Sunday, December 19, 2010

Notes to a development lead–part 2

The rule of the thumb to follow is that he should be able to say no to both the sides, up as well down. One measurable way it to count how many times you have said no to crazy ideas. From up and from down. You should be just while saying no to things that come from below. You should be stubborn when you say no to things that come from above. You should be political when things are coming from the same level.

Emotions generally do ruin things for you. But it is always ok to be emotional in control. Some times strong emotions take you faster to a desired goal. Strong emotions leave back deeper impressions. So it is ok to throw tantrums at the right moment. You should be using tantrum as one in a year kind of tool. In moderation and used at a right place, a tantrum is the best approach. But all this is only exception to the rule. As a lead, you should be empathetic to every one around. Even a worst idea should be given equal importance. Because an idea means a person is trying to think and that he is invested. This is pretty rare. But it can really be faked very very easily. A lead should be able to figure out the fake and even the extent of the fake. It is really interesting that the same thing is applicable from the other side also. A lead *will* throw some rubbish ideas up. He *will* enforce some random policies. He will have to and some times he will fake. But any down to earth person will always do it in proportion.

I think not faking it is not an answer, not for the lead at least. This is really important if you are in a people game to be ready for randomization and loads of bullshit. If you are too principled for that, do stay out of the role.

 

While doing all this, there is a high probability that a lead will just be running in the same place forever. There are so many urgent and important things coming on his plate, there are so many distractions, so many new technical and non technical areas to keep up with - that you may really lose sight of the original goal, to make progress - individually as well as as the team. So a lead should always ensure that things are moving. A lead should have either documented or mind-mapped milestones. He should have complete idea of the situation, at least view of the situation at his level. He should also play out possible variations in his mind.

 

This is more of a game than a nine to five job. If you are doing it really well, you will enjoy it more than any thing in life. At least in the country I am working on, the lead has a young family or just starting one. This required time and emotional investment. It will not fare well in future if you do not get a good foundation of your family and social life set up. In fact doing this will save a lot of time later. These are the most hectic and productive years in a developers life. So it should not also affect the time, effort and concentration at work. This means that a lead should pack more than any thing in any given twenty four hours. Time management is a very important skill here. A lead also should understand that it is more of an emotional activity than a planned one. any plan on paper is obsolete before the ink on it dries (or the file written on it is written to disk and out of cache :) ). This is some thing you should do by the ear. As you progress further, you get a feel for this.Managing your own time, your non work / work time, time of your team and time of your hierarchy for which you are responsible all falls in time management. It also should be noted that taking well placed breaks where you rejuvenate yourselves and the team is more important than it is credited for. Writing software is kind of a soft science. If you are doing any thing even a little involve that cookie cutting, it is going to be in intensely psychological activity. The state of mind of the reportees is very important.

 

So when we talk about time management, it is more of a productivity management. It is not necessary that you and your team is working more hours or getting more things done in given hours. It is also important that the activities are the most meaningful. It is imperative to say no to a lot of things. To find out ways of doing other things in a better way. A lead should always be skeptical of the incremental demands on time and how he ensures that the team is not dragged in to chasing the expanding requirement without any change in the time limits as well as in the deadlines.

On the other hand, a lead also should know that work expands to fill the time. So a normal team when given choice of what they choose will always end up being less productive then when the deadlines are pushed and enforced. The best way a lead deals with this is that he has two faces. He shows the upper layers one face where he is part of the team. He is talking as a developer and a team member when he is facing the upper layers. But when he is talking to the team, he should act as the management. He is ruthless with the deadlines and work assignments. Handing out them as opportunities and baits. Ensuring what ticks people and manipulating that to get the work done. While doing all this, he should also be tracking the actual time spent. So the time management as the traditional concept also should be implemented. In fact it makes a big difference if the lead individually is not managing his time well enough. He should also ensure that he inspires the team to follow his lead in managing the time better.

Saturday, December 18, 2010

Notes to a development lead–part I

Last two days I have been feeling expansively self-expressive and affectionate. Here is the proof Smile

http://750words.com/entries/stats/439809

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and http://750words.com/entries/stats/442646

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and this means that there is yet another barrage on the way, and here it is:

 

Today I will like to talk about the leads. I am kind of an self proclaimed expert about this if you think measuring just the time spent in a position is the criterion for experience gained. Though my experience is limited to established services or product companies. In my opinion in a start up or smaller companies, leads' role is more challenging than not but I have not experience about these.This is specific about technical leads in a product org. I do not have any experience about leading a semi OR non technical project. I am grateful that this is the case. Looking at the ambiguity involved in a well defined and measurable technical product itself, it is completely unimaginable to even fathom the challenges that a lead goes through in a non tech project.

