I want to make this feature request to twitter – Sticky tweets.

I would like to have an ability to mark some of my tweets as sticky and making them visible in the top of my timeline in my profile, all of the time.

I can see a lot of use cases for such tweets, suppose I am available for some freelancing job, I am out on a vacation, I have a portfolio to share, I have donation request, I could make those tweets sticky and hence my twitter profile would become more useful and my single point of online identity.

This will finally kill my need of having a blog or about.me profile or anything like that. Such a simple solution. Isn’t it ?

Twitter, We want sticky tweets, please! If you think this could be really useful, please help spread this post and let someone from twitter, notice this.

I think more than facebook, it’s twitter who need to copy the circle feature from Google+.  Posting different things to different people is much more required on twitter than on facebook. I’ve my professional contacts and personal friends on twitter, I would like to share different things with them, without them knowing it.

Twitter could do it by modifying twitter lists to some bit. If I could make private lists and put people in them and share different things with different lists, that’s what I want. The problem I see, in implementing this is, everything is public on twitter, so eventually everyone can see all you updates. But then, that’s ok. Only that I don’t want to spam my follower’s timeline with tweets he might not be interested in and there’s no problem if he explicitly come on my profile to see all of the tweets I made.

I think sooner or later, twitter would need to implement this feature. It’s a much needed one. Google+ is a big threat to them, I believe.

Unpluggd Startup event by pluggd.in happened last Saturday, here in Bangalore. I attended it and I am writing down, what I got from it.

First thing that I realized was, Why do startups love these events, meetups so much ? Because, it’s so much lonely, fear, uncertainty in their life that it feels so good to know and meet people who are going through all the same and are fools enough to believe that they can change the world and live in their own dream world.

It was exactly like any typical startup event or tech conference. Talks, networking, demos and bye bye. Greatest part was the speakers and the demos. The quality was really excellent by any means.

Listenig to Deap Ubhi, the founder of Burrp was most inspiring. The guy talked right from heart, about his experiences, mistakes he made during the early days of Burrp and about his current startup HopScout.com

Talk by ksrikrishna was also very insightful and made me feel like he was giving words to what I have experienced in last few months of startup life.

There were also Angels roaming around, people from Sequoia, Mumbai Angles and couple of others too.

Among the demos, I enjoyed Recruiter Box, Freshdesk, Interview Street and unbxd, these guys are really killing it.

People were trying their best to network with as many people as possible, it’s kind of fun to see people exchanging business cards and flattering about each others startup, seeing wannabes pitching to Angels, listening to veterans spraying gyan. There were rockstar founders, who had done well, everyone was trying to talk with them, there were people like me, sitting in the corner, there were people of all sorts.

There wasn’t any after party or there may be, but I didn’t see anything being discussed.

Surely, the Indian startup ecosystem is evolving, slowly, slowly, bit by bit.

For the technically-inclined, coding is the perfect form of procrastination” via a comment on HN

I’ve spend lots of time over computers, web, email, IM, twitter during last 5 years of my life.  When you don’t have enough resources to learn what you want to learn in your surroundings, Internet is one of the biggest source and help  for you.  Internet as a source of information is great, connected, liberal, free, always available, it’s exactly the way information access should be.

Five years back, I used to get internet access for around 3-4 hours a day, I would copy useful information, websites and burn them in CDs, go back home and read them for hours. It was all great. Internet as a source of information is perfect, still it’s same.

The other aspect of Internet is, Internet as a way of communication. Email, forums, IM, twitter, facebook are among them. But, the Internet as a way of communication, is broken.

You know this if you use it for more than 10+ hours a day.  For professional communication, it’s good. But I am talking about the personal communication. The problem with IM, twitter etc is, they are single dimensional, text. Communication between two people can happen only when there are multiple dimensions are involved, your voice, gestures, eye contact, body language.

From my personal experience, I’ve found that, talking a lot over IM has made me arrogant. I would tell people things I would never say them in a face to face conversation, I would talk too much straight forward, I would not answer people for a long, I would get frustrated if people don’t answer me and what not.

In person, I am a different person, over internet, I am bit different, I am arrogant, thanks to Internet.

I’ve got lots of misconception about world, because of Internet, I am connected with people from US, UK etc over internet more than people from India. Because of that, my understanding about society, culture is somewhat screwed, it’s a real disconnect from your surroundings. It’s painful at times.

Internet has made me arrogant.

First thing first. Let me tell you all the non-reasons. It’s not about technology. It’s not about ability. It’s not about resources. It’s not about funding. It’s nothing that you think.

And now let me clarify that how I qualify to answer this question. I am founder of http://closest.in it’s now a 11 month old web startup. We started working on it right after college, so I am a young startup founder, with very radical ideas, inspired by silicon valley culture and what not. So I have 11 months of experience in this arena to back my answer.

