Cleartrip – Travel Portal for Dare-Devils!

It’s not only with blonde, but at times the much-acclaimed, multi-million dollars algos running multi-million dollar sites can also turn out to be totally dumb. Cleartrip gave me a wonderful example of this today.

I was checking for tickets for return trip from Pune to Ahmedabad and Cleartrip came up with the best price offer for the trip. It was indeed the lowest fare possible, just that it needed me to jump from one aircraft onto other in the sky. Cleartrip’s super intelligent algo suggested that I should take 07:55am flight from Pune reaching Ahmedabad at 09:05am; and guess what, start return journey from Ahmedabad at 08:45am!!! Check this screenshot. 

Best case for me to do this would be to the Akshay-Kumar style dare-devil act of jumping from one plane onto other. It becomes more challenging and exciting as the most likely time when these two flights will be closest will be when Ahmedabad-onwards flight would be descending and Pune-onwards flight would be ascending. Though this won’t be at 32,000 feet, it would be somewhere in morning clouds over Ambavad! Sounds exciting? Wanna join?

Jokes apart, it is really sad to see such stupid mistake from Cleartrip. With all these millions of dollars spent into making these travel engines, more millions in marketing this engine, and what you get is such stupid miss. Not that it will make them lose their business, but certainly gives them a bad name. And yes, also gives me a good laugh thinking how it would be to make this return trip successful

Google+ and Picasa integration is a Mess

Google recently made another attempt at breaking Facebook’s monopoly in social networking sphere by launching Google+. Its a good product, concept of circles of friends is interesting and mimics real life situation. However Google has made a mess of it by compulsorily linking Picasa albums to Google+. Picasa is a wonderful photo-sharing product and should remain so, it’s incorrect to abruptly turning it into a feature of a social network.

Many people, including me, used Picasa to share photos which they do not want to share on Facebook. Picasa has been my private photo sharing tool, and I want it to remain so. Google+ still shares the photos and comments only with people it has been explicitly shared with by email, but a tag of person outside this sharing list of emails can make photo go out of those circle and can make it public. It’s a definite breach of privacy. Google does notifies about this possibility but it would be really stupid for them to expect people would understand complete implication of this just by reading the note. I am sure soon there will be an uproar about this, just like what happened with Google Buzz when it by default made contact list public as your connections on Buzz.

Photo-sharing is a very important feature of a social network, and contributes a lot to its growth. Facebook now has more photos being shared than proper photo-sharing sites like Flickr and Picasa. Considering this, it is understandable that Google wants to leverage it’s existing photo-sharing facility for Google+. However by doing that, they are demoting Picasa into being just a feature of Google+ than being a proper photo-sharing site. They should give an option to delink Picasa from Google+ for those who want to continue using Picasa as it has been till now. And if it wants to, I am sure it will definitely come up with hundreds of more engaging and interesting features and ways to get more and more photos shared on Google+ specifically for purpose of photo-sharing on a social network. Hope someone at Google is listening to this!

Life is all that happens when we are busy planning for it

“Life is all that happens when we are busy planning for it”

I had heard this way back, and had smiled at it. Being the person that I am, I smiled thinking how people living their lives on their own terms would laugh upon this and say its not true. They will laugh on people who plan, plan and plan but never act. Never get enough momentum, enough reason to get their plans in action. And meanwhile life takes its own turns and twists, making all their plans useless in one stroke. Many people refer to this as luck!

Then there are people who plan things really deep… deep to the extent of making it a totally foolproof plan. Problem with foolproof plans is that it strives on plan B and plan C, which are not really foolproof. So when your foolproof plan fails because of luck or “acts of God”, they blame externalities and go to plan B and plan C. But they don’t just to plan B and C, then panic and rush to these B and C plans, they often miss out planning the movement to plan B and C, and hence though they have backup plans, these backup plans backfire stupendously. When their master plan fails, their confidence on their own planning skills, their execution capabilities take a hit, and this gives a severe blow to the execution of plan B and C. So however good is their backup plan, they don’t get to execute it the way they would have loved to.

So then is what this quote says true – does really life is all that happens when we are busy planning for it? Does really planning ever helps in life?

I would say, it helps when you do it at broad levels. While it is always good to plan things to tee, it should be done when you have parameters on which success of plan depends in your control, or plan to get them under your control. Given the externalities that life throws at you at every other moment, it’s best to plan for broad objectives that you want to achieve, and leave the “reaching there” part to the doer when he is doing it on field. Plan for distance that you can see and visualize sitting at your couch, but not for the potholes and blind turns that you don’t know are present there on those roads. Let your better sense of judgment and common sense tackle these twists and turns on ground. Keeping an eye on the big picture will be sufficient to direct you through these unexpected events on your planned track.

So there you are… I had not planned this blog post word by word, but it happened as I started writing. So plan your life to the level that you always know what direction you need to take at every fork on road. No point in planning to drive down the road but not knowing which turn to take! Plan what you can plan, and be ready to take on what you cannot plan.