DHAR DHAR

If you are a user of Facebook, the hugely popular social networking site, you know what Top News is. For the uninitiated, Facebook has something called News Feeds, where you can view what your friends are up to and keep up with the World. There are two kinds of News Feeds, “Top News” and “Most Recent”. Most recent as the name suggests shows the most recent events, news, activities of your friends in time. This is a constantly updated, relentless barrage of all kinds of updates. Quite useless if you ask me.

The interesting part is the Top News section. Facebook help says,”Top News aggregates the most interesting content that your friends are posting”. The operating word here is interesting. You have no control over what is interesting and what is not to you. This is entirely determined by Facebook. The problem is that this information is not public. You can take an educated guess but there are probably so many variables involved here that making a reasonably accurate judment will be difficult for an outsider.

In my opinion, at least one of the criteria the Top News section depends upon is the number of feedbacks (comments and likes) a particular item receives. The more the number of feedbacks, the more popular the item is and more people will consider it news. Another criteria has to be the individual’s Facebook surfing behaviour. To check my assertion about the surfing behaviour, I embarked on a mini experiment. I started visiting the profile of a couple of friends regularly, checking out  their every item- photos, videos and things like that. I did this for a week and then I stopped.

The main difference during this time was, as expected, in my News Feed. Earlier, without large feedbacks the status messages of these friends never used to find any mention in my News Feed, but after this experiment they are very well represented even if they have zero feedbacks. The funny thing is, now the moment they post something in their profile, it instantly becomes visible in my News Feed. So, Facebook assumes that whatever they do (taking the privacy filter into account) will be news for me and presents that accordingly.

There are many other factors which play a role in determining what constitutes your Top News feed. If you often click on a particular user’s links when they post something, Facebook starts showing their links in your News Feed more often. Similar is the case with Photos, videos and all other things that you can do in Facebook. The same principle is applied to most of the FB groups and fan pages but I am sure with additional features or restrictions. Being an outsider it is virtually impossible to guess the complexity of the algorithm that determines the News Feed section. After all, it is the most visible part of Facebook that users see and thus perhaps the most scrutinised and hence the most most well designed. But I think, based on my experiment, Facebook uses the information regarding the user that it collects to present custom News feeds catered to the individual. That is the power of information. As they say, “INFORMATION RULES”!!

As a part of my curriculum at the London School Economics, I am doing a case study on BMW AG Germany. I need some data to answer a few questions regarding the case and for this I need your help.

I have set up a small survey HERE

The survey will take around 2 minutes and doesn’t require any registration. I would be very grateful, if you guys could take some time out of your schedule and help me with this.

UPDATE: Thank You everybody for participating. It was great having your opinion.

Too many tweets, it seems!

Mr Shah Rukh Khan, the one who has a crater in Moon named after him, has done it again. Though I have not watched his latest film, “My name is Khan”, I have read rave reviews about it and everything it seems, is going his way again.

This post is however not about the quality or the storyline of the film but about something else. It’s about the business side of it. One thing that I have noticed and I am sure everybody else also has, is the amount of controversy this film has generated over the past couple of months. First, there was the row over the US trying to stop SRK from entering that country and second, the recent protests by the unruly Shiv sena in Mumbai regarding some comments SRK made about some Pakistani cricket players. I am not sure whether these events were staged or they were just serendipitous consequences and I am not making any allegations here but if you consider that in both the cases seemingly unrelated situations have been turned on their heads and used for the publicity of the film, the entire big picture comes into scene.

The film, it seems, is tailor made for controversy. Let’s start with the name: My Name is Khan. In a World where every Muslim name is seen with suspicious eyes, this name alone does about half the job. The US, I have heard maintains a secret list containing the names of all those persons who are suspected to be  terrorists and this particular surname of Khan appears most number of times. Now, consider the setting: the 9/11 WTC twin tower aftermath. For the people who have lived through it, which by the way includes almost everybody above the age of 10, the sight of the twin towers falling down is nothing short of a Hollywood disaster movie. Almost all of us know how difficult it has become to travel between countries now – especially the western countries- with all the checking and questioning and profiling going on in the airports. In this mélange, if you throw in the spicy combination of SRK, the gorgeous Kajol and the ‘Koffee with Karan’, then the mathematical equation of

C=-P+S+M

where C = Controversy; P = Publicity; S=Star Power and M=Money

takes a new life of its own.

I have no idea how much impact this movie will have on Bollywood or for that matter even on SRK’s career, but it is a lesson in PR and marketing for any budding management student. Takes your notes, I have!!

Humans are complex and human interaction is even more so. However, when you add cross cultural interaction into this hotch-potch of a situation, this takes the form of mind blowing complexity, which can easily rival a particle physicist’s palette. The various hues and shades of color you get to see when people coming from different cultures assimilate and mix can put any Monet painting to shame.

To tell you the truth, I am totally perplexed by the intricate web of all these interaction games. Especially, the game where the other player is of the opposite sex. Evolutionary psychology tells us that men and women are different in a very basic level – deep down within the core – not only in physical sense but also in every other sense possible. If you look around and start observing everything that is going around you, you can find this to be very true. This apparent truth of nature makes the tricky situation even more trickier when the two players are of opposite sex.

But, I don’t want to talk about that here. I am hurt. I am not sure why though. Whether I have any right to get hurt or not, I have no idea. Confused is a better word for the predicament I am facing. Not knowing what to do and how to proceed is a dilemma which is very difficult to face for a person for whom the whole life seemed all clear just a few months back.

These interaction games that we play with other players build on the each others moves. Somewhere down the line, if you make a wrong one, the entire game goes into a state of hopelessness. In my game with somebody, somewhere I did play a bad move and  the game shifted its head towards doom. The sad part is that I have no clue where I went wrong. The rules of the game are so damn complex that they don’t even allow me to ask the fellow player about the mistake that I did. If I do that, it will be a sign of weakness on my part. It will be a sign of defeat.

Everybody, I am pretty sure, knows what I am talking about. Everything, though apparently explained in a bad disguise is pretty clearly spelt out. I just want to know, where did I go wrong? Why is the other player behaving the way that is so confusing? What is this? Where is this heading?…

Every Thursday evening after everybody is gone, about 10 people meet at room G208 in 20, Kingsway Building at the LSE. Their purpose – secret. Their deeds – hidden. The room – small and the blinds- covered.

What do they do there? What is the secret?

These are the torch bearers of an ancient and continuing sect, one whose legacy goes back to time immemorial, the life form appreciators or in simple words – the artists.

These people meet for the weekly Life Drawing sessions conducted by the LSE Student Union Visual Art Society. The society arranges for the models and other supplies for the sessions and people – LSE as well as non-LSE – join in for 2 hours of sketching extravaganza.

I recently went to one such session and the result is this sketch of the female body. Though we did about 5 sketch from various different perspectives, this is the one which I liked the most.

So, here it is, the nameless sketch.

Female Form

and coming to the title of the post, “The secret sessions”. Well, there is actually nothing secret about the entire business. If you want to attend one such session and want more information or check out the timings, then visit http://www.lse-arts.com/. The website is well maintained and has all the necessary information.

So, see you there.

Ok, this, by far has to be the most taxing week in all my time till now at the LSE. I have a whole host of things laid out in front of me and I am not sure whether I have enough time to complete everything…

Rest for some other day.

@FutureMe: When you see this post in the future, reflect back and think about what an awesomely busy week it has been. See you then…