National Breakfast Day Free McMuffin

Just walk into any Mcdonalds between 7am and 11am on 18th March to grab a free McMuffin. FB page of McDonals is not replying over there, so this page from my side. Full page ad on national dailies is not enough.

As I wrote in my tumblr page, there is an old Sanskrit adage:

Pratah Bhojum Purnam|
Doparah Madhyam Samaprajam|
Ratrukalam Apam Daridranam|

which basically means:
Eat breakfast like a king, Lunch should be modest like a common man, but the dinner should be very minimum, like a poor man would eat.
In today’s busy lives, we frequently forget morning breakfast, so this National Breakfast Day reminds us it’s importance.

Facebook Director Jocelyn Goldfein in Techfest on newsfeed

Techfest 2013 running on 3-5 Jan at IIT Mumbai has an excellent lecture series. Since I work at Justdial Malad West, I had to travel 16 kms to catch this lecture. I don’t regret a bit, as I got insights into the product management best practices behind world’s most engaged user base, if not in terms of number (which is held by Google of course).

Introduction

Jocelyn Goldfein is Director of Engineering at Facebook for 2 1/2 years. She looks after Newsfeed, yes the single most used and landmark feature of Facebook, Photos,Videos, Search and Questions.

Background

In the summer, 2010, Newsfeed was being used by over 1/2 Billion users of Facebook, because it was default way of interacting/content consumption. So, even contemplating changing it requires certain hubris or arrogance. But, Change at Facebook is often rapid, disruptive and not always appealing to users, but that is the only constant. Now, there is Zuckerber’s law, which is at play along similar lines of Moore’s law in semiconductor industry.

I would expect that next year, people will share twice as much information as they share this year, and next year, they will be sharing twice as much as they did the year before.

Another important development was the introduction of Like button in May, 2010. There were 3 fundamental tensions at work during the evolution of Newsfeed.

1. Determinism vs Magic
2. Freshness vs Staleness
3. Consumption vs Interaction

New stories were drowning old interesting stories in default reverse chronological feed display. So, Newsfeed – the aggregation of activities and updates in a user’s homepage needed to evolve and change. Over the course of 1 1/2 years, spanning 122 design mock-ups, a peak engineering team of 25 and 3 major prototypes, the newsfeed evolved leading to the launch in spring 2011.

Product Development

• The product development at Facebook follows the following methodology, stages:

Polished Ideas

Launchable  Ideas                                                Big Ideas

• There are a lot of live test, which they do.
• A product is improved and launched multiple times.
• The development work is only half-done at the launch. They continue to monitor how users are using the feature and use that to improve the experience.

Inputs to Launchable idea can be from a hackathon, a product manager’s research, an engineer or even an intern. The genesis of new Newsfeed lay in the Realtime Feed and Live Ticker prototype by a new engineer in Summer 2010. They go on to build an inspirational mockup around Cluster. The idea is to coalesce checkins, status update, photos, invitation around say birthday. They built a new infrastructure for the same: Feed Story. It allows newsfeed to pull signal from noise. You can group friends talking about same topic. The technology behind it was Topic clustering originally developed for Question based on NLP (Natural Language Processing). It was used to pose questions to relevant people, but wasn’t successful over there. I really like the idea of re-use of technology from a different product. But, the audience for

2 Newspaper and MLEs

A typical user has 150 friends, so birthdays, marriage etc life events in a typical month are a lot and they are interesting for a user. The new infrastructure behind this is Feed Ranking.

3 Launchable idea Boulder Feed

Now they try to have best of both worlds on all 3 parameters specified at the beginning. A newsfeed and a deterministic Ticker. Facebook employees start using deep integration of apps like spotify and they see clustering being used to group all songs a user listened instead of a separate feed for each song. On Nov 9, 2011 they launched it. There were a lot of protests.

They re-iterated and changed again. That will be a future blog post.

vNext

This is not final Newsfeed. There will be changes to it, maybe 3rd party content integration etc. At 1B users, it will be more challenging that 2010, when they undertook this redesign. We are waiting Ms Goldfein/Mark!

Mobile and Social enterprise

Taking your Enterprise Mobile is no longer an option, but a necessity

Mobile adoption is increasing in industries – healthcare, construction, govt. Field workers can download a part of workflow offline. When reconnected, it’d synchronize with the backend application. CIO

• 77% plan to use personal devices to access company data and applications.
• Deploy more than 25 mobility apps in next 2 years.