Now, why there are no web startups from India, because there are no early adopters. That’s not in our blood. Web startups come out of USA because Americans love to try new things and we Indians don’t. This is a problem which can’t be solved by technology. This is a psychological problem.  There is not a single web product which came out of India, that I use daily. Yes, not a single.

What are early adopters? Early adopters are those people who actually use new services and accept them or reject them. I am not saying that early adopters always accept new products, they actually give their opinion. So if a product is doomed to fail, it fails early. That’s how it works.

And I know the root of problem, it’s the faulty education system which is brainwashing innocent children and putting a belief in them that “your ideas are useless”, it’s such a small line and has such a vast impact on the whole nation. Students are literally discouraged to take forward their ideas, especially in the average engineering colleges, I can only talk about them because I was a part of them.

Only solution to fix this problem is to destroy all the engineering colleges right now and convert them into “idea factories” let young people work on what they want. I cry seeing so huge human potential wasting. If anyone wants to fix something in startups ecosystem, fix the education system, that’s the root.

</rant>

I was the busiest person in my college time. I don’t remember any day when I sate idle. Now, when I look back, I realized that it has really paid off. You can get everything back but not the lost time. Today when I woke up, I called a friend of mine and then my mom. I remember mom used to woke us up early in the morning singing a very nice marwari song, I asked mom to sing that song again today on phone. I hope that time could be brought back. It’s easy though, I just need to take a train, it will take 2 days and I would be at home. But yet, it’s so tough. It’s the effect of time.

I don’t remember exactly when this bug of overworking caught me. But I’ve found that working on the web is my biggest ever passion. I didn’t know it until few days back, when I was not working on anything. Not working on anything made me frustrated, I felt low, disgraceful and what not. Then I tried to find the cause, I thought I should work on something new and yup that worked. Getting back on to work is really helping me. Work makes me happy.

There are two kinds of work, one which is fruitful in short term and other which takes really long. During my college days, I used to work on small projects, those small projects are actually my nature. Working on one product for so long is a different game. I’ve been working on a product now for almost 11 months. Yes, that’s the longest time that I’ve worked on one thing. Ever since childhood. It’s a different thing, you really need lots of self belief for doing this. To be honest, these 11 months weren’t any smooth. Last 11 months were the toughest, most challenging days of my life. I don’t know if I would learn as much ever again from anything that I’ve learned through it. Apart from the technology thing, I’ve learned about myself a lot. I am actually not the person that I was thinking of myself. I am bad at many things which a common human should be good at. It’s really painful when you see bad side of yourself. Startups ( especially the one which are not working well) can teach you all these.

A couple of days back, www.sosasta.com, the groupon company in India, leaked the databases containing all the information about their users and they used to store passwords in plain text. This story left me wondering that how, ex-googlers, acquired by Groupon can make such mistakes and why the hell these people are so successful. I made comment on HN regarding this and got a very good replies,

6 points by skbohra123 1 day ago | link | parent | on: Groupon leaks entire Indian user database Incidents like this make me think that if success is anything to do with talent? Even a mediocre developer wouldn’t do such mistake and these people are acquired by Groupon. Then, I think, it’s all about who you know ?reply

vladd 1 day ago | link It appears you’re putting the equal sign between developer ability and business success. Being a great developer lands you a good job with a 6-figure yearly salary. Being successful in business requires a different sort of talent.Business “talent” is primarily about knowing what matters. There are lots of Groupon clones or other startups where founders can’t do basic arithmetic on user acquisition costs or lifetime customer value, or they choose to work on scaling the backend prematurely or on solving things that will not matter unless they achieve product/market fit and scale. Recognizing priorities and working on what matters is also talent, or more precisely, a lot of hard work. Once you have product/market fit, doing risk management is a must and nowadays it seems to be a lacking skill (look at this incident or the Dropbox story from a couple of days ago). But doing risk management is like translating your business in French: if you’re big it pays off to do it but otherwise you should be more worried about not dying. Therefore I’m not surprised when I see that people who are focused on not dying more than risk management have been more successful in reaching… “success” (managing it once you’ve got it is another business) reply

* 1 point by skbohra123 1 day ago | link I am a young 20 something, right out of college, first time startup founder, developer and with almost zero business knowledge guy. It’s hard to accept the truth you are saying, but I am learning.reply

SoftwareMaven 20 hours ago | link Just make sure you can tie everything you do to your customer’s needs. If you find yourself thinking about technology for technology’s sake (e.g. “let’s rewrite in Scala” or “We need a 12-tier system to manage scalability) (for you curtsy user…)), start worrying.Fortunately, there is an easy cure: go talk to customers. Your good customers (or potential customers) will point you the right way. reply

pagekalisedown 1 day ago | link As you get older, you realize the world isn’t a meritocracy. Only the young, poor, and/or foolish will believe that.reply

Amazing world.