Usage of Social Media by Indian brands has increased recently. Sunsilk started it with the introduction of sunsilk gang of girls. I am not sure how far it has worked. What I am sure is there is some movement happening as more and more brands are trying to involve their customers. Which is the best part of social media, P2P kind of involvement between brands and users. Works for both consumers and brands.

Not very recently Indian youth brand Fastrack also got into an area where it wants to interact with its web2.0 savvy customers directly. Along with wrist watches they are also into eye wears [I own a pair of glasses and I am big fan of bikes that John rides both in personal & other professional life] both find consumers in youth, I am happy that social media doesn’t mean just *orkut* to fastrack. We need to see how far Fastrack will go in this new exciting journey.

Fastrack sent me a brand new neon disk watch to try out. I already have about five watches from different companies. So I guess I would be good enough to give some comments. So here are my comments after using it for about two weeks. Neon disk range is stylish anaolg watches targeted at youth. They don’t have needles but has rotating disk to show the time.
+ves : Its stylish, light and easy, It looks uber cool with your evening wear, those disks and neon light has some geek factor
-ves : May not really go well with your formal dressing. But I guess you will be using a different watch for that right? No date functionality.We need that really.

OK now the happy news is Fastrack agreed to pass on the watch to any of my reader as a gift. I decided it should go to commenter with maximum number of comments on this blog. So  ManojVasanth congrats.

I like to have cards of different design. Now I have a new design. Which is much better than my previous card. This time its more web2.0 and geekish. It has just enough information and lots of space for other notes,  mob number and address if req.

Friends suggested that I should have it in my *blog colours* too. Here is the modified version.

Which one do you think is better? I like black&white.

The problem with using more and more social networks is with every social network you join you need to create profile then invite friends. There is no way to carry your data from one network to another network with out a hitch. Few smart people have already started working on this issue of DataPortability in detail. So lets not worry about it.
In the mean time few web apps have given users an opportunity to share the data. Take an example of adding all your Gmail contacts into Orkut. Login to Orkut and then enter your gmail id/password to invite all your contacts. This seems OK since both Gmail and Orkut is owned by the same company. Your id/password *does not* leave Google.

Where as the same model is used by LinkedIn to add your professional contacts. You need to give your userid/pw details of gmail/hotmail to add the contacts. This doesn’t seem OK even with their promise of privacy and purpose.

Now how would you achieve this with out sharing the credentials?
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I just read this new article by Anand about the SMSGupsgup. Even though I don’t agree with the traffic/numbers used for comparison I was forced to re look at Gupshup. I had an account at SMS Gupshup almost an year back. My last msg there was 359 days back and I had 84 subscribers then. Year back it was simple one to many SMS application. It didn’t have other ways of interacting than sending an expensive SMS. At the same time twitter had all those things which I needed. So the obvious choice was twitter.

Smsgupshup has grown a lot in this one year to prove my this comment almost wrong. Now it has web interface which can be used for posting text or images to group. It has Gchat (I would have loved more general jabber) interface to post. Now I can subscribe to any other gupshuppers with a click of a button. It has a mobile site which is usable and friendly. Which means I revived my account at smsgupshup and sent another welcome/warning message to all my subscribers.
I guess I am going to use it more regularly now.

I still think it needs an API to get more people attracted. By looking at the way they have introduced features in last one year,  they may have it very soon.
I am going to be there on twitter as long as the community around me stays there.  As well now I am going to maintain the gupshup account too. I need to figure out how can I use both of them! BTW send JOIN thejeshgn 567673434 to *follow me* on gupshup.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/aamirkhan
I am scrapping the html of Aamir Khan’s blog to create feed. I am using feedburner to reduce the load on my server. The scrapping script isn’t perfect yet. It doesn’t show date properly and doesn’t show number of comments. I am working on it will fix it very soon.

As of now its a partial content feed. It will remain partial until Aamir makes his blog creative commons compliant. The scrapping script runs once per day. I will increase the frequency once it becomes almost perfect

Update May 16 2008 : Fixed a small bug.