I was very happy that Ramesh reached out to have this discussion, here is some of my take away …

From the beginning of the meeting it was clear that the way Ramesh looked at community and the way I thought of it was different, in Ramesh’s opinion Adobe’s community is professionals who use Adobe’s technology, people who may be interested in Adobe technology but don’t use it, developers in companies who may become users of Adobe technologies, managers whose teams use Adobe technologies, students in universities, teachers, everybody …. while in my opinion Adobe’s community is comprised of professionals who already use Adobe technology and are passionate about it …for the sake of convenience of discussion, I’ll borrow a term used by Seth Godin and call my understanding of community a Tribe

Ramesh talked about the principal of Participation Inequality (90-9-1) which states …

In most online communities, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action.

He pointed out that Adobe’s strategy in India so far has been to grow the over all numbers of people involved with their technologies and hence hopefully in turn grow the number of key contributors, the 9 and the 1. He mentioned various challenges like the corporate structure of Indian service oriented companies, the online savvy of Indian developers etc. because of which they think that marketing to the masses at least here in India takes priority over focusing on the Tribe.

I was reminded of this TED talk by Seth Godin …

Ramesh pointed out that the reason the content at various events is “Introductory” is because their goal with most of the events that they organize is to focus on the new people and help them adopt Adobe technologies. He agreed that there is a need to engage more with the tribe but at the same time he pointed out that their primary strategy is still to focus on the masses. We also discussed various ways in which Adobe could engage better with the tribe and hopefully we will start seeing some of that take shape soon.

What do you feel, should Adobe in India continue to focus on marketing to the masses or should they pay more attention to our Tribe?

Here is how Adobe evangelist Harish Sivaramakrish chose to react to my thoughts on twitter, I feel that its unfortunate that this is Adobe’s reaction to genuine critique …

I believe that Adobe’s various community programs like the User Group Program, Community Champions program etc are meant to obtain genuine feedback and its sad to receive such a personally attacking reaction when you speak your mind.

I have not asked other members of the list for their permission to post their parts of the thread in public .. so I am only posting my thoughts and not the whole thread but there were at least 4 other champions who agreed with me on many of my points but not everything ..

Here’s the email I sent on Thursday …

I am disappointed by the consistent failure of Adobe India to support community, user groups, community mailing lists, community events, community leaders etc.

I just got an email about Adobe devsummit … yes the same event that gives flex builder to everyone who attends and draws the maximum audience of all Flex related events throughout the year.

Last year in August when I first heard of the same event … I had written to the Adobe evangelism team .. congratulating them on organizing a large scale event that would draw audiences from outside our regular community … I also suggested that they should include community speakers in the event to add to their existing content … I personally offered to present a talk on Advanced concepts in AIR (AIR was completely not present in that agenda). My intention at the time was to help improve the quality of the content that would be presented at the event .. because well I was and still am tired of the “Intro” like talks we hear at all Adobe events in India … you cannot blame Adobe for this because these talks are presented by evangelists and not by developers who use Flex to build real stuff … hence I suggested Adobe should include community experts who have more experience in the trenches than Adobe evangelists.

The reply I got to that email last year stated that it was too late for what I was proposing and they would include community in future events .. yet, here we are a year down the line with an email about the same event in my Inbox and no prior communication to the community that I know off.

I’ve attended Adobe events outside of India and community takes center stage at those events …. I was at the AIR Bus tour in Washington DC in 2007 and at the venue the local DC Flex user group had been given a special pod (the only pod there) to promote their group … adobe presenters advertised the group after their presentations and encouraged people to join …. I have attended several Adobe events in India … none of them mentioned the local user group.
I attended MAX in Chicago and there as well I saw special focus on community and user groups … if devsummit is the main event in India .. why doesn’t that include community in any form?

While Adobe India events continue to be boring marketing gimmicks (there I said it) .. primarily I feel because they don’t include community … its not just about the events …

1. Adobe India members are not active on flex-india or any user group mailing list … they just use flex-india as an advertisement medium. Local Indian Flex team members do not contribute to any local mailing lists, while I constantly see them active on flexcoders, flex sdk list and other international forums

2. Indian Flex team members are not active on the local user groups (the evangelists are) .. but why don’t I see the Flex engineers at out BangaloreFx meetings which happens in their own building?

3. Adobe evangelist go out and give presentations to several companies every day … I don’t think any of them mention the local Flex User Group or Flex India .. where all these new adopters could get help and gain knowledge.

I could go on …

In short I feel while Adobe on the whole does a great job of including community … Adobe India has been completely ignoring it.

I’m disappointed.

