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Wednesday, October 19, 2016

Orkut, Facebook, Google+ and Twitter..What next!

I'm a person who always love my 'space' and very often, I've often been defensive to those who enter that world uninvited. Being on the social media is a totally different game. My connection with social media started off with Orkut, where I could connect with my friends and family. The days of scrapbooks gave way to Facebook, that soon captured the attention of youth.

I was reluctant to come out of my Orkut world to a new place, Facebook. However, I found that many of my friends were no more active on Orkut and were showing interest in its counterpart Facebook. The initial days on Facebook weren't so comfortable for me, but I soon got used to it and addicted. I started my career during those days too.

Things just changed once I got employed. My priorities changed, my attitude altered, and I no more found 'chats' interesting. The only chats I used to then have were with my friends from Muziboo, where I get connected with the users who share their music uploads.

Later, after joining OneIndia (where I'm still a happy employee), I was asked to take care of a Facebook fan page. As always, I showed no interest. To me, Facebook was a distraction, not a necessity. With the support of the CEO, I took up the responsibility and I have no regrets on the same.

Twitter came to me much later. Though I had a Twitter account, I never used to login to it and never bothered to be active there too. I always felt that Twitter was for the 'intellectual' types, and I see myself nowhere close to it! :D. To me life is fun, and by then Facebook was funny too :P

It is not right on my part if I forget to mention my Google+ venture. I was a happy user of G+ then. Regularly posting my articles, getting G+ likes and sharing my works of words on the web was fun but it was short-lived. One fine day, they decided to block my posts stating that I've violated the policies of G+. Now you may be wondering how I violated the G+ policies, I swear I haven't posted anything obscene! After a few days I got it rectified with the help of my colleague Manish, but I still am sceptical about being active on the platform and never want to be warned of any violation anymore.

Well, let me tell you how I started my Twitter journey. The CEO (not sure if he would mind if I take his name here, so better not take it!) asked me “Do you know Tinu Cherian on Twitter?”. I had no clue who this person was, I thought he is some writer or a person with some political influence. After the talk with the CEO, I started wondering “Tinu Cherian seems to be so popular on Twitter and he is from Kerala. The whole world (at least my world) knows him well. Why was I ignorant of this person. This is bad. I need to be updated.”

This time, when I logged in to Twitter, I wasn't reluctant. I wanted to explore the whole new world before me. I didn't know what RT, MT, DM or even hashtags meant. I got a warm welcome as I found a lot of articles being shared the moment I checked my feed, which had posts from the very few people whom I had followed when I had opened the account (oops, it's called a Twitter handle, not account.. excuse me!:-o)

My active entry to Twitter was just a month back, and I'm really happy about that casual conversation I had with the CEO, without which I wouldn't have considered logging in to Twitter. Today though I don't have many followers, whoever follows me are worth sharing my 'space'. I won a contest (well, that's when I knew that hashtags were used for contests too!), though not knowingly. One of my favourite authors, Jean Sasson follows me and showed her interest in reading my tweets(that day I was so excited that I couldn't sleep!) and many more happy moments followed, just in a month!

Today, I have a totally different perspective about social media platforms. Since the day I'm on Twitter, I'm reading a lot on various topics that interest me. Well, since my interests don't just restrict to books and music, I find a hell lot to read on the web, of which a good part is from Twitter. In fact, even while I cook or have food, I keep checking for updates on my Twitter app on mobile. It's a different world altogether, a fresh one with so much of possibilities to broaden your knowledge zones.

With the rapid growth of social media platforms, I'm just wondering what comes next to grab my attention! I'm glad I belong to the internet era, so that I don't have to be in front of the idiot box watching dumb TV serials (Oh I forgot, TV and I are several worlds apart, not to mention the TV serials!).

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