Sunday, April 26, 2009

My two cents on social networking

The Whackster wrote about twitter some time back, and these past few days of twittering non-stop has made me appreciate why we fall in love, and out of love, with social networks. Does anyone remember the day you first joined Facebook? I do... It was at the school computer lab sometime in Mid-2007... a long long time before Facebook became popular with the average Sri Lankan school kid (and that explains why it wasn't blocked at school, unlike Hi5, the dominant social network among us at that time) and I remember just why I joined (yes, it involved a girl... duh! hehe) and I have been through a lot with Zuckerberg's contraption: 3 major design changes, the rise and takeover of applications, pokes, superpokes, walls and superwalls, threads, groups, photo tagging (something I had never seen before that, although I believe it had existed much earlier) and yes, the relationships and the breakups that took place on Facebook. And when I first heard about twitter, I was confused as to how a social network could grow based solely on 140-character updates and messages. Then Facebook changed it's design to mirror twitter, and I was furious that this had happened. The homepage became cluttered and all sorts of bull started appearing on it.

So it was with very low expectations that I joined twitter, and that too only to follow 'famous' people... Now, one month and 1057 updates later (mostly @ replies though), I have gone through making new friends, finding out stuff (did anyone else know about fingermonkeys?? I sure didn't!), analyzing Kottu bitchfights (that was fun!), sharing hugs and other 'moments', debating television shows, movies and music, being at the receiving end of quite a number of old 'Thomian jokes', and of course that one instance of getting caught twittering at a class! The sheer number of updates show how addictive twitter is, and it doesn't look like it's going away anytime soon! :D
So, all-in-all, If you were a guy who should be studying for his final exams happening in less than 5 weeks (!!!), I wouldn't never never never ever never ever never (even if I hated you!) suggest you join twitter! Don't!!! Seriously! :P



Edit: St. Fallen shared this video poking fun at twitter-culture with me, and I wanted to post it here

14 comments:

  1. Agree Bro .. First Hi5 then Facebook and now Twitter I feel sorry for myspace though they lost the plot by having too many graphics

    Cheers ! =)

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  2. dude you have to watch this!
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xo8IfYFyLgQ
    :D

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  3. @Disease: Yea man, MySpace was just like Hi5, too many stupid images, and too little useful information. In today's tech world, it has come to the stage of innovate or die... :D

    @Fallen: Thanks for the clip man, that kinda reminds me of what we do on twitter... I added it to the post, hope you don't mind... ;)

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  4. Exam in five weeks???

    Lock up ur computer and HIT the books!

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  5. yes I plan to do that shortly Tules... waiting for an auspicious moment! hehe *gets slapped across the face by reality* Ok, maybe tomorrow! :S

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  6. See the good side. Twitter helps u improve ur writing skills - u learn to write short sentences, to the point, direct...sooo.. errr.. if ur exams involves that kinda thing, it's good :)

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  7. HEE HEE! You can thank me later for enlightening you with the thomian jokes and fingermonkey jazz. ;)

    And LMAO @ the video! XD

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  8. dude,stop twittering so much if you've exams!!

    cool video btw..:)

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  9. @Vileness: Yes, but I'm more likely to lose marks than gain them if I were to change my patented-exam-writing-method... ;) :D

    @Maks: Thank you! :P and no, I wasn't sitting here reading your tweets and pretending to be doing something productive... I was simply watching IPL! ;D

    @Lady D: Yeah, I'm going to limit it from today... No more staring at the screen for hours... ;)

    and St. Fallen deserves all the credit for digging that video up! :)

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  10. Aaahhh! I remember the "Steps" we took in our Internet lives.
    Hi5-->Facebook-->Twitter[Ive not yet got there,Hopefully will do in the near future] then-->Blogger. =D.
    Things change with time so much.

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  11. Very true GG... And the newer social networks are always faster or more instantaneous than the one that preceded it... In Hi5 there were no wall posts or status updates, in Facebook there wasn't any real-time feed (well the feed now seems to be real-time but it's not in the same league as twitter) and in twitter you're pretty much updating your status and sharing your thoughts every few seconds, almost like a group-convo in an instant messaging programme... :)

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  12. Not much into twittering but knew it is a 'wow' idea! Think the success of twitter is that it facilitate quick n easy communication..

    I remember my friend twittering while we were in a tent in the middle of nowhere..

    Tks for very informative post..

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  13. BTW I like the new design of your blog :)

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  14. Thanks K! :D

    Yes, the almost real time communication of data that it allows is the brilliance of the idea. Even CNN uses twitter to find out what the latest news is when something like a bomb-blast happens... That is because people close to the area that it happens will tweet about it, and these can be searched using keywords... lol@ the twittering from the middle of nowhere thing, I can just imagine what the tweets would've been like... :D

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