My Social Networking Expirience of 2008 (intro)

Last years it has been all about people connecting over the internet, people from all over the world socializing. A social networking fucking revolution it is. Just think about it. I have an almost day-to-day interaction with people from nearby and far-away countries, like Croatia, Serbia, Germany and Australia. No phone, just Facebook and Twitter. I talk to my relatives in Germany using Skype, not paying for the phone costs, only my internet monthly fee. And I don’t get only audio, I get to see them while talking through video chat. Without video chat I still wouldn’t know how my cousins 6 months old daughter looks like. If I were a woman, I’d drop a tear now, writing about this.

60 years ago people in my country barely knew people from nearby villages. About world matters they only new what they’ve heard on radio. It was another world back then. Then they got phones and TV and a whole new world opened to them. Before the end of last century people got their hands on mobile phones, world wide web, e-forums and e-mail. It was an revolution. Unthinkable. Suddenly you were reachable all the time thanks to your mobile phone, you could use e-mail to get your mail delivered (bye bye paper) in a matter of minutes and you could participate in e-forum debates with people from all over the world. And today? How many Facebooks, MySpaces and Twitters have we seen arise in last years, with user numbers growing straight into the sky? You don’t use Facebook? You’ve never heard about Twitter? What? You don’t even know what RSS is? Well, guess what. Your e-mail is just a plain old fax machine. Jesus, are you living in a bubble? I barely go to toilet today without people all over the world knowing about it. Okay, thats an bad example. Here’s a better one. Two weeks ago with Mumbai events going on (you’ve heard about Mumbai terrorist attacks, right?), you were waiting for the evening news to find out more on what was going on there. Okay, maybe you’ve heard something on the radio and read something on news web pages. To me it was old news already, I was getting my updates from services like Twitter, more or less learning about situation as it was developing. You may think it’s too much information to handle. I say it’s better to have information available then to not have them. It’s only a matter of how you manage it. Surely, if you will want to know everything about everything, today you will drown in this ocean of information.

That’s why I’ve set out to write three posts focusing on which (and why) social networking tools and services I’ve started to use in last few years, how they improved my social networking revolution experience and how it helped me to not to drown in this flood of information. So stay tuned in to learn about which social networking services I use and how I use them on my Windows PCand on my Mac.

— Regards, Milan