Some people astonish us. So do some numbers. Take the case of Shashi Tharoor. When his candidature to the Lok Sabha election was announced in March 2009, lots of Indians were surprised. Many (inlcuding me) hoped for a different type of politician.

Many of them wrote him off saying that he is too sophisticated for politics and will not be able to handle the rough and tough of politics. He walked out of a political debate before the elections. This was telecast live and he had to draw a lot of flak for that. This only added to the perception that he cannot handle criticism. But he astonished us all with his landslide victory with a margin of close to 1 Lakh votes. Then again, he surprised us again by becoming the MoS for External Affairs.

Now, he has astonished us again with some “astonishing” numbers. I am talking about his number of followers in Twitter. He started to tweet on March 17, 2009 as part of his election campaign. As of June 2, 2009, his Twitter followers had grown to around 4500+. (I don’t remember exactly, but I was his Twitter follower number 2700 ( or so). By the end of that month, June 2009, his number of followers crossed 10,000.

He got a new title as he himself tweeted on June 24, 2009 “In Dubai my old friend Sheikha Lubna, UAE foreign trade minister, hosted a friendly lunch at which she greeted me as ‘Minister Twitter’!”

The progression from that point was quite interesting. Jacob Joseph, Tharoor’s Secretary, has been tweeting about the number of followers. Here is a sample of his tweets.

August 4, 2009 – Shashi Tharoor (@shashitharoor) has crossed 20,000 followers

August 5, 2009 – @priyankachopra has overtaken @shashitharoor

(Priyanka Chopra apparently had the most number of followers among Indian celebrities at that time and there was a race for the top spot)

August 22, 2009 – Pic of Dr. Shashi Tharoor (@shashitharoor) tweeting from the boat race http://myloc.me/p8rs

August 26, 2009 – Shashi Tharoor (@shashitharoor) adds 3000+ followers overnight on twitter

August 27, 2009 – Shashi Tharoor (@shashitharoor) crosses 36,000 followers on twitter!

August 29, 2009 – Shashi Tharoor (@shashitharoor) crossed 50,000 followers on twitter.

September 6, 2009 – RT @keralafarmer: 1 lakh followers @ShashiTharoor http://bit.ly/bl6ii

Astonishing isn’t it?

The secret of these numbers is that his untiring commitment to tweeting. His tweets are informative, witty and lively. He has tweeted 1235 times(as of September 7, 2009) at an average of 200 per month.

No wonder he is able to get such a fan following. What is next? 5 Lakh by the end of this year?

Will he ever overtake Barack Obama(20 Lakh + followers)? Or is it question of when and not “will he”?

Image Credit: Stuti

Popularity: 10%

Google has launched Friend Connect to perhaps aimed at a Global Social Network. Already thousands of sites have added the widgets and are using them.

While users are using the widgets and posting their activities, currently the FriendConnect System helps update these only on Orkut and Plaxo. It doesn’t provide either an RSS or a method to post these to other sites.

Well for users like me, who love to have all their web activities to be streamed this is a show stopper. Thankfully, we have the option of creating a Mashup to address this challenge.

Mashup in the context of web is defined as: “A web application or site mixing content from multiple sources”

So let’s get started. What you need are the following:

• A Yahoo Account for use with Yahoo Pipes, a mashup creating tool
• A Plaxo Account to capture the updates from Friend Connect
• And of course registrations on FriendConnect enabled sites

Here’s how you can do this in 9 steps:

Step 1: Open the FriendConnect Setting, add Plaxo and check “Publish my activities on other sites”. Click Done. This will enable your activities to be streamed to Plaxo and be visible on Plaxo pulse.

Step 2: Log in to the Plaxo site and navigate to http://www.plaxo.com/rss. Click on “Enable” next to option “Me” as shown below. This will activate a link. Copy the URL displayed.

Step 3: Log in to Yahoo Pipes and click on “Create pipe”

This will open up a Pipe Layout.

Step 4: Select Sources->Fetch Feed and in the URL add the URL copied from Plaxo.

Step 5: Select Operators->Filter, and connect the Fetch Feed to Filter as shown in the figure.