Himanshu Modi from Tekno Point agreed with some of my points but suggested that we as community champions should step up organize things on our own … here’s my reaction his thoughts …

Hi Himanshu,

Thank you for replying.
I see your point, .. but the events we organize as community champions is a whole other discussion .. yes we should do that and many of us have been … RIA Connect, initRIA, User Group Tours/Meetings etc.

My point here is different … I’m disappointed because none of Adobe India’s existing efforts seem to include community … its as if they organize/plan everything forgetting that there is an active community out there that can help … I’m not requesting any new events here … I’m questioning why community is not included in exiting efforts … we see Adobe world wide do this beautifully everyday .. community is included at a very early stage .. take MAX for example or the launch of Adobe Groups.

I receive info about an event in San Fransisco 2 months in advance … in contrast .. I receive info about an event in Bangalore 18 days before the event along with public announcement with obviously no room for suggestion and no inclusion of community whatsoever even though I had suggested that last year
All Adobe India events have tech talks only from Adobe speakers .. why don’t they take advantage of expertise in the community?

Also, why don’t I see adobe india .. support/promote/contribute to existing efforts of the community … user groups, mailing lists etc … did anyone from Adobe India help you promote RIA Connect?

John Koch from Adobe who has been very helpful to the Indian Community and has all my respect, acknowledged that he saw my frustration and would communicate my thoughts to all concerned .. here’s my reply to him …

Hi John,

Thank you for replying ….. I know you understand my point of view … anyone who has spent some time thinking about community, its effects and its benefits should see what I’m saying.

What’s surprising to me is that there is team at Adobe India whose job is to focus on community and yet they repeated fail to see the obvious.

I’m picking on one particular team here … I know everyone in that team … they are all great guys and gals .. but I feel I’m obligated to point out their mistakes in the interest of a common goal

I’m sorry to have put you in this position of having to communicate my strongly worded comments … I was about to put this in a blog post and let them know directly how I feel, but then I thought that saying something like that in public would put a lot of people on the defensive … and that is not what we need here. I would love to have this discussion be direct so if you just want to forward this thread to all concerned and have an all hands discussion I’m open to that.

Thank you as always for helping.
Mrinal

Anantharaman Mani who runs the Chennai Flex User Group also agreed with me on some counts but made a point that there are cultural differences between India and abroad and it is somewhat unfair to single out one team at adobe when there is less community focus in all of India Software industry … here is my reply to his thoughts …

Hi Ananth,

Thank you for replying … you’ve raised a very good point about culture … but here’s as I see it …

Adobe India is impacted by two cultures …. 1. The culture of corporate India and 2. The culture of Adobe …. you’re right most corporates in India don’t get community … but what surprises me is how Adobe India is not able to gain from its own world wide culture of nurturing communities … Adobe worldwide oozes with understanding of community … I mean big decisions a are made by including community … see the Flex SDK, see the Adobe Groups initiative, see the activity of Flex team members on mailing lists, twitter et al. … so how come Adobe India misses this and their evangelism efforts continue be one sided marketing messages … I mean that team might as well be called Adobe Marketing.

While they’re almost the same, there is a cultural difference between those two words — Marketing and Evangelism.

(In a separate email, I said …)

Why I’m singling out just team is because I want this one team to change their approach … that change will greatly help improve our ecosystem … blaming the society won’t get us anywhere.

There were other valuable reactions on the thread from Abdul Qabiz and others, but I will leave it to the other contributors of the discussion if they want to make their thoughts public.

Adobe community in India is small knit and I guess I’ve stepped on a few toes here .. but I feel that the reason Adobe runs various community programs is to solicit genuine critique and feedback, so being part of the community champions program, I feel obligated to share my thoughts and that is what I am doing here, unfortunate that people are reacting the way they are.

Over time though, I became quite bored of that look and I also received some negative feedback relating to how people find it uncomfortable to read white text on a black background. Also, it was always disconcerting to see another blog use the same theme as mine so I’d been planning to make a personalized theme of my own for a while. I finally got to it and went ahead and designed this new look …

Hoping to save some time, I sought help from my friends at Blog Design Studio to help me build the wordpress theme, who I think did an excellent job.

I’m no “designer” so please do let me know what you think of the design.

New Name

Another major change that you may notice here is that this blog is no longer called “Rags to Riches : en route to a richer Internet”. When I came up with the name it was intended to be a play on words to represent the evolution of our Internet from lame old web pages to engaging rich experiences. But, I started hating the name only a few weeks into it… I didn’t think it conveyed what I write about properly.

I would love to know what you all think of the changes and would really appreciate any feedback that you may have. Hope you continue to enjoy reading what I write.

All the suggested help doesn’t seem to be working so I’ve written to Google Support and hopefully things will be back to normal soon.

Meanwhile, I can still be reached at email [at] mrinalwadhwa.com ….