Mobile enterprise strategy

1. Build and Connect: Connect to and run backend systems in support of mobile
2. Manage and Secure: Mobile Devices, services and applications
3. Extend and Transform: Existing business capabilities need to be extended to mobile devices. Also, create new opportunities to transform the business

Technology backbone

The priority needs to be decided for targeting mobile OS. If it is primarily smartphone devices, a technology like Phonegap can be used to reuse code across iOS, Android, Blackberry and Windows phone 8 OS. The technology should be able to support:

• Social networking,
• smarter commerce, and
• analytics.

Sometimes you need to look at the support for feature phones in addition to smartphones. The analytics piece mentioned above, allows developer to track the mobile experience. It also means automatically detect customer struggles, obstacles, or issues. It should enable us to drill down into actual user behavior.

Business Continuity with unreliable networks

The solution should enable companies to connect a distributed system (like point of sales or the sales force’s mobile devices) to a centralized database even though the network infrastructure is unreliable, a common challenge in India. The solution also should provide a cost-effective way to automate highly distributed business processes leveraging remote knowledge workers by replacing heavy web/app servers with lighter client apps.

Build and Connect innovative apps and interactive experiences

Background: There are going to be 10B devices by 2020. 61% CIOs put priority on mobile 45% say that they can achieve increased productivity with mobile apps according to a report by IBM.

It will find its way B2E, B2C applications in different industries like – Retail, Financial services, Distribution according to 2011 IBM tech trends report. It also mentions top mobile adoption concerns. Increasing trend that we are going to witness is BYOD (Bring your Own Device). There will be 200m BYOD soon. My employer Justdial has rolled out Ambassador program, which empowers employees to take our enterprise software on Ipad with 3G connection, wireless Logitec keyboard.

The increasing number of operating systems as well as the mix of devices, form factors and standards has turned native application development into a cost-prohibitive strategy, resulting in a growing market of cross-platform solutions and mobile development tools, like Phonegap and IBM Worklight. It provides device application programming interface (API) using JavaScript.  So, one can use HTML5, CSS4 and JavaSscript libraries like dojox.mobile, Sencha Touch, jQuery Mobile. There a provision for Server – push notification, version management, security, integration. APN (Apple Push Server), Google Push Servers (GCN, formerly C2DM), RIM Push Server, Microsoft Push Server

Social Communication

Focus for enterprise unified communication has shifted from reach to relevance. Messaging tools need to provide real-time translation across languages, and IM lingo as well. Soft phones are in vogue, as they use broadband removing voice costs and have better integration on applications. This can be extended to customer interaction as well. The following are components:

1. Voice
2. Meetings
3. Video
4. Mobile
5. Instant Messaging
6. Social
7. Call Management

There are going to be 1b smartphones by 2016. Do you need more reasons to focus on enterprise mobility.

2011 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

A New York City subway train holds 1,200 people. This blog was viewed about 4,300 times in 2011. If it were a NYC subway train, it would take about 4 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

Social media for doctors

I was privileged to be a faculty for social media marketing, blogging for doctors at Maharashtra University of Health Sciences. There were 25 doctors, who were present there as part of CME (continuing medical education). They earned 4 points out of it. Medical informatics is green-field space in India and a lot of development will take place in near future. I enjoyed talking about blogging, wiki, Facebook marketing, Twitter and Health 2.0 with wonderful participants. Looking forward to interact with all of you at:

• http://www.facebook.com/prasoonk
• http://twitter.com/prasoonk
• http://www.linkedin.com/in/prasoonk
• http://www.slideshare.net/prasoonk

If a company participates in social media, it should be ready for good as well bad comments

I am doing a case study on the participation of Avaya in social media. Here is the summary of presence in various
business and social networking sites:

Network	Avaya Employees	Groups
LinkedIn	>500	38
Facebook	>500	40
MySpace	The only Avaya references are to Avaya as a name.  I was unable to find a way to enter or search for company name, and searching for a ‘*@avaya.com’ or just ‘avaya.com’ as an email address didn’t work	I was unable to identify any Avaya-related groups on MySpace
Plaxo	You can only search for people to whom you are already connected	6

 

Let’s analyze them one-by-one. If we go to Linkedin, we will find the groups relating to Avaya products,
Avaya employees, and Devconnect:

Group Name	Description	Owner	Members
Avaya Alumni Network	Worldwide network of Avaya employees, past and present. • Get in touch with old colleagues! • Accelerate your career/business through members of the Avaya Alumni Network. Please ensure Avaya is in your LinkedIn profile before joining.	Rajeev Kalavar	1,650
AVAYA CONNECTIONS	This group is designed to bring former and current Avaya employees together to share ideas and opportunities.	Andrew Meringoff	1,357
Avaya Professionals	All about Avaya, for Avaya professionals to meet and get in touch to share knowledge. Recruiters not allowed in this group!	Cas Blokker	999
Telecom IP consultants group	The telecom IP consultants group is a team of network and project managers’ consultants, working with multiple Service providers and corporate customers. The objective of the group is to exchange the contracting prospects world wide on the following field: Junipers, Cisco, Nortel, Avaya, etc.	Amin Amor	386
Avaya DevConnect	Member of the Avaya DevConnect Developer & Partner Program	Jon Alperin	264
Ex-Lucent Alumni	A networking group for former Lucent Technologies Employees worldwide that are active in telecommunications industry including former/current Lucent, Bell Labs, Avaya, Agere and current Alcatel-Lucent professionals.	Patrick Duncan	242
Call Center Technologies Brewery	The Group Focuses on Call Center Technologies Platforms like Cisco IPCC, Dialogic, Asterisk and Avaya. Also Consultancy and outsourcing is focused upon.	Asif Khan	206
IVR and CTI for CRM	This group is for networking, discussions and job postings around IVR, CTI for Genesys and Avaya	Chirag Shah	172
Avaya Engineers	This is a group for sharing anything concerning Avaya.	Jesper Dahl	133
UDN, an Avaya DevConnect program	This group is for software developers who are members of UDN, an Avaya DevConnect program focused on development of advanced communications applications	Jon Alperin	96
Avaya Employees and Users	This is a group for Avaya employees, Avaya Business Partners and Avaya users, used to share connections, experience and information.	David Glumac	93
Avaya Telecoms Forum	For IT professionals involved in the telecoms field using Avaya technology e.g. IP Telephony, SIP, business services, Multi-media channels, call routing, unified messaging.	Andrew Evans	78
Avaya Associates	Group dedicated to Avaya Professionals with skills / interests in all of the Avaya porfolio or products – INDeX to Definity, IP Office or Network Alchemy to Media Server / Communications Manager (8300, 8500, 8700), AIC, IQ, CMS, Modular Messaging & Diallers, Multivantage etc….	Greg Tatton	68
AVAYA Network	Avaya is a global leader in communication systems, applications, and services. Learn about where we’ve been, where we’re headed, and the leaders that are getting us there.	Ranjit Patel	60
Contact Center Architects	Join today Contact Center Architect Group! http://contactcenterarchitects.com It is a Professional Group of Qualified Contact Center Architect who is having exposure & expertise of Contact Center Technologies across the platform like Aspect, Genesys, AVAYA, Nortel, CosmoCom, ININ etc.	Ranjit Patel	56
Avaya Solution & Interoperability Test Lab (SIL) Alumni	Where current and former members of the Avaya Solution & Interoperability Test Lab (SIL) under Skip Hubner and DevConnect Test Lab stay in touch	Samy Cheng-Robles	49
Tata Telecom Alumni	This is a worldwide group of all ex-Tata Telecom employees, who share common bonding, trust and comraderie despite our diverse backgrounds. All ex-employees of Tata Telecom (now Avaya) will be considered for membership.	Parag Kasture	45
IVR Engineer	This group is all about IVR Engineer.Cisco, Juniper, Huawei, Checkpoint, Nortel, Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson, Marconi, ADVA, Ciena, Fujitsu, Avaya, Intervoice.If you are an Engineer with experience in any of the above, join this group.Your membership may be subject to the approval of the group manager.	Balram singh	43
