Why we need a new twitter?

Twitter has become a garbage dump. Even though I don't follow many controversial people, still tweets, re-tweets, promoted tweets finally results in my timeline being full of garbage. So I am wondering what is the solution. There is still sufficient information that comes on my timeline that I am interested in but it is becoming more and more difficult by each passing day to decipher good information.

As a rule, I block anybody who I am not interested in. I have nothing against anybody who wants to say something, I am just not interested in spending my time in listening to it. Still some of my friends are interested in what others have to say and most retweet without thinking. That garbage shows up in my timeline.

So I am thinking what is the solution. Here is what I propose.

We need a cross-breed of Liinkedin and Twitter. What we need is the social graph of the LinkedIn with the degree of separation and approval and the broadcast capability and ease of use of twitter.

• The edges  in social graph has to be directional. Basically, if I am interested in listening to what somebody has to say, that doesn't automatically mean he is interested in what I have to say.
• I only see messages from my direct connections, if somebody else wants to reach me, he has to go through the message forward model of LinkedIn
• Promoted messages should clearly mention which of  the attributes of my interaction are causing that particular promoted message to show up in my timeline.
• If a person is blocked by a specified number of people, he is automatically thrown off the system. Basically we need an algorithm to locate people who are paid to abuse.

What say guys, somebody wants to build it. Or better still, fund me I will build it. I will call the system Cricket and a message would be called Chirp :-)

IPL, Fatigue and Mccullum

Indian cricket team's coach mentioned that IP fatigue could be one of the reasons of the team's pathetic show in WT20. Everybody seems to have pounced upon him. I believe what he says does have sense. There never seemed to be any sense of coordination in the team, most of the people were not 100% fit and both of these were major reasons of our defeat and could be caused by IPL's excessing cricket too close to the world cup.

Anyway, people may agree or disagree with the coach but the interesting comment came back from Mccullum. He said that the fatigue theory is rubbish. I can understand that. Only those people would be fatigued who were doing hardword. Mccullum, who lead KKR actually were passengers so for them it was really a jolly ride and that is probably one of the reasons he believes that fatigue can't be the reason of team's bad performance.

Hayden explains himself

So hayden first says something and then explains itself.

One of the things I love the most about India, is that you walk around the back of the hotel, and there's a man who's selling peanuts on the street for one cent a month, and he holds his head so high, and is so proud, as if he was making $2 million a month

So what he meant to say when he made his famous remark

Often we find ourselves waiting with hands on hips for someone to face up or someone on the sight board to move away or some of those little frustrations happening with third world countries

He was only talking about frustration that he gets out of eating peanuts that he buys from a proud peanut seller who makes one cent a month.
What is wrong with this guy, one cent a month, that is like 50 paise. Who will sell peanuts for a months if he was making 50 paise a month. I don't really get these people.

Excuses, excuses

So, our cricket captain has come up with another gem. No I am not talking about the good innings that he played in the last match against Sri Lanka. I am talking about his new excuse on why we are dropping catches. See here. He claims it is because of the crowd's wardrobe.

Since Sri Lanka had a colourful crowd it becomes difficult to spot the ball in the night specially after it (ball) becomes a bit dirty,

Other teams, are you listening. Just request your fans to wear colorful clothes to defeat India. Indian fans, please wear all black attire for day-night matches and all white attire for day matches.

The dumb main stream media

Here is another stupid media headline. Here is what the headline says.

SACHIN SCORES ON THE FIELD, YUVI OFF ITâ??WITH DEEPIKA

This is supposed to be the largest mainstream daily for English news in India. I think we really need a new news paper.

Finally

India won, for once we snatched victory from jaws of defeat. I thought bhajji had almost gifted the match to Pakistan. Anyway, all is well that ends well. Congratulations to all India team supporters, to other who don't like us winning, go to hell.

T20 cricket finals

I decided to give a miss to the T20 finals. May be I will go an watch the second innings. Just now checked on rediff.com, Yuvaraj has just departed at 14 off 19 balls. I think irrespective of what happens to the match, this is good for the team in long run, otherwise the good old dad of Yuvi would have really gone berserk.

McGrath and Tendulkar

Here is an interesting comment from McGrath about Tendulkar and Lara. Looking at current scenario, it does sound true though.

"I enjoyed bowling to Sachin and getting him out or changing his gameplan or just tying him up. You tend to lift your game a bit when you are bowling to guys like that and I felt I did," McGrath said.

Pathetic Indian Media

After the end of world cup I was trying to watch something useful on TV that is non-cricket, I came across a program on "Headlines Today" channel, where they were showing Kapil Dev and Sir Richard Hadlee playing a game of golf. On the same day Gaurav Ghei had won Bejing open golf tournament and they was no mention of him.

I can understand media's fixation with cricket but if they have to show a game of golf, they could have shown a proper golf player player golf, but then that is really asking for too much from them.

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The cricket world cup and Indian people

So finally the cricket world cup is over, for Indian atleast it is. I feel so happy that I did not get sucked into joining the bandwagon of people who wanted to fly to Caribbeans or buy a 52� plasma TV to watch the world cup or get a satellite connection.

Now what I fail the understand is the reaction of Indian fans. Ok, so we lost the world cup. It is not that we are a country of people who excel in everything. We are mediocre at best. Look at our great software Industry, it fixes bugs for rest of the world and survives by wage arbitrage and we call ourselves IT superpower.

I have also not seen anybody burning the effigies of hockey players, I think they are loosing matches of all variety since last couple of decades. Now people are saying that we should bring the young team out. Where is this young team?

Anyway, enough about cricket. I think I can watch F1 peacefully. There is no India so no need to feel bad. May the best driver win.

Remedies for Indian Cricket Team

You can't help talking about cricket. So I again went to our trusty stats guru. How bad is really tendulkar. How bad is he compared to himself and how bad is he compared to his peers. The first chart is the life record of all the Indian players and here you can see that there is really no comparison. He has won around 50% of all the matches he has played. Only player who is higher then that number is Yuvraj Singh. The other criticism of Tendulkar has always been that he does not play for team. His average is higher when India wins. He has scored more percentage of centuries in the matches that he won compared to matches that he lost. The other argument that I have heard is that he was ok but last one year he has not been performing well. To a large extent this criticism is true, but it seems none of the top batsmen in last one year have been doing well. If you see record of all the top batsmen, (other than Ganguly) they have been performing much worse in last one year. Now only common factor in last one year was the coach so I would go ahead and blame that on coach. Something went awry in last one year that all our top guns stopped performing. The last chart just compares all these players� records for life vs. last one year and you can see apart from Ganguly all of then have deteriorated in last one year. So my verdict for Indian team, fire chappel and everything will alright.