 1971 Mustang and still going strong. Sean Platt has a great post on Creative Inspiration. SP Rajeshwaran has a great post on being a Code Monkey .  Brilliant article on what goes on inside a baby’s brain by Jonah Lehrer in the Boston Globe.

Prolog

I have been on Twitter for the past 1.5 years and I have been smitten. Given my interest in social technologies, i have been thinking about why Twitter is an important development. There have been several rah rah posts about Twitter recently, but i am not satisfied with the inferences.  Like all series starter posts i have done in the past, this post has some thoughts from me to get the community started. I promise to analyze and publish the wisdom of the community, as always.

History

To really understand the power of something, i believe that we should delve into the history a bit. There have been several perspectives of the Web including the highly popular 1.0/2.0 view.  In my view, that classification does not help us understand the Twitter phenomenon adequately.

Therefore, i decided to categorize the web into 3 eras as captured by the diagram below:

In the first Algorithmic Era, most of the focus was on using algorithms to tame the web, Google’s brilliant citations-based (or incoming links-based) algorithm being the chief amongst them.

Then came the Crowd Era, which saw the launch of several crowd platforms like Digg, Flickr, Youtube etc. which allowed us to use the crowds to make sense of the web content as well as to add fresh content.  I included Blogs also in this era because it is very difficult to tame the massive base of 40+ million blogs.  Though bloggers do have an identity, the massive size of the blogosphere reduced bloggers to a crowd [Inside the firewall, we have managed to create a powerful community using blogs  which is difficult to do on the internet due to the crowd effect].  Even the highly popular Wikipedia is a crowd phenomenon – you still don’t have an easy means to understand who the top contributors are, their reputation etc.

In the next era, which i decided to call the Community Era, we have 2 major categories – Facebook, Linkedin, Orkut  etc in what i would term a closed category and Twitter in an entirely new open category. The open category i think models the real world better and that is why it is very powerful.

Three Real World Parallels

1. Asynchronous Friending

If you look at Facebook or Orkut (i use both of them), you need to friend someone first and only then can you exchange anything.  In fact, Facebook won’t even allow you to look at someone’s profile before friending them.  Whereas on Twitter, you can follow anyone and if they like they can follow you back  and if they don’t like you at all, they can block you.  The twitter model is more akin to what we do in the real world.

2. Fine-grained Relationships Dominate

In the real world, all of us participate in many communities  – our neighborhood, our relatives, our coworkers etc.  We have relationships in these communities of varying degrees of strength.  Most relationships are built over time based on a number of fine-grained interactions (low amount of time per interaction) over time – meetings, get-togethers, parties, games, religious/social gatherings etc.  We also have coarse-grained (high amount of time per interaction)  interactions with a few people like our immediate coworkers, supervisors, immediate family/close friends  & close relatives. But most of our network growth comes from the fine-grained relationships. You can analogize a tweet to a fine-grained interaction with your followers.  Additionally, a tweet is very simple and consumes little effort. This is why using blogs or youtube or flickr to build networks is harder because to produce a good blog post or a good photo or a good video takes significantly more effort.  Additionally, the followers also need more effort to appreciate a blog post or a photo or a video.  The problem with Facebook or Orkut or Linkedin is the lack of a tweet-like simple fine-grained interaction mode (although lately Facebook has been copying twitter heavily).

2. Asymmetric relationships

In the real world also, we have asymmetric relationships – the strength of the relationship with someone that we perceive maybe different from the strength of the relationship perceived by that someone.

To make some sense of a large number of relationships – Orkut allows you to grade the relationships. But that is not how we do it in the real world -  our perception of the strength of the relationship is subconscious and is based on perceived quality of  interactions and the frequency of interactions we have.

In Twitter, you can do the same thing, the Twitterers you interact with subconsciously grow on you over time, which could lead to a mutually rewarding relationship. In most

Are there other ways in which Twitter resembles real world community-building?

Epilog

Do you agree that Twitter marks a fundamental tectonic shift? If  so, what impact is it going to have on the web?  That is what i am trying to contemplate. I have some thoughts. Look forward to yours. I would also like your views on Facebook, Linkedin, Orkut etc.

Prolog

Happy new year to all that celebrate it today (Tamils, Malayalis, Assamese, Punjabis..). As always, thanks for the insightful comments on part 3  (here is part1, part2). Kumaran’s comment on Penicillin and Potato Chips , Nimmy’s comment on the invention of electric car being appreciated when fuel shortages occur, Ganesh’s comment about startups reinventing themselves  really got me into thinking about the role of luck.  In fact, Malcolm Gladwell’s dedicates most of his book Outliers to the concept of being in the right place at the right time, which is luck wearing fancy clothes. 

Extreme Luck

First, i wanted to look at Luck in the extreme. Someone who won a jackpot in the lottery is the best example i could think of. There is almost zero effort (if you don’t count driving to the lottery store) and marginal expense (cost of a few lottery tickets).  I am sure you will all agree that there is simply no explanation other than luck when someone wins a lottery ticket.  I am sure you will all agree that this luck doesn’t come to most people. 