 

In a technical project / product / module, Leads are really in a special position.Transition to a lead position most of the times comes when you are just evolving from being one of the best OR the most senior individual contributor in the team (caveat: Unfortunately it is measured as the number of years spent in the team and the availability of the individual in the lead role - both are not valid criterion in my opinion). As compared to higher management, they have pretty good control and understanding of the project. They generally own some particular piece as individual contributor as a team and are involved in most of the technical decisions of the team. They also have good veto powers on the implementation decisions. Typically they are also technical leads/consultants. I think this is the right position to be in. A lead should be and if he is not, should try to be the most knowledgeable person about the complete module or a project. If this is not the case, he at least should try and setup a confidant group who actually is knowledgeable and can decide future directions. As compared to any higher level managers, lead really knows what is going on in the team.

 

As compared to the team, the lead also knows what is going on in the general scene in the company. He knows the political undercurrents and the way changes are happening in the company better than the individual members of the team. This means that he should set up his network with important people in the org at his and higher level. There are a lot of trainings and events organized by a typical company to arrange this. But in my opinion they rarely work. And it is not also advisable to make this kind of networking a very formal activity. A lead has to be an extrovert and come out of his shell. Even if he is an introvert, he should ensure that he gets to be part of such a group. The challenge is to make such a group not a clique of all the "haves" and the big boys' exclusive club. The challenge is to ensure that it happens seamlessly and happens while not damaging the day to day schedule. They should have the unique ability to think and work at both the levels, the individual contributors of the team as well as the higher ladders. Most effective leads have access to multiple layers up. Of these even more successful are those who do not use this access to speed up things. This is again like an influence which diminishes as soon as you uses it. These two things, horizontal networking as well as upward influence are generally considered with aversion. I think this is a right approach to all this. There are so many ways these things can be misused and can have bad impact on your day to day activities that it is always advisable to treat these with all the skepticism possible. But a long term successful and fast growing lead seems to have these two traits in them.

 

The lead is always in a great dilemma. It is always drilled in to him that he is now part of the management and not a group of friends. He should be able to take unpleasant decisions, enforce certain things in the team, rule out the people he wants to be peers with. Be strict and firm and occasionally say no to people. The rule of the thumb to follow is that he should be able to say no to both the sides, up as well down.

Wednesday, December 15, 2010

Diggi Raja, shut up or open up

Digvijay Singh, a former chief minister of Madhya Pradesh and one of the top influential people in UPA 2 has made it a habit of being in the news. Most of the times for the wrong reason. And whenever there is controversy related to terrorism he takes keen interest.


Diggi Raja has an interesting history. He led congress in Madhya Pradesh for two consecutive terms. The media impression during his rule were that he is a progressive chief minister. It was one of the marquee state governments of Indira Congress. It was portrayed as poster child. And even after his rule is over, media always glorified his years at the helm. On the back of being a successful chief minister, he was pretty powerful inside congress party. Though the generic idea that I got was that once he lost power, he slowly started moving away from the main stream of congress party. historically this was pretty much  the fate of any one in congress who grows too powerful to be comfortable. He has been assigned multiple posts within the party. But his performance has been kind of away from the public glare. I think Congress at least in theory works in one person one post mode. He is one of the second rung leaders who are hand picked for ensuring that the party grows in future. So he will never participate in any government but will work on brining the party. He was one of the people working with Rahul Gandhi in UP. The luke warm response from Congress there again is being portrayed as a success by congress. This is because they can not afford to show that their prince - next - in - line - to - hereditary - stone has lost some thing. But they definitely could not achieve the internal goals they would have set for themselves. I do not have any problem with a party looking deep and planning for further in future rather than concentrating on the immediate elections at hand. For stability of India, the most national parties should have good presence in the Hindi heart lands. This will ensure that unity of the country is maintained. One of the short term approaches applied by Congress in general and Digvijay Singh in particular has been appeasement of terrorists from the district of Azamgarh. Most of the activities that are taken up by Diggy Raja there are bordering on supporting the terrorists and their families. But they have played their cards nicely till now and Diggy has always maintained that he was just talking to families and acting against alienation of the entire region where as congress has kept its distance from all this.