Step 6: Now Change the Settings on Filter to “Permit” items that match “all” of the following. Under Rules add “item.title” contains Friendconnect.

Step 7: Now link Filter to Pipe Output, as shown in the figure.

Step 8: Click save and voila! you have created your Mashup!

Step 9: On the Run Screen, click on Get as RSS, copy the RSS URL

That’s it… You have your RSS of FriendConnect activities. You can use this to feed it into FriendFeed, Twitter, Facebook, Lifestream and any other tool which supports RSS import.

My preference is Twitterfeed.com feeding to Ping.fm, which updates lot of social networking sites at one go.

Get a flavor of how to get the web working for you? Welcome to Web 2.0.

Enjoy!

Popularity: 48%

Media coverage of events across the world has grown manifold in the past decade or so. With the advent of newer forums that use the Web2.0 infrastructure – blogs, twitter, podcast, etc – there are more than enough avenues for folks to get their daily share of news from.

The traditional print news media is caught blinded by this explosion of sorts. Not worrying about traditional competition anymore, they are just looking for ways and means to keep their current customer base in place and not lose market share to the new media outlets.

No matter what the level of news reach the online publication options provide, there’s still bound to be a time and place for traditional print: be it on an airplane, be it fulfilling the morning ritual of a quick glance at the newspaper with a cup of coffee, or lying down by the pool side on a quiet Saturday afternoon with a newspaper in hand.

So, as an editor to a leading news publication, the biggest challenge is to capture and retain the attention of the reader. Does one go the mass market way and provide a tabloid, or does one focus on providing enriched content that adds cerebral value to the reader? The answers to these questions determine the critical choice of whether to put certain events’ coverage on page-1 or page-3 of the newspaper.

If someone were to pick up a USA-Today and Wall Street Journal in Boston today, there’s a marked difference in the Page-1 content between the newspapers. The same difference is obviously visible when one looks at The Hindu & Times Of India in Bangalore, which is on the other side of the world.

While these newspapers cover the same little urban village, that is the world, and the content is from the same events worldwide, there’s a marked difference on what the focus of these newspapers is, especially when it comes to deciding what goes on Page-1!

As the executive editor, or whatever he or she is now called, what goes into them making these choices? Does their role move beyond just the coverage; do they owe something to the world at large i.e. the customers, by virtue of their bi-partisan positions? Is there a moral side to it? It must be hard to strike a balance between being a self-righteous moral police and being seen as enticing audience with sensationalism.

Essentially, there’s a simple answer to this seemingly complex conundrum and the solution is equally applicable to an individual or entity. The clues lie in answering one question:

Are you a false positive or a false negative?

Stripping all the jargon around it, would you rather be seen as doing the right thing, or would you rather do the right thing and not care about the perception or the end results?

What would you do??

Image Credit: Neogabox, Quarter Mae

Popularity: 12%

If you haven’t heard of Twitter yet, it is social networking site, which lets you stay connected and network with people. It only allows short message of about 140 characters. These messages are usually referred to as Tweets.

If you want to know more about Twitter then give a reading about what it is on Wikipedia.

Now talking about Tweets, the standard way to add them is through the website by logging into the website. Tweet.im is a site which makes Twitter more usable and provides a time-saving interface, your Instant Messenger. While there was a direct option from Twitter to do this earlier, it is now disabled (indefinitely)

You can go to Tweet.im and register for the their service either with a Jabber account or a Google Talk account in just three steps. All you need to do is:

1. Provide your Twitter user name and password and the Google Talk or Jabber account you want to link with.
2. As soon as you register, you will be prompted in your Instant Messenger to add a friend names something like <Twitterusername>@Twitter.tweet.im
3. Accept the request and you are all set.

You can directly send a Instant message to this contact and it will be updated on Twitter for you. And should someone in your network post updates, they will directly come to you as a Instant message.

While there are other services like Ping.fm which let you update Twitter through IM, the difference with Tweet.im is that it returns the message posted by members of your network to the Instant Messenger.  Give this one a try, It is fun.

Image Copyright: Tweet.im

Popularity: 12%