Life in 140 characters

No, i never imagined it before i entered this zone. It was not 'just-another' social networking site. It beat my imagination.Yes, i am talking about Twitter and my experience in it for just over half an year. Social networking is something that i always admired for host of reasons apart from entertainment and networking.

 Twitter is the perhaps the first and the most popular site to introduce the concept of micro-blogging. The restriction of 140 characters is obviously inspired by SMS. Just over 6 years of its creation, the effect the twitter has brought about is really amazing. Every celebrity worth his salt would have an account in twitter and facebook.

 Though facebook and twitter are essentially social networking sites, there are many differences when it comes to the actual usage. Facebook is more towards entertainment but whereas twitter is more towards information. Your identity hardly matters in twitter but not so in facebook. Someone differentiated them pretty well stating "In facebook who you are is more important than what you say, but in twitter it's just the opposite". So, you can see many people with concealed identitities garnering a lot of followers because they are saying the right things despite their unknown identities.

 When any news erupts, no social media reacts as swiftly as twitter. If one has his area of interest, and knows whom to follow, he can get a hell lot of information in that field. This has been my experience so far. Even the news that main stream media blacks out for various reasons can be found in twitter. So, if you are an infomaniac, this is the place for you. You'll have a lot of like minded people and there can be great many discussions.

 One more positive i have found out of twitter is that i have found many good bloggers who are way better read and way better informed than the mainstream writers that we daily encounter in the newspapers. Through twitter, they are able to convey some important things to wider audience. Twitter has given them some considerable fan following as well. Till date, i have read many good blogs of many people. I wouldn't have known about those blogs if not for twitter. (In the near future,I intend to write about some of the good bloggers that i have encountered. So, I am not going into the details here).

 There are many other reasons to admire twitter. In my opinion it's impeding the fanatic pace of mainstream media which was/is peddling lies all the way. This is no mean task. That's why you see them cry foul in twitter that rightists (or 'Internet Hindus' as they are fondly named!) have taken control over twitter. This,all the way comfortably forgetting that the communists and pseudo-secularists have hijacked the whole nation and taking it systematically to the dogs. All these years, the main stream media had no challenges. With the advent of twitter and many other social networking sites, they no more can lie through their teeth.

I only wish social media in general & twitter in particular grows from strength to strength because mainstream media has more or less failed in carrying the responsibility of being the fourth pillar of democracy. I fervently hope twitter is here to stay and for good!

The brave new world of social networking

It was in the beginning of the year 2006 when I came to know about the social networking site Orkut. At that time it was not open to all. One needed to have invitation to create an account in Orkut. My friend who’d sent me the invitation, when asked about the site could not explain properly because the term social networking and the concept of it were something new to all. Those were the beginning days of social networking.

Though Orkut and Facebook started in the same year 2004, it was Orkut which had made mark in India in the initial days of social networking. Orkut had its major users from two countries: Brazil and India. Facebook, though was present in India, it was used by very small percentage of population then. But the situation is just reversed altogether now.

The concept of social networking was so new and engaging that we all became addicted to it big time. Even at the time of our computer labs, most people would be online with their orkut account. When teachers got enough of it, they decided to block all social networking sites. Oh come on! After all, ours was an engineering college. We did know how to get them back. It was not a big deal for us to get access to orkut and the likes through proxy-servers. In this way our browsing went unabated despite being in the watchful eyes of our teachers.

After two or three years, Facebook gained prominence obscuring Orkut in India. The kind of users orkut had, no one ever thought orkut would be pushed into oblivion so soon. But that did happen. Nowadays people hardly use orkut. At the same time, microblogging site twitter came into existence (2006) and became extremely popular. It is hard to find a person who doesn’t have an account in any these sites.(There are many other social networking sites like Google+, LinkedIn and many more but I am restricting to some very popular ones) We can’t say whether god is omnipresent or not but surely these sites are.

Any marketer who is serious about his product can not afford to neglect the social networking sites at all. Especially in the country like ours where the online population is growing at great proportions by the day, one can not look down the effects of social networking sites in any time from now. Through the platform created, the stars of cinema, sports, and other celebs interact effectively with their fans.

Strictly speaking though blogging can’t be called social networking, they can be classified under a broader umbrella. The difficulty in creating a blog is nill compared to that of creating a website. In these days, websites can also be created and made functional within a few days but those who don’t need their own websites, can settle for a blog. It is definitely a very effective way of communicating your ideas about many things and interpretation of various other ideas to a larger section of people. There are many good bloggers who write much better than the journalists in prestigious newspapers. Social networking has made all these possible.

In a nutshell I can say that the concept of social networking has definitely empowered people and given voice to their opinions. The biggest example from the world is the Arab revolution that happened in many countries starting from Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen and Libya. One of the major people mobilizing powers in these revolutions was the social networking media. It has played an important role in ending some autocratic regimes. The effect of social networking is huge in anti-corruption campaign led by Anna Hazare. 

Some major impacts 

The world was made small by the internet. Social networking made it even smaller. In this kind of environment one has to deal with all meticulously because a small error made, someone would have known somewhere. So it becomes almost impossible to plagiarize, misquote or misinform without being caught by some.

In the arena of media, social networking is doing a great service. While almost all the mainstream media has been purchased by some party or the other, none can purchase the social media because none owns it. That’s the beauty of internet and social media. That’s why there is no bias in social networking; there is equal space for both the parties; which is a very unlikely scenario in the mainstream media. If democracy is living anywhere, it is in the social networking. That’s the precise reason why some dumbass politicos want to curb it.

It is just the beginning of the age of social networking. As India and the rest of the world add more online people with each passing day, the social networking can only get stronger. Social networking is here to stay and more of its effects are yet to be seen. While we continue to adore social networking, it screams in Michael Jackson’s style “Boy! You ain’t seen nothing yet.”!!