What's App Doc!

As many of you are already aware is that there is a SMS substitute software called What's App. After having been requested to use it by a work client who informed me he was stepping out of office I installed it on my phone.

Obviously it's needs a net connection to run. At work I can use Wi-fi at the expense of battery power. Essentially I can communicate with this client for free even when he no longer has access to Skype.

He gives me his phone number and then communication carries on. All the while I'm thinking what is the point of this app beyond communicating to people overseas. And yet people are using it even locally.

Some advantages obviously are group chats, sending images and other attachments though this will cost you on your data. However you always need to keep your data/wi-fi connection on unless you keep checking it at regular intervals. Doing this severely reduces the battery life of any device whereas sticking to traditional SMS has no impact on battery whatsoever despite the cost.

Now in an effort to embrace technology I've kept my wi-fi connection on and used what's app. The problem is my battery keeps draining at a much higher rate requiring me to charge once a day.

Also for some strange reason there is no iPad app. This way I could have switched off my Internet on my phone and left the ipad on which is anyway always on when at home. But apple or the developers have prevented this for some strange reason (yes jailbreaking will work). You can however keep it running on a Windows machine or tablet in addition to a Mac. iPod touch is also supported. So there is a win there if you want to stay connected permanently. None of these are official as far as I know except for the iPod touch.

You might have noticed that other popular Social Media platforms started on the web and eventually had a mobile version. When you're at home you can just use your machine. By default this is not how What's App is intended though it would seem to be a smart move to market it that way.

As it stands you need to be connected to the Internet on your mobile device constantly to receive information in a timely manner. When you consider this SMS seems to win out as you are guaranteed delivery though at a higher cost. For people who regular text people such as their boyfriend/girlfriend you do find other alternatives from mobile providers. So what I'm asking you is, is there any real point to What'sApp?

It has been cited that Whatsapp is cheaper which is most certainly true especially if you mange your data correctly. However What's App is not free giving users a year to try it on Android and Windows platforms while Apple users have to pay from the get go. Sure it's only $0.99 but are you actually willing to pay for it?

On the whole this doesn't seem like an SMS killer. Most non users I mentioned the app to suggested using gtalk or Facebook as alternatives instead.

What do you think?

Interesting Sri Lankan Facebook Stats

Well, this was not the post that I intended to write but, when trying to research on Social Media engagement in Sri Lanka, just came across some interesting Facebook facts derived straight from their own Advertising platform.
It gives you great options to filter your target markets with custom segmentation, most of the figures are just from playing around with the advertiser dashboard.

So lets start

As of March 2010

Males Dominate!

There are 501,520 Facebook users who live in Sri Lanka (those who have indicated that they are located in Sri Lanka) out of which 320,100 are men and 172,640 are women. Another 8780 have not disclosed their gender.

As a percentage close to 65% of Sri Lankan Facebook users are male. And around only around 35% are female.

More Lesbians than Gay men?

Well, that may be a hypothetical statement but if you go ahead to check “Interested In” feature you would find that there are 12,400 Men who are interested in Men, and 35,800 women interested in women. J

So if we take this figure as a percentage of each gender 3.87% of Sri Lankan Men on Facebook are interested in Men, and 20.67% of Sri Lankan women on Facebook are interested in women.   :O


The Facebook group called Sri Lankan Gay Friends has close to 1000 members. and the Facebook Group Lesbians Group in Sri Lanka has close to 600 members.

Who you gonna vote?

In the past few months we saw heavy political activity in Facebook, even now you could see many candidates advertising on Facebook and so many updates on different political fan pages. There was a close game between the two presidential candidates with much being spent on constant advertising. The Facebook Fan Page stats at the moment are as follows

Mahinda Rajapaksa (http://www.facebook.com/mahinda2010) - 56,702

Sarath Fonseka ( http://www.facebook.com/sarathfonseka ) - 63,150


Do you like Kottu?

Although you could consider many Sri Lankans to love “Kottu” when you filter out the number those who actually are a Fan of a Kottu Rotti Page or who have Kottu Rotti mentioned in their profile information is only 5380. No matter how popular Kottu is amongst Sri Lankans since many of them have not associated themselves with that word, Facebook has not been able to collect the correct sentiment with regards to Kottu.

What’s your Lingo?

Ok so we have the three National Languages, Sinhala, Tamil and English. In Facebook many of us have set our default language as English (US) with  451,000 using it and only 46,060 using English (UK).

But did if you check other languages you would get some interesting figures,

320 Facebook users in Sri Lanka speak Español (Spanish)

270 speak French

And an interesting 20 users speaking Hebrew

Of course the accuracy of this would differ according to whether the user has specified this on their language settings.


Sports Update

There are 55,0810 who like Cricket and only 6220 who have mentioned their interest in Rugby

Creepy

There are 180 Facebook users who like Satan and 20 of those who like Osama Bin Laden…and there are 4589 fans in Anarkalli’s Official Facebook Page!!!

So anyway Facebook is a place where different tastes, ideas and people come together, its interesting see how this social media platform has risen to popularity in the recent past, when i checked Facebook some months back there were only around 350000 Facebook users but now its over 500000. Its interesting to see how Facebook is influencing our lives and how it is impacting our country as a whole, i think i might cover it on another post.