Diggi Raja recently has performed completely opposite to his history. He who once was known for his administration and long term decisions for the benefit of his states has stooped down to playing the religious politics and playing with fire using terrorists for these. And he has gone and done this again, this time it is the Mumbai 26/11 carnage.

There was always some thing burning. It is very interesting how he always finds himself in the middle of one controversy after another. Even when there are two independent events, he has managed to involve himself in both these.

There can be multiple reasons for this. It can be because congress is playing a very dangerous game of minority appeasement and Digvijay is the actor. And congress is silently trying to reap the benefits. If this turns sour, congress can always pull its card out and let all the blame fall on Diggy. This way he is one of the most important pieces in their strategy. The other angle can be that Diggi Raja has already been pushed to the long list of has-beens and it is his last bid to relevance. The party as such can not do much but stay completely neutral lest it can be considered to be supporting the fanatics.
But a has - been should only ensure that he takes up what he can handle. This can definitely blow up in congress's face pretty badly. So if it is Diggy's own game,his problem is that he is taking some thing up which he may not have strength to handle.

The worst part of all these is that this has hurt the cause of the martyrs, defeats the pressure on Pak and muddles already dirty picture. I am not sure whether the congress as well as Diggy knows the long term harm they are causing to the already torn fabric of the nation.

This particular approach, along with the inaction raises multiple questions. In the bigger picture the government has not done almost any thing about the terrorism issue. The security hawks in the government have been completely silenced or they have agreed to the general direction of using these events for appeasement and vote gathering.

This is deeply shameful. The country's integrity and sovereignty is at stake. At some level the reactions of then Maharashtra CM and deputy CM to the carnage can be attributed to short sightedness and political and national immaturity. But now there are signs that the congress party think tank has decided to use these events to their own goals.

But for a politician it is nothing new. Politics being art of the possible. But there is always a limit. Of all the failures of this version of UPA, the most biting is this change in strategy. Unfortunately the alternative to all this is equally bad and I see a very bleak picture for the nation ahead. There is not viable alternative to congress, which itself is completely collapsing under its own weight, when it is not crossing boundaries which it should not cross.

It is about time calmer heads and deeper thinkers prevailed.

Monday, December 13, 2010

Working at the speed of trust

Some time back I had this training from my organization. This was not necessarily the training I like to attend. But this was kind of a different training in a crazy way. It was really a lotus eaters delight. And as I am one such nut case, I really liked it.

Here are some thoughts on it Smile

I definitely agree to the maxim that speed travels faster than light. If there is any thing that is going to cause a huge jump in productivity, it is basically trust that gets us to jump multiple levels in productivity. In software business, it is the next thing to the smart design and work allocation and tracking.

The training was by Franklin Covey institute and they have a book also along with it. I do not want to break their copyright by giving excerpts of their work here. So there are just some random musings inspired by the book and training. I am not even saying that you should go for that training or should buy that book. None of these two things have ever worked for me. Even if I am a self confessed self-help book junkie, the books that affect me most are the ones which are not written for doing so. So here is the divorce from the training and the book.


I think there is an interesting perspective of looking at trust, trust can be both directions, outward and inward. trust in others and trust in yourselves to achieve the desired goals. First thing that needs to be done when you want to trust some one is that you should build up that trust in others. It is a strange thing that comes back as much as you give it out.


The training really brings up this fact completely. Building trust is a very lengthy process. Losing it may not be. There are scientific steps which can be taken to build up trust. It needs the relationship to go through a set of levels before trust is built. It needs both the parties to be mature and winning. There is a high chance that trust can be broken and then it takes you down a very bad slippery slope. Inherently trust means that you would not have spent time building alternate solutions. If that happens, then once your trust-party fails you, you can never recover.


If this has to be a “fail-safe scenario” , this means that there is another angle to trust. It is of interdependence. There is another angle of making your dependencies soft. If your dependencies are soft, this means that you can still survive when everything else fails. And if every thing succeeds, you are at the pinnacle of success.

Trusting some one also means that the person you are dealing with should not have any exterior motives about your failure. If some one is fully inclined to make you a failure, it is very difficult to trust him. That's why trusting people is an issue in case of an environment where you are competing for survival. In an environment where you are losing ten percent of people annually you will be most probably collaborating with, it is really difficult not to think about stabbing people in the back when the opportunity provides. Some one trying to build trust is exactly giving the same opportunity to your competitors.