UPDATE:

About 20 hours after this happened Google enabled my account again, Thank you Google. Those were some painful 20 hours, but I’m just glad things are back to normal. Here’s the email I received from Google, what’s funny though is that they did not care to explain why this happened …

Hello,

Thank you for your report.

We apologize for any inconvenience you may have experienced. The issue you described should now be resolved. If you continue to experience difficulties, please respond to this message, and we’ll investigate further.

Sincerely,

The Google Team

 
Image courtesy LunaDiRimmel

Let me start with a quote from an email I just received from iPhone@vodafone.in

Thank you for registering for your Apple iPhone 3GTM with us.
We are delighted to announce that the iPhone 3G will be available in India from August 22, 2008
It will be available in 8GB & 16GB models, priced at Rs 31,000 and Rs 36,100 respectively.

According to today’s rupee-dollar exchange rate that’s $715 for 8GB and $832 for the 16GB model. The email is not very clear if there is a contract involved or not .. contracts are not very common in India so I’m guessing not.

This is not entirely new news since the guys at tech2 had leaked the pricing a few days ago and they were bang on … but it is very disappointing. The iPhone is priced at $199 with an AT&T contract in US …
 

 
I’ve been waiting to buy an iPhone ever since it was first introduced, it is a brilliant piece of technology and I might actually still buy it even at that price, but not many will.

What’s disappointing is that Apple, Vodafone (and maybe Airtel) have missed to notice this extremely exciting opportunity that had the potential of totally changing the Internet usage landscape in India. Just yesterday Tim ‘O Reilly tweeted a link to this excellent writeup on the state of the Indian mobile space .. the article states ..
 

India had only 3.4 million PC broadband subscribers in early 2008, and less than 60 million people are using the stationary internet – that’s 5% of the population. But 300 million people in India have a cell phone. Since April 2008, there are more cell phone users in India than in the United States.

The whole country is making mobile a natural priority. Wherever I went, it was obvious, all the way to overcrowded and old Indian trains. My 14 hour overnight train did not have a restaurant car or a bathroom as we know it. But it did have power plugs built in at each air-conditioned seat, with a metal plate next to it. It didn’t say computer power plug or shaving power plug (which would have been appropriate for these slow-moving overnight trains), but simply and only: mobile charging points.

How can Apple, Vodafone not see the potential here? At the right price and given the ease of using the web on the iPhone, it had the potential of becoming the de facto Internet device for the masses in India.

The US price of $199 (I know it comes with a contract) or Rs. 8634 is an extremely good price for a phone in India .. I mean I’ve seen vegetable vendors and auto-rickshaw drives with more expensive phones than that. If Apple, Vodafone had priced the phone at that price (or a little over it) .. iPhone could totally have become the uber device of the masses in India .. we have a lot of masses you see, so imagine the volume of business for Apple, Vodafone, Airtel, application developers, e-commerce based service providers and many others.

Maybe I’m taking this too hard, maybe they plan to fix this by December when 3G networks arrive, what do you think?

It is a meme tracker site, which indexes Indian blogs and gives a sneak peak of the hottest stories from the Indian blogosphere.

The site is a work in progress and is in no way as mature as Techmeme but it has a lot of potential .. the link and time based ranking algorithm seems fairly basic (I think that’s all its doing for now) and I hope this will get better over time and would include many more factors. I would surely like to know more about this algorithm.

The RSS feed could use some improvement too, it currently does not tell me who the author of the post is, this is extremely important as I scan though things in my feed reader.

All in all, this is an excellent start .. great job Ram!! .. I look forward to seeing Indimeme grow into the true pulse of the Indian blogosphere

I have converted a corner of my apartment into my office and I thought it’ll be fun to share a few pictures of where I work, so here they are ..

Using MATE’s™ machine learning and artificial intelligence techniques developed in Google’s Sydney offices, we can construct elements of the future.

Google spiders crawl publicly available web information and our index of historic, cached web content. Using a mashup of numerous factors such as recurrence plots, fuzzy measure analysis, online betting odds and the weather forecast from the iGoogle weather gadget, we can create a sophisticated model of what the internet will look like 24 hours from now.

We can use this technique to predict almost anything on the web – tomorrow’s share price movements, sports results or news events. Plus, using language regression analysis, Google can even predict the actual wording of blogs and newspaper columns, 24 hours before they’re written!

To rank these future pages in order of relevance, gDay™ uses a statistical extrapolation of a page’s future PageRank, called SageRank.

Read more here.

I know that Abdul had complained about this first in March 2006 and then again in Jan 2007 … yet another year has passed since and still nothing has changed.