Fonseka Bubble on Google...

Well…these are interesting times that we are living in. The election heat is felt everywhere, with the announcement of the Presidential Election and a lot of talk is about the Sarath Fonseka from the opposition.

Several months back this would have been something that no one would have even imagined. But Political debate aside, I thought of just simply checking out the how Sarath Fonseka’s entry into Sri Lankan politics affected the online behavior and public search patterns.

A simple trend research on Google Trends revealed how the Fonseka bubble burst into the online community. It’s quite interesting to see the relative increase of search queries for the keyword “Sarath Fonseka”.

If we are able to relate each peak on the graph with actual events from the real world we would be able to easily relate why the search patterns have increased in such a manner.

For example the peak marked by “C” occurred during end of May 2009 is when General Sarath Fonseka was to be made Chief of Defense Staff. The steady increase from October 2009 shows the relative high volume of search queries made with the Generals name just when he was announcing his resignation and his interest in entering into politics subsequently.

The other interesting information to be gathered would be the Google News Results marked at each peak point.

These peak points marked by different letters feature the most relevant Google News result occurred when each peak was created.

It would be really interesting to see how the Search Trend for Sarath Fonseka turn out to be in the coming months, we can see a clear upward trend but have we reached the highest peak yet? The Bubble will subside at some point, and even if he wins or lose it would be interesting to see at which point it would subside…

A Tale of Websites

A very long time ago I created my first website. I did so because my friend said it was kinda 'cool' and I should definitely do so. Naturally I rushed off to Angelfire.com as he directed and created my account.

Everyone in school had a website then. My friends said "My name is XXXX. I am 12 years old. I like Cheetahs." Funny enough he soon started getting mails from a retired American Navy Man who was in his late 40's. I thought it was a bit odd, but being 12 I didn't know what it was. This guy kept mailing my friend as months went by informing him about how he just bought a new computer and it just went on. Apparently he really liked Cheetahs too! I figure now that he was definitely a Pedo...

Anyway this first site was lame, as lame as everyone else's. So I wanted to create something that wasn't crap. So being a big fan of Star Wars Jedi Knight II, I created a site to host something I made. A secret locations guide. OoooooH!

This time though not satisfied with the Angelfire web editor and also because of the significant cost associated with creating pages online I used notepad instead. These were the days when connecting to the Internet was only associated with Peeky Peeky Peeky PEEEEEKYYYYYYYYYYYY Peeky Peeky Peek.

But creating the site in this manner required careful planning. Having a fair number of pages I soon learned the problem of using the regular linking, which created links that led to my harddrive... very frustrating. Changes in structure also lead to broken links in multiple places. Uploading images also had to be planned to military precision to save money. All in all it was fun and had quite a few pages. I liked my site, it was cooler than the other crap everyone else had, but it never really took off. I was pleased, it had a set scope of content which I achieved and that was that. Eventually it was forgotten.

It was much later that I created a different site that actually had some traffic. In 2004 a game called Chrome came out. I kinda liked it though it wasn't great. Went on to the official forum and somehow got stuck there. I ended up answering people's queries on there, and there were a lot of ANGRY people for the game's shortcomings.

Soon the dev's asked me to become the official moderator. I did. Then I noticed that a lot of the complaints were being repeated in different threads, newer threads. So in my infinite wisdom I created a FAQ of well... FAQ's! I dubbed it ingeniously... the I'm Stuck Guide! I then needed a place to host it...

Dun Dun Dun... the birth of a new website, this time on Geocities. I started with the I'm Stuck Guide which significantly reduced the number of complaints on the official forum. Over time the FAQ grew... but then new less frequent problems came along, like how to play etc.

So then I expanded... added a full walkthrough complete with picturZ! I created a homepage (with a picture!) that led to another index page of stuffs. Soon the traffic was rolling in. My account was being taken off due to exceeding daily allotted bandwidth. But this was due to large images being scaled down. One user actually sent me a mail telling me to resize them and to use IrfanView. I still use it today.

So after resizing all the images, I still got blocked after bandwidth usage was too high. Then another user told me to switch to his brothers web hosting service, fusioncities.com with no bandwidth restrictions. After some consideration I did. There were some relatively minor challenges, but the site was eventually completed and traffic was still good. I monitored with Stat Counter. Days with peak activity were tied to excessive activity on the Chrome official forum. I still moderated there. I created sticky threads linking to my site, and my signature also linked to my site.

The dev's of Chrome... Techland based in Poland sent me some freebies for my trouble. A Chrome mug and shirt.CoolZ. The forum was managed and the site kept getting traffic.

But then an unsolvable problem hit the game. The complaints got larger and larger, more vocal. Fusioncities was bought over and my site just erased. I wasn't making any profit from these activities and eventually exited.

Today I realize that creating a site is easy. The challenge lies in the maintenance and growth which is achieved through the creation of relevant and rich content. If you don't plan for it and successfully capture/hold people's attention, then you're pretty much doomed. Content is king.