Caught in the web: Rise of Social networking

Continued from Caught in the web: Part 1

So till 2005 my time with internet was spent only by checking emails, forwarding funny pictures and other stuff to friends and then in late 2004 some downloads... mostly songs, old hindi tracks, ghazals, and ebooks from esnips and of course a few comic strips. I was crazy about comic strips like Hagar the Horrible and Garefield, who shared an uncanny resemblance with a good buddy... 

Then I was introduced to social networking sites by a friend, the first one being a very non popular site whose name I forgot... me.com or something like that. It was a very short lived amusement and I was feeling kind of bored with it... Life went on with more downloading and more forwarded mails, which I never used to open and just forwarded like that to all friends. 

Google was the emerging giant then, which revolutionized searching the web and giving a new word to the netizen's vocabulary "Googling"... so when they started a new email service Gmail, which was kind of unlimited service, a new trend then, all of the friends switched to it...again I kept my loyalty to Rediff. Then another new concept Orkut came into existence. Initially I was apprehensive of it, may be due to the disinterest caused by my association with that I-Forgot-the-name social networking site. My friends recommended it a lot but I kept my resistance, later I bend only when they made an orkut account for me... they set the profile for me and even helping in searching some old high school and higher secondary school friends whose existence I had forgotten by then. Thus started orkutting that was valuable in getting in touch with scores of old contacts, otherwise whose memories would have slowly moved into oblivion. Those days emails took a backseat and only those mails were checked which were personal and important. Orkutting and downloading songs and books were the internetting pastime. Later if we were able to organize a get together of high school friends and made it a reasonable success, it was all courtesy Orkut.

Another two sites that came into forefront at that period were  wikipedia and youtube... former was an information revolution and latter, a visual revolution. The success of these sites was phenomenal... Facebook was also making it big, but outside India. In India, it was all orkut for another couple of years, probably till 2008. I decided to make my entry into blogger world in 2006. It was a fascinating thing then. A platform for  showing off all your creativity, a vent for all the crazy things that goes through your mind.... I realised the potential but inspite of making a profile in blogger and starting a blog I never continued it. Later in 2007 I started a few blogs, in which I reviewed movies, books and things like that but that also stopped by 2008. 

I also joined Facebook by 2008 starting, but I was alone then. And bored, none of my friends were around. So I went to Orkut again for two more years. These years, 2008, 09 and 10 saw a large number of social networking sites and communities developing and prospering... but I believe all were short lived...and in 2009 I took to blogging seriously... micro and macro ways...In 2008 another thing I did was chatting. Yes, I was too late getting in it. I opened a Gmail account, which is a spammer's paradise right now filled with disgusting ads of machines to increase size of private body parts, power enhancing drugs, multinational companies announcing me winner of lotteries (Now do any one sensible will believe microsoft or Yahoo will have any interest to invest their hard earned money into lottery business?) and millionaires in Nigeria ready to give me a part of their black money. And I still find it difficult to chat with strangers... I feel kind of cheating them and at the same time feel cheated too.

Coming up next: Micro and macro blogging