But in the long run, trust is the best way to achieve some semblance of justice in all this process is to be yourselves and ensure that people are always supported and helped. Working towards a greater goal and benefits of the collective may look like a day dream. but people have been achieving this even in case of worse situations than this. There are proofs of such behavior in extreme situations like the concentration camps. Then it should not so difficult to put it to use in normal office scenarios. You need not be a saint to reach there. As man is a social animal, soft power has been built by normal people and more competitive scenarios tackled effectively.


So we are just being our natural self when we behave in a collaborative manner. Only people with a deep sense of lack of confidence in their own abilities can rule this out. What is done is always more important than what is seen. If you do really stellar work, it can not be kept in cage because of just incompetence.

As a leader, the lead should ensure that the same thing happens in the team as well. Being the lead of my team, I am the owner of the direction, culture and success of it. My success should be measured with the ease with which I setup the culture of initiative, ownership, belonging and achievement in my team. In that sense, every team member should be like one to me. This is again some thing that is contradictory. How can I behave exactly same with all the reportees if I am the one who is going to differentiate between these two times a year. Or as the thing goes, I may be asking some of these to leave. but that is completely different track and I should be able to behave independently in both these situations. I think I need to do a bunch of stuff to track these things.

 

Saturday, December 11, 2010

The TED talk that introduced me to myself

 

This is based on the TED talk:

http://www.ted.com/talks/elizabeth_gilbert_on_genius.html

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This really rang a bell some where. It made some thing in my life clear to me. It rarely happens at my age and at my stage. that's why I am thankful that it has happened and I would like other people to know about this.

750words.com, the site I use for writing my diary, rates this writing as self important. I am sure, it feels like that so take the things below with a pinch of salt. But I think these thoughts are important for some people I want to reach. Especially some of the dear friends who have been with me and really know me. I want to get them thinking in the same direction. I am just hoping they will find this at some point in time in some dusty unvisited corners of the web and then they will understand and learn. So I am daring to publish this Smile.

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Expressing myself has always been a passion to me. This was from a young age. I found myself to be an excellent performer when I found that the subject mattered to me. At this point, I would be so involved with the subject, that it will be one for me to think about myself OR think about the subject.
One such thing happened today which took me back in to the early days of stand up mimicry in my school. I just built on day to day stories I was exposed to. I used material which I found on my way to school or day to day materials in use in school or at home. I took the Belan, I took car lining and built wonderful stories out of these. Most of the stories were impromptu. In fact I failed when I tried to practice before. Those were the days I was blessed by the stage goddess. The audience danced at my fingertips. If I remember it correctly, I continued doing this for around three years. It could have been a speech competition, it could have been an one act play or any thing else to do with standing in front of people and doing my stuff.
One thing I know now that I was always considering the forth wall to be opaque. That means that I would never consider and work for the forth wall, which in performing arts jargon is the spectators. I would be in the bubble of my own in front of a crowd of multitudes. And that was my key to success.
Several important things happened in life. These included matriculation, cut throat competition in college, movement from a small town atmosphere to a fully cosmopolitan environment like my engineering college.
The fun of performing and the ability to succeed has been visiting me on and off. On my best day, I would be the best programmer, I would be the best thinker, I would be the best designer and the best student. Thankfully for me some times it happened at the right times. I was at my puzzle solving and thinking best when these two opportunities arose, in terms of my first job and in terms of my most important jobs till now, that is MS. I did so well in the projects I liked. I sucked royally in the project which did not please me. Apart from far basic, physical limitations: for example, my pronunciation in case of English theater and enunciation and lack of thoroughness in understanding the interplay of emotions and convey them properly in my body language in case of Marathi theater; it was always my intentions and involvement that decided the extent of success or failure.
So I notice that my pleasure and my expectations have a great part to play in my success. Any thing, however easy it may be, can fail if it is not pleasing to me OR I am not interested in doing these.
But the most important thing I notice is that  I always failed when I did things to impress or please some one. Even theater gave me less pleasure when it was done to impress some one. Only when I did it for myself I liked it a lot. It is something like the TED talk I am referring to. Some higher entity would stay in the abode of my body and soul for these moments.In all these cases, I now notice that I never played to the gallery. The best / the ideal came to inhabit me for some fleeting seconds when I was the most dissolved in satisfying myself with the pursuit.
Now that this thought is complete, I am relieved. I am not a software engineer who draws a huge salary. I am not even the best coder and designer. I am not the best actor that ever was there. I am not the best stand up comic.
This is what I am. I am just a conduit to all these higher forms. My day to day life is blessed with comfort because I allow all these entity to reside in me from time to time. I keep my body and my thoughts clean for these higher life forms, which may be mine, but are short lived. I should do every thing in my capabilities to ensure that my body,mind and thoughts are clean to receive these. I should always ensure that my body is flexible,supple and strong enough to achieve greatness when the greatness comes to it.
Otherwise I am just a middle class small town boy. That is the reality and I should live this reality as profoundly and clearly as possible. Any deviation from this reality will not achieve anything else but just drive the djinns away who perform through me.

