Process Plaids: 2008

In the good old days when friends wanted to catch up, we would cycle to the nearest shack and sit on stone benches sipping Masala Chai and voicing our take on the world that past week.

Over the years things changed. All of us went in search of greener pastures after College and for a few years we relied on terrestrial phones to keep in touch with each other. Often these used to result in multiple calls with an unwritten code on who would call whom, but then those were the days dialing was a lot easier then cycling. For a brief period, with the advent of computers came BBS (Bulletin Board Services) hosted by geeks with deep pockets for a subscription fee. Though it was popular amongst the nerd crowd, it vanished into cyberspace without a blip and soon was replaced by Email. It was a privilege having an email id and for about two years it served as a means for keeping in touch. You had to pay for an Email account until Sabeer Bhatia changed the rules of the game with HotMail and then all of a sudden you were connected with everyone across the world – you could send the same mail to you classmates working in India or to those studying abroad.

Connectivity was still limited to using Hotmail at Work! And so for about two years till Yahoo introduced IM, Hotmail was the means of keeping in touch. During these years connectivity improved and so did the popularity of Instant Messengers like Yahoo. Yahoo essentially improved upon the IRC (Internet Relay Chat) which was used to run the BBS’ and made it work on HTTP over TCP/IP. So now I had an official mail account, a personal mail account on Hotmail, a Yahoo mail and IM account. Managing addresses on these servers and syncing them to your paper based organizers became a nightmare. Disruptions in internet models continued to happen and soon businesses jumped onto the bandwagon to exploit this annoyance as a business opportunity.

First on the scene was Plaxo. A web based application that managed your business contacts. It would read your email client’s address book and store all the mail addresses on its servers and at some predetermined intervals send mail to these recipients asking them to update their contact details obviously the mail would also encourage the recipient to sign up. It was a large database of contact information with almost something about everybody who had nothing but an email id! This heralded the first step in Social Networking. Where you could exchange notes without the hassle of sipping cocktails and handing out business cards. Obviously someone could see that Plaxo had a one is to one relationship when in reality the relationship was many to many.

Then slowly on the scene came Social Bookmarking, where as you traverse the web, you flag interesting pages and share it on sites like Stumble Upon, del.icio.us, furl, spurl, etc, for others to discover. Like this you built up a collection as you unearthed little treasures while traveling through the web and shared it with others, the sites on their part ranked these bookmarks based on the number of people who clicked on them. As the bookmark collections grew exponentially, you tagged them with keywords to make these links easier for others to locate.

If you could share your links, then you could and would, obviously want to share your snaps. Flickr was the first one to answer this inner calling. You posted your snaps, tagged them and then flagged it Public, if you want others to see. Others saw left comments for you to respond. You responded and they responded and so the story goes. Over the years things have changed, the anonymity that internet offered by allowing you create the avatar you wanted to portray to the world, resulted in several so called value added social networking sites, that combined all the above features, sprouting like wild oats strewn across cyberspace. My first invite was to join Orkut followed by Hi5 followed by LinkedIn and then Followed by FaceBook then followed by something then something else until I stopped responding to invites. But the invites continue to pour in.

But first Orkut, it took a little under 3 minutes to sign-up and then allowed me to search for friends by name or their known Avatar. Then pictorially tag them based on their “coolness” you could also assign other pre-defined sobriquets. You posted scraps on your friends scrap book and they reciprocated the gesture by posting scraps on yours. Anything goes. The more stupid, the merrier. The person with most scraps was the most popular. There are other silly stuff you can do on Orkut to get cheap thrills – Declare someone as Hot Babe or Cool Guy by assigning little hearts. Express yourself was the motto. But then all excesses should come to a stop. You could find hoards of people realizing that this pastime was addictive and boldly declaring that they would stay away from Orkut much to the chagrin of their cyber buddies, many of whom didn’t have a form other than their online Avatars.

However in the dark recesses of the internet were small evils waiting to strike. Soon MW.Orc masquerading as an image file copied itself to other peoples scrap books and propagated itself until Orkut’s staff identified and removed it only to be hit by other JavaScript Fauna. Of late Orkut has deprecated its nonsense features like coolness and Hotness to a more sober and calm interface like those on Facebook.
My next invite was from, I don’t remember who, to Linked In. I signed up not to disappoint a friend. LinkedIn allowed me to import all my contacts from my Nokia, Thunderbird Client, Yahoo and Google address books. LinkedIn is strict business networking and limits personal expression to a photo and a resume. Contacting others is always through an intermediary thus reducing the annoyance of unsolicited invites. But it could do better. I still have a few invites to accept.

Then came an invite to Hi5 and the Psychedelic MySpace that allows me to decorate pages with background images and themes. These punk accoutrements were so heavy to render that they crashed my browser. The chaos was so intense that its been sometime since I checked out what’s happening to my network on these sites. I did like listening to free music on Hi5 and flagging my favorites. However I dread visiting them for fear of unsolicited mail and spam.

I discovered Facebook early this year. Facebook allows you to add applications (developed by third part developers) that enable you to share restaurant reviews (Local Picks), reviews on Books (Books IRead), You Tube Videos and a host of other Trivia. I can stuff a lot of things in my SandBox even without buying them. My friends can post notes on the Wall to grab my attention. MyMusic allows me to listen to my favourite track while Qloud will update the tracks I am listening on ITunes to my Facebook Profile! However, everytime I install these small applications they have access to my personal data on Facebook which legally allows them to target unsolicited advertising. The NewsFeed application informed me a few days back that Ajay Alex and Ravi Jerome Barnes are now friends, as though they weren’t before! Another application tells me that Ajay wants to play a 9X9 Sudoku with me, yet another tells me that a friend has just Poked me and then Zombie bit me! Ouch! One message tells me that Tom just brushed his teeth! Someone sends me a Bottle of Booze (Hic!). Someone sends me a gift. And so on and on it goes until I am sucked into this networking quagmire that hopes to keeps you on top of what the heck your pals are upto across the world. These silly apps sometimes try to get your attention by asking you to invite other friends. You can make them go away though. But unsubscribing from these sites is not easy as signing up!

I just realized that all I wanted to do a few years back was to keep in touch with friends. Phone numbers gave way to email id’s then to IM’s and now to Avatars on these annoying Social Networking sites. Managing these Multiple Social Network Syndrome is getting difficult. As I write this my friend Ravi Jerome Barnes in Tokyo is tired and wants to crash!
I prefer Masala Chai on a stone bench with some real faces around. Wouldn’t you?