Opportunity

Opportunity is a word that often goes with Luck.  There seems to be 4 kinds of opportunities:

1. When you are chasing a particular goal, you find opportunities that fit your goal, you execute and meet your goal. 

2. When you are chasing a particular goal, something else more promising happens, that forces you to look at the something else and make it your goal. Most serendipitous discoveries of the type Kumaran pointed out. 

3.  When you are chasing a particular goal,  after a lot of trying, you find out that the endevor is a failure and reinvent yourself.  This is the type that Ganesh pointed out. 

4. When you are chasing a goal, you make some mistakes, but you find out that due to mistakes that other people made, your mistakes didn’t affect you and you are able to chase your goal and succeed.  To quote an example from my life –  in my early days of being a leader, i didn’t know how to flex my style to work with my team mates. Some people who i found very difficult to work with due to style differences quit the company and that turned out to be my advantage because they were not around to spread negativity to the rest of my team. 

Are there other kinds of opportunities you can think of? 

Right Place at the Right Time

If you look at the list of opportunities again, it would be clear that none of those opportunities will be present if one is not at the right place at the right time. For example, if Alexander Fleming weren’t studying bacteria, he would not have observed the mold killing the bacteria.  Since we don’t control for the most part directly, where we are born, what exposure we get to have in our childhood and youth, being in the right place at the right time is critically important.  Malcom Gladwell, is right about that part.    I also firmly believe, from my experience, that being in the right place at the right time matters a lot. However, Gladwell missed one critical ingredient.

Luck Revisited

If you look at the opportunities list again, it would be clear that all these opportunities occur in most people’s lives. But then many of them don’t take advantage of it. Take the same Alexander Fleming example. I am sure there were several scientists who were studying bacteria during Fleming’s time but only he was able to discover penicillin.   Why is it that Fleming succeeded when the others didn’t even when presented with the same opportunity? 

In the same way, instead of asking whether we should recalibrate our goals, ask whether you have spotted a big possibly insurmountable reason to recalibrate, you may find the answer. 

Prof Richard Wiseman  , a psychologist from the UK,  has done extensive work on Luck.  Please make sure to  read this brilliant article titled “The Luck Factor” that covers his key research findings.  His interesting research proved this – that people who are seen as lucky are simply better at spotting opportunities. 

The Goal

From Wiseman’s research, it is clear that spotting opportunities is a mindset thing. How can we get that mindset?  In my view, it is focus. If we focus ourselves on the right set of goals, and our mind is in a prepared state to spot opportunities, that occur in all of our lives, we can succeed. 

I will give a trivial example of what focus can do. When was in the USA, we bought our first car – a Saturn. We bought a green car because my wife likes green. The salesman trying to do his bit said to us – you know what “green” is a rare colour in Saturn, very few people buy that color.  Once i started driving the car, i started focusing on green color Saturns and i found to my dismay that almost one in three Saturns were green in color.  Is this because, all of a sudden people started buying green Saturns? Absolutely not, it is simply due to the fact that until then, i had not noticed the color of  Saturns.  

Epilog

In sum, being in the right place at right time matters, but with a mindset that is focused on your goals, you can spot opportunities and be successful. Remember where we started – have the right goals – don’t chase money or fame as goals. 

As always please chime away with your views.

Notes & References:

1. Charlie Munger’s speech – f***ing brilliant speech that is one of the most insightful i have ever read about success. 

2. Steve Jobs’ brilliant speech at Stanford

Prolog

Please read the first 2 parts (part1, part2), please read the comments as well for a lot of wisdom has been collected.  While we may have reached some level of clarity on goals themselves,  we seem to have ways to go around recalibrating goals? Is recalibrating a cop out?

The Role of Failure in Success

We have all heard the maxim  ”aim for the stars and shoot the sky”. It has got a lot of truth in it.  While it may seem like a cop-out, i think it is worth keeping in the success playbook.

What is seldom discussed is, what happens when we end up shooting just the sky instead of the stars that we aimed for?

When we chase difficult goals, failure is inevitable.  What i observed in my experience is that when we fail massively or when massive failure looms large, we should do some deep soul searching. Maybe our methods are erroneous. We can try a different route and see if we can still hit the stars.

If  after that revamped attempt we fail yet again, is it reasonable to recalibrate the goal?  Or should we try again and again untill we succeed? 

Rosabeth Moss Kanter in her insightful book Confidence, talks about a doom loop setting in, if you fail more than once in a row.  

What do you all think?

“Confidence”  maybe a book worth reading to understand how to set the cycle of success going and how to prevent losing streaks and why Confidence is so important in success.

Po Branson’s Take

Po Branson talked to over 900 people from various walks of life to understand the real meaning of success. Fast Company carried some of Po Branson’s key findings in a brilliant article.  Don’t miss reading the article.

Po found 3 important lessons:

1. Timeframe -   persist over a long period of time. 

2. Backup plans – do not lead to different destinations, such as “If I don’t get into business school, I’ll be a schoolteacher.” His backup plans lead to the same destination, and if he has to arrive late by a back road, that’s fine.

3. Don’t get burnt out  – never let yourself get burnt out.

I am sure the book would have a lot more wisdom packed into it. If any of you have read it, please comment.  BTW, Po Branson may be familiar to some of you, since we covered his take on  Praising Talent Vs. Praising Effort.

Epilog

I would like to contemplate the role of luck next. What do you all think about luck? Is it a significant factor?