• LAR : Last Available Room. This is the term used to define the last available room in inventory for a channel.

Check out this article on ReadWriteWeb regd how the tech leaders are calling for a boycott of Facebook and advocating for an open social networking protocol (http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/more_web_industry_leaders_quit_facebook_call_for_o.php).

Another article on the same website, speaks about a study by the Advanced Institute of Science and Technology in Korea, which shows that Twitter is really not a social networking site, but more of a medium to broadcast your content (http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/study_twitter_isnt_very_social.php). Doesn’t really support the argument I made earlier that Twitter is not going to make it..but it certainly supports the notion that once the hype is gone the influence of twitter as a medium will decrease.

Do you think that this person even gave a minutes thought before filling up my mailbox with a 4MB attachment? Nope.. will he be getting my business? Nope.. It is not that the sales rep sent me such a large attachment, but because the company that can supposedly offer the best technical solutions out there cannot figure out a way to show their offerings in a single page without bloating it. Shows that the company is not innovative and thinking of customers.

Maybe I am being harsh here.. but then I have pretty high standards .

The sixth reason.. you are actually watching the video above to decide if you are cut out to be a CIO .. Come on people!!

PS : Yes, people do speak with each other before agreeing to get married and No, elephants don’t walk around in the streets in India .

Write at least 3 times a week on this blog

How did I do with this? Not as well as I wanted to. Here’s a chart showing the postings per month

I started well in January, but then as with most new year resolutions it didn’t last for more than a month . But I started picking up again at the end of the year. Hope I can continue the trend.

Run one half marathon ever month in a different state

Don’t laugh .. seriously this was something I have been wanting to do for a long time and I thought this was the year. But alas little did I know that I had to work so many weekends . I barely managed to run 3 half marathons and that too in only two neighboring states. Won’t make any promises..but hope to do better next year. I should mention that I did register for 3 races in different states for the first three months of 2009.. Just didn’t make it to the races

Even though I didn’t stick with my resolutions, 2009 was an interesting year. Accomplished a lot at work, but more importantly gained a life partner .

Morale of the story.. Don’t make resolutions. Just do it!! .

Donate.. Share..Enlighten

Here is the link to the donations page http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Support_Wikipedia/en

Congratulations, Mrs Cha Sa-Soon !!

Reminder for the rest of us to never give up .

First the good part.. Let’s take a look at some data from Compete and Alexa (companies that provide web statistics about sites) in comparison to facebook and myspace (the 800 lbs Gorillas of social networking)

Traffic Ranking :

Similar data from Alexa (where the long term data is available for free, unlike Compete)

No surprises here. We see that the ranking of Twitter has gone up drastically and is staying there..

Reach :

Interesting trend. One would expect that the reach (i.e. the number of people accessing the site) would go up as drastically as the ranking, but it is not as linear. Facebook is doing pretty well in this statistic.

Page Views :

I think this is to be expected. Twitter does not rely as much on page view due to the design and nature of the site.

Looking at all the data above, it looks like twitter is in a good place right. Now let’s add another dimension to the analysis. Let’s take a look at how Google views twitter. “Google Insights” is a service offered by Google to help analyze the “search” volume of keywords across regions and timelines. Since Google has ~70% of the search engine traffic, this is a good way to observe the trends.

Here is a graph showing the “interest” starting from 2004…

Zooming into the last 12 months..

Interesting to see that while facebook is getting more and more “interesting”, twitter is not catching up. This might be due to two reasons.

1. Twitter really did not promote it’s search function until July 2009, meaning the search engines did not have a way to scrape the site and as such did not have a lot of content to show to users.
2. Twitter partnered with Google and Bing in Oct 2010 2009 to index it’s posting. Again, this means that the search engines just got to the data and it might take some time for them to start showing the data in the search results.

I don’t know if this is conclusive evidence to show that Twitter will not make it. Twitter definitely has its place, but I don’t think it is all that the media has hyped it to be. Even though the media hype has driven more and more users to Twitter, the company has to yet come out with an viable business plan. I think that businesses are flocking towards twitter, because users are.. but once the fad passes on, the world is also going to move on.

P.S : I don’t think I need to mention to anyone looking at the data presented above that MySpace is on a downward spiral . Who still uses Coldfusion to run a site?? That is so 90s!! .