FACEBOOK and TWITTER – New medium of communications
When I first read this topic, I instantly remembered a lesson in my 6th standard English book named, “A romance of the mailrunner”. It described the adventurous, dangerous and challenging life of a mailrunner in old days when no other means of communication existed. When I start thinking of the evolution in the communication for last 4-5 centuries there are various significant milestones I can never miss out mentioning. In 1627 France introduced first registered mail. Then there was the morse code, telegraphs. The single person who can be give the credit of pioneering the distant communication is Sir Alexander Graham Bell, the patent holder of telephone in 1876 and followed by some groundbreaking work in optical telecommunication. This led the foundation for further research in telecommunication, mobile communication, satellite communication and the internet, the lifeline of everyone of us today.

Evolution of internet and computers in themselves have been rapid and quite thrilling. I used the first internet application when in 10th standard , an email via hotmail and then got introduced or can say addicted to chatting in following years via yahoo. Initially I used to chat with my brother in US and then started to chat with unknown people across the globe. I was very thrilled to chat, share, understand the thoughts, cultures, traditions from various countries. I realized the real meaning of a popular statement “communication has brought world closer”.

But on the other side I started realizing the amount of time I waste on these applications rather than doing some productive stuff. I consciously kept myself away from those for quite a while. After about four to five years a friend introduced me to social networking applications such as orkut, facebook and twitter. Orkut and facebook were found in 2004 while twitter came into existence in 2006. Today facebook is the web application with highest number of user count exceeding 500 million across the world. This number gets me thrilled but at the same time a thought comes to mind as to why people spend so much time on the web rather than doing things like chasing the hobbies and interests, exploring new things or even relaxing.

Entertainment Weekly put facebook on its end-of-the-decade 'best-of' list, saying, "How on earth did we stalk our exes, remember our co-workers' birthdays, bug our friends, and play a rousing game of Scrabulous before Facebook?" [So is the magic of these networking sites.
If I start recalling my initial phase of using these applications, I can see myself totally addicted with all the games that were there, old friends meeting online and talking about nothing (???) or making new friends, following the activities or twits of some of the celebs and similar activities. There was a facility to find the old out of contact friends (the ones lost in kumbh ka mela). There were also some links you can provide to your personal website and the blogsites. That is how I got whatever small audience to my blogspot. Recently these sites have introduced use of mobiles to connect, twit and chat. This add-on has been so successful that you can now see at least one or two out of ten having mobiles using these web apps. This phase was there for about one or two quarters.

When I see today the flip side of the facebook and twitter coins, there are number of flaws I could find. Let us recall the recent incidence of one of these being attacked by the networms. We have been told to change our passwords. This thing really questioned about the basic security available with these sites. We put our personal information, our friends contacts, a lot of people put their photographs, and many more things. If this goes in wrong hands I dare not imagine the consequences. The other problem I have seen of the sites is your messages are public where in anybody can read those which might be undesirable to few.

On a philosophical note, in day to day life we are not connected that well with even our neighbours, close friends or family members which are right there in the house, we claim these sites to be helpful for building social connections, we really need to sit quietly and think about this approach otherwise we will get a lot of long distant invisible friends and might miss onto the most dear ones seating right beside us !!!