Monday, December 06, 2010

movie Review: The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

 

imageThis is the third Narnia movie I am watching and I think the interest level is going down by each version. This is not a very interesting situation to be in. The best face saving this has always been the lion. Aslan is very much real to the fiction.

imageIt suits really well to the lofty designs that C L Lewis may have.
But apart from that the movie has been a disappointment. This disappointment was completely overshadowed by many firsts and achievements. The best thing about it is that two of the three kids managed to keep the three dimensional glasses on (the third one was sleeping) and watched a fair bit of movie quietly (around half an hour) before being lulled in to sleep. This is an achievement because generally they convert the movie hall in to their play ground and do quiet a bit of shouting and distracting other people. But this movie some how changed that.

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The second achievement is that they really liked the part that they saw. This was the sword fight by  the rat and the lion talking to the kids. They really like the majestic lion. This means that the film maker has done some thing winning here. Apart from the lion and the funny bits about the cousin turning in to a dragon, the movie was a bore. Either it does not have any thing to put OR it tried to fit too much in to a single movie.
A bit about the story line, in my opinion seven conquests is in fact a dangerous number of conquests to have in a two hour movie. It becomes one too many. So it looked like most of the swords are won without much efforts. They were just to be taken without any specific challenges. Even the last sword was actually captured and then the dilemmas started. By the way, it bodes not well on the imagination of a bunch of crew if the only thing that is most fearful to them is the huge slithery worm.
The other visuals and dilemmas also came in and went away without any context. I think the story did not do justice to the hard work put through by the graphics crew etc. The good point there was that the target audience, the kids and preschoolers could not have cared less about the story. They got what they wanted from the movie and thus it was successful.
But as I am reading the novel currently, it does not do any justice to the novel as such. I went to the movie with my parents, wife and kids plus nephew. all of them really liked it. Along with my wife who also watched her first 3-D movie with glasses on.
I tried to get her to watch the earlier three D block buster, Avatar but I had to hear about my weird choices of the movies for quiet some time since that time on. But this time it was a good family fare, not too jerky, the good won over the evil easily, which in turn was just a itsy bitsy evil at all. Put this together with good swords fights, a bit of comedy, a touch of brouhaha about human fallibility etc and we have a family entertainer right there.
I have not yet reached this part in the novel so I am not sure whether they have been very truthful to the novel. But the seven adventures looks a bit curtailed to me. I think the best way to look at these would be at least two full length feature films where the back ground is set in one movie an with first three challenges. The second movie could have contained the next four challenges and then the victory celebrations.
But for all said and done, it looked like the directors also wanted to get over this tedium of movies and go ahead to more meatier part of the stories.
I do not buy in to the talks of this being the last movie in the Narnia stories. In fact this is the part from which the lion does not figure in the stories. But the franchise is still on and I think has done enough to prepare for one more movie.
I think the next movie will definitely decide whether there is any life in the franchise at all. I think the story line and presentation will matter the most.
Thankfully my kids did not need to think about this. They were very happy playing the lion, the dragon and the rat alternately. And if the next movie also gets them to do the same, you have a winner at hands.

Sunday, December 05, 2010

My search for an ultimate social networking client

 

It all started with my completely faithful web 2.0 client, tweekdeck, gave up on me. It would not sync my face book account, it will not even register new one. May be some changes with Facebook authentication that these guys have not caught up with. So I think after around a six month of totally dedicated usage of tweetdeck, I had to search for an alternative.