Adobe, we have a huge community of Flex developers in India, please do something about this soon, its hurting your business and its painful for us your customers. I was all set to buy CS3 Web Premium last month, but I didn’t because I realized I would need to go to the reseller for it (ya I’m lazy) .. I don’t really need CS3, it was spur of the moment that i wanted to buy it .. but the fact that there was no online store and I couldn’t get it immediately at 2 in the night put me off …. I now use Aviary Phoenix and Picnik .. they serve most of the needs I have. Unfortunately I don’t have such an alternative for FlexBuilder, its an excellent tool and I can’t live without it … so adobe please fix this.

Now that the releases are so close, if you want to know more about the exiting new features coming in Flex 3 and discuss all the goodness of AIR you cannot miss tomorrow’s Bangalore Flex User Group Meeting … 80 people have already registered.

Just in case you don’t know what I’m talking about ..

What is Flex?
Adobe Flex 3 is a cross platform, open source framework for creating rich Internet applications that run identically in all major browsers and operating systems.

What is AIR?
Adobe AIR is cross operating system runtime that lets developers use their existing web development skills in HTML, AJAX, Flash and Flex to build and deploy rich Internet applications to the desktop.

I plan on recording many 30onair videos so come prepared with your answers for Why Flex? Why AIR? etc.

If you want to know more, Sandil has a nice writeup about the event and what we did at Mutiny.in

One unexpected opportunity that the event presented was the chance of meeting many from Microsoft’s evangelism team in India, I also came to know that there is a Silverlight Evangelist in India and I plan on connecting with him over the coming days …. I wish I knew of him when I was organizing initRIA, anyway its never too late.

All in all, the evening was quite fruitful, thank you Indiblogger for organizing the meeting and thank you Microsoft for providing the venue.

I presented a lightning talk titled “3D on the web with Papervision3D” … I had 3 minutes and my plan was to convey one message … 3D on the web is totally practical now (performs well, easy to build) and you should start thinking about how you can use it … I hope I got my message across .. I couldn’t show all the examples I wanted to, so here they are …

You can get Papervision3D from google code or get more information about it at their blog or at the mailing list.

I believe that 3D is going to be an integral part of software user interfaces in the near future … Apple’s coverflow and Google Earth’s interface are good examples of how its already started to happen.

The project is extremely exiting and was one of the many triggers that made me take this big step. Currently we are a small team of three where I’m the only developer, the other two guys are the ones who had the idea and understand the business in the idea very well. So from a development standpoint I’ll be doing it all on my own, although we may seek more help if needed down the line. I’ve done many such all on my own projects at SAP so I’m pretty confident that i can pull this off. The scary part is the working from home bit …. while I used to occasionally work from home while at SAP, doing it full time scares me a lot .. hopefully I can deal with it .. If you have some tips please do share.

I would like to thank all my peers a SAP for all the support, encouragement, guidance and learning that they provided me over the past 14 months and wish all of them a very bright future. I had an excellent time working at SAP … I worked on several Flex/AIR/SAP applications that showcased how SAP could be used as a platform for rich experiences and all my projects very well received all across the company, many of them even helped SAP win big sales deals. The people I got to work with are some the best is their respective fields and I learned a lot form all of them and best of all I made some very good friends.

These past 14 months couldn’t have been better and now its time for me to take on some exciting new challenges, so wish me luck.

Later, I was introduced to her blog Creating Passionate Users and I was totally hooked … well technically the blog wasn’t just her’s but I was passionate about it mostly because of Kathy’s posts … her captivating style of writing and extensive knowledge on the subject was an excellent combination and the cleverly chosen supporting images were the icing. I was so passionate about her blog that every time I noticed a new post on it, I got goose bumps (Seriously !!).

About 10 months back, in early April of 2007, due to a very sad and alarming incident Kathy decided to discontinue writing her blog … I felt her pain and was very sad, I hope she has recovered from that incident and is enjoying life. I miss her blog a lot and even today I spend a good amount of time in its archives, there’s tons of knowledge in there and anyone who is in the business of creating stuff, software or otherwise, should read her articles.

Creating Passionate Users has inspired me in many ways … looking back at 2007, I realized that 2 of her posts played a very important role in my life last year. Most part of last year I was extensively involved in the Adobe Flex community in India .. the motivation of course was that I love Flex and I want the whole world to use it … the source of inspiration were two blog posts by Kathy Sierra …

Just like all Creating Passionate Users’ posts these posts also had some powerful pictures, in the below pictures Kathy explains the importance of “Being Friendly” on community sites … this is one of the key principles that Flex-India has followed over time ..

This is just one example of how much I have been inspired and influenced by Creating Passionate Users … It’s very sad that because of a few disoriented people so many young aspiring individuals like me will loose out on loads of knowledge we could have gained from Kathy’s writings. I am going to leave you all with some of my favorite posts and images from CPU … but before I do that, I would like to thank Kathy for sharing her wisdom with us and I hope that someday she would write again.

Here are a few posts from Creating passionate Users that I love …