Unified Communication Forum-Avaya,Cisco,Mitel,Nortel	Enter a brief description of your group and its purpose, i.e., “This is a group for User Experience Design professionals to expand our network of people and ideas.”	Sanjay Ramdhonee	41
Greater Philadelphia Avaya Users Group	GPAUG is a group for individuals who use or manage Avaya communication technologies. The group hosts bi-weekly meeting and has provided discounted and free Avaya training classes. Members in the group also assist each other with technology questions. Serving, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware.	Val B	32
Avaya Specialists	Dedicated Group for Avaya Technical Specialists based in the UK to connect to old colleagues, network or even get technical advise. The group is designed for experienced Avaya Specialists and accredited Engineers – ACA, ACS and/or ACE’s.	Ross Mitchell (ross_mit@hotmail.com)	29
Avaya Alumni	Where ex-Avayans stay in touch.	Sukij Yongpiyakul	27
Avaya Select	Enter a brief description of your group and its purpose, i.e., “This is a group for User Experience Design professionals to expand our network of people and ideas.”	Sanjay Ramdhonee	26
Avaya	A group for former employees, current employees and vendors/agencies that have worked with Avaya	Jeff Fall	12
Avaya GSD	Group of people supporting Avaya products.	Abhishek Gupta	11
Avaya Employees	This group is designed to network all current Avaya employees around the globe. Feel free to Join and netowrk with your colleagues ..!	Sateesh Karra	10
Avaya Certified Associates	Anyone who is Avaya Certified is encouraged to join this new group. Focused on bringing together anyone working or associated with the networking field.	Peter Valencia	9
AVAYA Business Partner Professionals	Enter a brief description of your group and its purpose, i.e., “This is a group for User Experience Design professionals to expand our network of people and ideas.”	Jeff Stewart	9
Associated Communication Consultants, Inc. – ACCI	ACCI’s mission is to achieve the results necessary to meet our client’s computer, data and telecommunications goals while realizing the highest productivity and rate of return on their investment. Consultation, acquisition of equipment &material. NEC, Microsoft, Avaya, Nortel, Cisco/Linksys	David Stroh	8
Mid-West Avaya Advocates	This group is a non manufacturer sanctioned group dedicated to being an open forum for discussion, praise, venting, and/or just the exchange of ideas between Avaya Business Partners, Avaya Users, and potential users evaulating Avaya as an option for their Business Communications strategy.	Jason Boni, ACA	7
Were you with me in Tata Telecom	This group is to bring together the prople who have worked in Tata Telecom and who are now continuing with Avaya Global Connect, India	Vijay Raghavan	7
AVAYA HOWTO	This group is created to share knowledge about AVAYA equipments, send new job opportunities, and more….	Juan Francisco Cardoza Mancilla Jr.	5
Sencit	Sencit is a group for user experienced Telecom professionals who are employed by Sencit (Sencit Brussels, Sencit Antwerp, Sencit Liège, Sencit Enterprise, the Sencit companies in The Netherlands) or are related to it’s partners (Toptel, Plantronics, Toledo, Go Telecom, Avaya, Alcatel-Lucent,…).	Roel Vandenbroucke	5
AVAYA DK User Group	Professional User Group for AVAYA users in Scandinavia	Nicholas Hansen	2
Avaya GSD Argentina	Avaya Global Services Delivery members from Argentina.	Daniel Chrabolowsky	2
Central PA Alliance of Avaya Users (CPAAU)	Professional group of Avaya Users (customers) in the Central PA area to exchange ideas and to network.	Karen Peiffer	2
Avaya GlobalConnect Karamchari	Avaya GlobalConnect is India’s leading provider of intelligent communications solutions, systems and services focused on meeting the needs of organizations large to small.	Madhur Seth	1
Avaya Colleagues	Enter a brief description of your group and its purpose, i.e., “This is a group for User Experience Design professionals to expand our network of people and ideas.”	Mohamed Ashiq	1