I found two completely different approaches to solve this problem, I had to decide between two of these. And this post is the story of that.

Email like update do not work with web 2.0. A typical email client works very nearly similar to outlook view. An incoming email is added either to the top or bottom of a folder. Each email is meant for a set of people who are either pigs OR hens(apologies for the SCRUM wordings here, this in short means that two kind of people, who either are affected by such an exchange Or have a say in such an exchange). Ideally the people who should act are in the "to" line and any FYI folks are in the "CC" line. Do not ask me why BCC is all about :). Typically emails are serious business and they are exchanged at the maximum average rate of three to four an hour per producer. The producer gets to decide who should be involved, he also gets to decide who all can subsequent (re)producers can involve. This is kind of state based model where each email expects some action, at least acknowledgement of comprehension and reporting back. It may also expect a dialog.

In comparison, web2.0 is like a Bazaar thing. You give a shout and if your shout is unique, hopefully some people may be attracted to you and you can form such groups. It is not a definite necessity that a group has to be listening to every shouts of its members. The shouts can be multimedia as well. You can also appreciate the shouts, in some cases by repeating them, in other solutions by marking them as "liked". As there are multiple sites claiming to be platforms for web 2.0 interactions, it is always possible that you are registered to more than one such site/platform. Another good thing about all this thing is that you are not tied to a protocol,website. any body can build an experience on the platform.(BTW, there are some really cool twitter feeds being built on top of windows azure currently). This gives the user power which it did not have before. As there are more than one platform where things are happening in parallel,the best approach is to have a spreadsheet like view where each column represents a platform. This is what tweetdeck does and does well. For me the sites I wanted to integrate were: facebook, twitter, linkedin and google buzz. The idea of this interface is that each of the update (upon configuration) is displayed as a biscuit (this is the rectangular thing that pops up on a new message). And like Pavlov's dogs, now arrival of this biscuit satisfies the sanctum sanctorums of web 2.0 junkies like me. Till last two-three years, it was ding on an email in my inbox. I can edit, reply to the same in the same window or create new shouts. All this is easy and comfortable.

The problem is that there is a third case, which does not merge so well with web 2.0, which is chat. If I see, we have been using chat almost for the same time as we have been using email (gosh, I am a software engineer, I should know this more thoroughly :(). Chat was completely independent from the email. Some of the email solutions, especially the online ones, did surely try to give an integrated solution. But it was kind of a slap on. So chat should be another angle of any solution that I am trying to evaluate. Another thing is that after all this email has not gone away. It will not go away soon as well. There are still some improvements and innovation there which needs to happen. Half an year ago, I was looking at a bunch (two to be exact :)) email aggregators. Digsby stuck as the most important one, but then I left using that. Now it looks like they have a desktop client which does what they used to do online, it also aggregates my social feeds, aggregates my chat accounts and gives me a complete window where I can see my friends and whether they are online or not and I can easily chat with them with any chat site. This also aggregates my email and reports the read/unread statistic. At the cost of few more clicks, you can reach the email and reply to it.

So to according to digsby postulate, web 2.0 does not replace something. It adds a new dimension to my interactions.

And the interesting point is that there are two ways to get to the web 2.0 thingie. One is build on top of the existing functionality, AKA chat and email, integrate these and then add web2.0 platforms to the same stream. This is the digsby way.
Second approach is that we should implement web 2.0 fully and leave every thing else to the choice of users. How he wants to use the earlier technologies.
It is a tough call to choose between these two approaches. I just needed one tool which works for me. But because I agree that the email and chat need some more work to be super useful and I think these are two different streams where progress will be made and web 2.0 is just a new kid on the block and nothing much else, I ended up making a convenient decision.

Right now,I am using both, digsby and seesmic desktop. Digsby as integrated IM and email client does not look like it has any comparisons. Seesmic desktop on the other hand takes the interface provided by tweet deck. Adds some better User Interface and tree traversal. It needs some more features of tweetdeck (for example: deleting / marking as read etc) and it will be the best client there is.


The next inflection point is going to be the smart phone entry on the block. I have not yet used my web 2.0 clients on any of the phone. Actually I am waiting for my windows phone seven drop. Once it comes to me, I think it will be easier for me to do most of the things I do on desktop on the phone. That will be my first smart phone I will actually use smartly, hopefully. So Watch this space for the updates on the phone revolution and how it would have changed the way I do things. Signing off till then, tada.