A Social Network!

Okay, (for those who excitedly wait for discursive insipid stuff) my apologies for such a prolonged delay in writing my new post! And a big 'Hello!' for the rest!(possibly with a few more minutes of agony.Don't tell me I didn't warn you!) After a rather fantastic vacation spent on doing a thesis on the similarity of the color of the ceiling of my room and that of the West Indian sky during the test matches, I've finally got the time to vent out stuff for the online world! Sadly, the thesis hit the dead-end as most of the matches ended well before the fourth day and I was distracted by the huge amount of highly interested aficionados that thronged the stadiums.

Anyway, lets talk about the Social Networks! This thing has become so damn ubiquitous! Why ,even the corny mobile phone advert says "Facebook, Orkut, Twitter!! Bana doon social life better!" I'm sure, all of you, unless you follow the old caveman lifestyle, have an account in some social networking site. Social Networking, they say(my best guess is Sheldon Cooper) ,has become a new paradigm of the 21st century. Or in other words, the best thing since wrestling bouts wherein you can have a lot of fun at others' expense! Where else can you get to spy on the social lives of 300+ people at one place!

Being a social net-worker has its benefits.You get to know all your friends who constantly update their status to impress someone or do some real social service by updating some typical post-break-up songs for their fellow sufferers! It also breeds a sense a competitiveness in you. I remember one incident which happened sometime back. I was on a trip in my holidays and accessed Facebook through my rickety Nokia. The panorama was simply so picturesque that I badly wanted my friends in Mumbai/Pune to know that! (Nothing frustrates you more on a gloomy afternoon than statuses like these! True story!) So after racking my otherwise pathetic creativity for a couple of hours, I came up with "What a place! Feeling Fantastic!" .Feeling smug, I decided to follow the same routine everyday (I was kind of a nerd then,yeah..) So after coming back I decided to press the issue further (to go for the kill as they say ). Here's the excerpt :

(at college)

Me : So how did your holidays go??

Friend: They were okay.

(I was little disappointed..he didn't ask me how mine were! But I decided to let him know all the same!)

Me :Mine were great! You saw my status updates,right?

Friend:Yeah..You do have guts,man.

Me :Yeah..Going up to 5000 odd feet is no mean feat! Even if you go by a car!

Friend:Not that! You updated statuses through your crappy phone!! "Mobile Web" !!! How cheap is that! At least get that MicroMax ka Android!!

Now this was unexpected!! I can't say that my pride didn't puke at me. So I updated my status again, this time through an Apple device! But imagine my agony when I found out, it still was "mobile-web"!! Because I accessed Facebook through the browser and not the App! Jeez, technology makes your life so "easier", doesn't it?

After the success of that 'Social Network' movie, I was hit by this bug again.Inspired by Mr.Zuckerberg, my friend and I decided to make a social networking site as a part of our college project. We spent two weeks doing it and presented it as our entry in the competition. Sadly, the thing didn't impress our honorably just and scrupulous college authorities and we weren't allowed to participate. Oh well.We booked the domain name(waddup.in..it's still there but maybe the site might have crashed) and uploaded it with a great gusto! It has its members as the highly intelligent cognoscenti who really understand it (2 at the last count.. i.e the developers themselves).

Ah well..bad stuff (my blog is clean!) happens right? So where was I? Ah yes, Social networking! And if you speak of that how can you forget to mention Google+ ? The new in-thing! Its the sort of the stuff that acts as the food for your statuses on other sites! Brag if you've got it and despise it if you haven't! For those of you who haven't received an invitation to join it, fear not! Just comment on this blog and you'll have one in your inbox in a jiffy! (Okay, that's a joke! I haven't received one myself! And I plan to write my displeasure to the Google gods right away!) Despite its huge success, somehow the site seems a little confusing to me. Granted, its more secure, fun and has to have a better chat than Facebook but it isn't really social networking when most of your 'social' isn't in it! Still, I'd love to have that coveted golden ticket all the same!

I was always apprehensive of twitter.It had gained a notorious fame ever since the Shashi Tharoor and Lalit Modi incidents! Me, being someone who talks or rather talks too much before he thinks, always kept it at a safe distance. However,I couldn't stop myself from joining it after I found out I could connect with Wayne Parnell , Bill Gates and OMG Facts at the same time and know all about whats happening in celebs' lives! (Pune Times doesn't cover much..what to do?) After an initial gung-ho, it became rather hackneyed by the passing day. No longer did it interest me which brand of toothbrush by favorite actress hates the most or what part of Africa is the latest venture of a philanthropist. The feeling was aptly put by my friend @jam27990 who tweeted "god i'm tweeting! i must be really bored!" I re-tweeted that and that was the only thing I did on twitter!

Of course, networking has gone a certain Paradigm shift but its general essence remains constant. Be it just 'poking' someone on line or giving birthday bumps to someone with a great alacrity in front of petrified crowd in an udupi restaurant. 'Like' it or not, you can't help 'following' it! :D