 

If we head over to Facebook, we
will find it everywhere. In fact, Avaya is making a great push for connecting Facebook profile with CRM.

Facebook Groups related to Avaya
Group Name	Network	Size	Type	New
AVAYA – GSD Argentina	Avaya	11 members	Just for Fun – Totally Pointless
AVAYA		365 members	Organizations - Professional Organizations	9 More Members
Avaya Employees		145 members	Business – Companies
Avaya DevConnect		112 members	Business – Companies
Dude I Hate Avaya		111 members	Common Interest – Beliefs & Causes	3 More Members
We love Avaya		53 members	Business – General	3 More Members, 1 Wall Post
ODA A LA AVAYA		29 members	Common Interest – Friends	1 More Member
Avaya IP Office		24 members	Business – General
Avaya Canada		21 members	Business – Employment & Work
Avaya GlobalConnect Employees		17 members	Common Interest - Activities
INDIOS AVAYA		14 members	Sports & Recreation - General Sports
Avaya Egypt		13 members	Business – Companies
Facebook Avaya		13 members	Organizations - Professional Organizations
DOWN WITH AVAYA!!		4 members	Just for Fun – Totally Random
Avaya EMEA		3 members	Business – Companies
Avaya Gold Business Partner Requires – Business Development Executive		1 member	Business – Employment & Work
Nortel BCM vs Avaya IP Office		2 members	Internet & Technology - General
Avaya Platinum Partner		3 members	Business – General
AVAYA		1 member	Business – Employment & Work
Avaya Belgium		11 members	Organizations - Professional Organizations
albatross		481 members	Music – Rock	1 More Member, 1 Board Topic
Centennial College–HP Science and Technology Center Students		405 members	Student Groups – General	1 Fewer Member
SIP Protocol		159 members	Internet & Technology - Languages & Formats	3 More Members, 1 Wall Post
Atento Venezuela		122 members	Common Interest – Friends
Agence ChoYou		65 members	Business – Marketing & Advertising	1 Fewer Member
APAC Underground!		79 members	Common Interest – Friends
Hold Fox News Accountable		33 members	Common Interest – Beliefs & Causes
proCSG		21 members	Business – Companies
Want to work in an IT/Telecoms company in Surrey?		17 members	Business – Employment & Work
Future Technology		12 members	Business – Employment & Work
Nissi Media		7 members	Business – Employment & Work
Elect Robert Carr for Council Willoughby Ward 4		6 members	Organizations – Political Organizations
Modular Messaging		3 members	Business – Companies
Artelco		4 members	Internet & Technology - General
SOTEL SYSTEMS		3 members	Business – General
???VoIP, Ecsino=Skype+Cisco		3 members	Business – General
SoftPhone - Sistemas de Call Center Gratuito		2 members	Internet & Technology - Computers & Hardware
URGE		1 member	Business – Companies
Para que vuelva el plantronick y tengamos mute!!		16 members	Common Interest - Activities	1 More Member
Old Timer’s Soccer		8 members	Sports & Recreation - Recreational Sports	1 More Member

 

Plaxo, which is now a part of
Comcast, one of Avaya’s customers of Avaya Aura has healthy presence of Avaya
as well.

Plaxo  Groups related to Avaya
Name	Size	URL	Description	Tags
Avaya CTI	78 members	http://avayacti.plaxogroups.com	All about Avaya and CTI (AIC, TSAPI, CCE, …) No recruiters!	Avaya, AIC, CTI, VOIP, CCE, Telecom, Contact center, Call Center, Voice Portal, IVR, Telecom, Voice, Email, blending, Switch, @Voice
Avaya Inc. Brasil	62 members	http://avayanos.plaxogroups.com	Grupo de profissionais Avaya no Brasil.	PBX, Lucent, Avaya, Call Center, CTI, IQ, CIE, IVR, CMS, S8700, S8300, S8500, G350, G700, G650, IA770, Audix, VoIP, SIP, CM, Comunication Manager, DAC, ACD, Solaris, Linux, DADS, Dev Connect, ASA, Softphone, ipPhone, R2, ISDN, CDR, Dialog Designer, EPW, Distributed Off
Avaya UC Champions Team	5 members	http://avayaucchampions.plaxogroups.com	This is the community group for the virtual team of champions focusing around the topic of Unified Communications applications.	uc, unified communications, avaya, cti, collaboration, fmc
Avaya	3 members	http://avaya.plaxogroups.com	Avaya users and engineers
CRM Specialist Group	10 members	http://crmspecialist.plaxogroups.com	To join all people who works with CRM technologies.	CRM, CTI, Siebel, Genesys, Avaya
Contact Center Management	50 members	http://ccma.plaxogroups.com	This group contains Contact Center Managers. English language please	Contact Center, Call Center, CCMA, Management, Customer Support, Direct Sell, Cross-Sell, Avaya, Siemens, Alcatel, Lucent, Nortel, Cisco

 

 

 

Facebook is down at 1:03PM IST

[Update: Facebook Architecture links added]

1. Quora link on Facebook architecture
2. Facebook‘s Github page – Hiphop PHP to C++ compiler, memcached, cassandra
3. Facebook Opensource – Apache Hive,
4. Facebook Engineering FB page

Facebook website is down image

Yes, it is true. Facebook, which if considered a country is the 7th most populous one, is down. The following message appears on the site:

Sorry, an error has occurred.

We’re working on getting this fixed as soon as we can.

Last time, there was an outage on July 2007 for 1 and 1/2 hours. Last week, there were a lot of phishing attacks, like Areps.at.