Saurabh Garg on The New New Thing

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Facebook now has over 10 billion photos (via mashable). The numbers for other photo sharing sites are unknown but assuming that Flickr had 2 billion in Nov 07 (and they were growing by 5 million per day, Flickr should have about 5 billion photos), Facebook becomes the largest photo-sharing website.

Can someone give numbers on Orkut, MySpace, Flickr and Picasa … ?

Brings me to a radical idea. If Facebook stated charging for photo uploads, would the reveune stream be sustainable? Would people continue to upload pictures?

Thinking out loud about Flickr, it has evolved into a place where all the aspiring photographers publish their pictures hoping to catch attention of the world. What if there are places like that for all niches? A place where all aspiring actors upload their videos to be seen by directors and producers? A place where all aspiring sportsmen uploaded their videos and profiles to be spotted by talent scouts? Hmmm .. could be interesting. Any thoughts anyone?

Brings me to another point. What do people really do on social networking sites. More than relying on research reports, what do you see yourself and people around you doing on SNS? For me top three things would be

1. Share and Discover lives - Upload and read photos, videos, notes, blogs etc.
2. Kill time - Games, Movies, Celeb Gossip etc.
3. Discovery of Interestingness - Interesting people, interesting links etc.

What are your top three things that people do on networking sites?

Time for another Friday Update. I like these Friday updates more than regular blog posts. I can be short. To the point. Touch upon variety of things. Generate ideas and prioritize things.

Without further ado, the hits, misses and random musings for the week that went by.

Hits

• TheStorez.com. Arvind T, a classmate from MDI Gurgaon launched his venture. He has been at it for about an year now and he says that he has done things from selling books on a pushcart to going to all the small bookstores in every nook and cranny of India. More on him in subsequent posts. Please help by spreading word and giving him feedback.
• Morpheus Capital. Thanks to Ashish, spoke to Sameer and Nandini of Morpheus Venture about ideation and entrepreneurship. It was a very good conversation and they gave me a lot of food for thought. If there are any start-ups looking for mentoring, support, contacts or even a bouncing board for their ideas, they are an ideal team.
• Living Out of a Suitcase. I have been writing since I can remember and been blogging since 2004. Have been a really fruitful exercise and the time is ripe to start working on my first piece of fiction. This is something that I have always wanted to do. Tentatively called ‘Living out of a suitcase’, the book is a compilation of thoughts and rants of a 25 year old Indian. And no, its not a biography. Have written two chapters already. Lemme know if you would want a sneak preview.

Misses

• Bandwidth issues. My site (and as a result this blog) suddenly saw a lot of traffic and I exceeded my bandwidth. My site was unavailable for a couple of days. The issue is still not sorted but at least the site back online for now. Thanks to efforts of Trisha Infotech (my web-hosting provider).

Random Musings

• Theater. Saw Naseeruddin Shah act in a rendition of Khalil Gibran’s The Prophet. I did not understand much of the play, but Naseeruddin Shah was fabulous. I now know what it is like to be mesmerized at an individual brilliance.
• Hit by Plagiarism. This Facebook group uses one of my blogposts as its introduction (the first 20 bullet points) without any credits of any sort to me. Don’t know what to do about it. In a way its good, its affirmation for the fact that I write well and people appreciate it. But it sucks to see someone else use your work and you cant do anything about it.

All in all a not so exciting week. Lets see what the next one has in store for me.

What started as a random message on twitter, has now spiraled into something larger.

I sent this message on Twitter asking if anyone would like to co-author a book with me using Twitter and Web as medium. Idea was to use Twitter as a communication medium to write a book. I did not have a clue what the book would be on. What the title would be. What the storyline would be. How would we collaborate. I just wanted to see if people would want to participate in this experiment. And yes, in less than an hour, 5 people had replied.

Siyab, SimplyArun, kv, Asfaq and gsik agreed to be a part of the experiment. We soon exchanged emails and figured how would be go about it. I shall keep updating this once we flesh out the details.

Keep tuned.

UPDATE ON 13 Jul 2008: Setup a wiki to help Collaboration. PBWiki Link
UPDATE ON 13 Jul 2008: Setup a blog. Twitter Book Blog

Image Credits: Flickr