Staying in touch

During college, I couldn’t stay in touch with my school friends as much as I would have liked to and communication got limited to weekly-basis, if not annually, at least monthly.
When I started working, things got extremely busy with the competitiveness and connection with family (the uncles, aunts, cousins and such), and friends (now from neighbourhood, school and college), further worsened.
As years went past, I kept wishing there was a better way to stay in touch with all my close and dear friends and other nice people I had come across in life- apart from calling them once in a blue moon or even managing to meet them rarely.
There were emails and even chat-forums. But I wasn’t ever committed enough to ensure regular mailing with all my friends and relatives, and never even liked the idea of staying online, chatting all day long during work-hours at least.

Cut to the year, 2006…
Suddenly the new wave of online communities took over. And guess who else got swept by… yours truly! *:D*

The thing about online communities, used to be the lack of privacy, lack of options for interaction, and the lack of creativity on the part of the members. All one could do, was read up each other’s details in the profile information, see each other’s pictures, videos, and for interaction, go on those arbit ‘So, what’s happening?’, ‘Nothing much!’, ‘And what’s up with you’, ‘Nothing. You tell me!’ conversations or surf some more profile if one wished.
But, the new age of internet connectivity, offers all that and MUCH more to the members. It’s not simply stay-in-touch-with-your-friends-and-make-new-ones-if-you-like, kind of a platform.
The new and the refurbished portals, enable friends to find each other, interact and share, numerous inventive chit-chats, in the form of games, nominations, testimonials, quizzes, virtual gifts, virtual ‘hugs’/ ‘pokes’ etc., apart from the usual messaging and mailing.
Also, instead of having to visit friend’s pages, every now and then, just to see if they’ve done anything new there, now you can simply rely on the ‘News Feed’, which comes on your home page for all the updates on your friends.
One can also get birthday reminders as well on the Home page itself.
Instead of getting all your friends, listed one after another, in one row/table, in the friends list, add some trivia on them, about how you know them, where you met them, since when you have known them etc. to spruce it up- for your own benefit or for your visitors.
There is also, no limit to how much you can add to your own profile information, due to the ‘add on’ features. Whatever becomes a standard, boring question from your friends, or rather acquaintances, e.g. ‘So, what are your hobbies?’, ‘Are you seeing anyone?’, ‘What kind of movies do you like?’, ‘What genre in music?’, ‘Favourite books?’, ‘What annoys you the most?’, ‘Where all would you like to travel?’, ‘What is your dream job?’, ‘Oh! Isn’t Pink your favourite colour?’, ‘Are you on Orkut/MySpace/Hi5etc. as well?’, ‘Baby, please give me the URL for your blog. I’ve lost it again.’, ‘What would you say is your style in clothing?’, ‘What are your favourite things?’, ‘Do you support any causes?’, ‘And, what all are you focusing on, now a days?’, ‘Have you read the book xyz yet?’, ‘What’s the next book on your list?’, ‘What are your favourite songs?’…and so on!!
One can also create To Do lists, calendars, reminders for yourself.
You can also add ‘invisible’ sections to your profile, for some private jottings, as these are only visible to the owners.
...I have nothing against having topics to talk about, with friends, acquaintances or strangers. Who does? But I get tired of the repetitiveness at times. Of course, there will always be the ones, who claim to be too busy to read through your saga of a profile, but seem to have all the time in the world to maintain the ‘so, what’s up’ chat for hours together!! *lol*

Then there comes the big question- how secure is it? Well, with the new and improved portals, in some, members have the option of allowing ‘only friends’ to visit their pages, read their information, and even to see their profile pictures. In a few communities, members can even pick which applications should be visible to whom and which not.

Lately, I have been hooked onto one such portal, and have been trying to get all my friends and relatives under that one umbrella, for easier, more fun, and more interaction with all the security/privacy possible.

We have all come across the latest in crime, where members got conned, blackmailed, robbed, or even murdered- by people they had met online.

I have been maintaining online mail ids since 1998 and that’s all that I used to do on the Net, at that time.
A couple of years later, one day, while I was logging onto my mail-id to check messages, I came across a link, which had been appearing for sometime, every time I visited that portal. It said something to the affect of, ‘Could there be a writer inside you? Click here.’ That’s how I started blogging in 2002!! *grin*
First all I wrote was some random ramblings, then I started on a biographical, then a journal, and then finally I came around to writing the random ramblings again (which I sometimes insist should be called ‘Features’ *ahem*).

All these years of blogging, I have come across a lot of people online, who commented on my posts.
Thankfully, I’ve hardly ever got the inane ‘I want to friendship you’ or ‘you make my heart sing’ kind of contact hits- which is perhaps because of the length of my posts (*lol* The day I realised this use of the length of my posts, I further ensured that my posts always remain as long as possible! *grin*)
For all the others who commented, I replied to them and sometimes even visited a few, who seemed to be leaving sensible/interesting/too-weird-to-pass-without-visiting-at-least-once comments.
And in some odd cases, I even became friends with a few, over time. Some of these friends stayed over years, while some disappeared and new ones replaced them.

But fortunately, my online interaction has been clean and friendly all these years. I guess that should be considered an achievement in today’s times. A friend, warned me against putting up my personal information, email id, picture, etc. on the Internet some time back. And I kept thinking how strange the idea was for me. But the suggestion had been completely reasonable.
Around the same time I started blogging, I realised that the concept of being honest, is really rewarding. If one has no secrets and nothing to hide, life stays much simpler and thus easy. I fell in love with this total-transparency ever since.

What else are the ‘Block’, ‘Scrap’ or ‘Junk’ tabs for I keep telling myself, every time I come across a weirdo again!
And nobody asked you to leave your senses, logic and mind in general, in the closet, remember that.

Ponder on…S m i l e