Hello and welcome to the last column for the year. It’s been quite a year, hasn’t it? Major things have happened in all areas of the world, and blogging is not the least of them. Let’s take a trip down memory lane and revisit some of them:
Instant connectivity
1. Michael Jackson dies and the blogging world explodes. It was everywhere. In fact, I found out about his death on Twitter, before any news source had reported it. His death brought millions of fans worldwide closer together, just through the Internet. Overnight, his fan page on Facebook doubled in numbers.
2. Twitter becomes a major player. In 2009, everyone who had access to the Internet signed on to the site and began to follow practically anyone, including their favourite celebrity. There were times when the addiction went a bit too far — like the woman who tweeted even as her two-year-old was in hospital after drowning — but non-face-to-face communication was the new thing.
3. Facebook introduced changes, the ability to ‘like’ or comment on someone else’s status or photos and a lot of features. In fact, the features even got blogs of their own, the most popular one being Lamebook (www.lamebook.com).
4. Facebook also rolled out the Farmville game, which presented you with harvesting virtual strawberries that everyone came to be talking about.
Getting smart
5. Cell phones became the new laptop. With smartphones getting cheaper and people travelling more, blogging and tweeting happened most from your cell phone. Twitter allowed Indian users to text their tweets and suddenly, blogging became as easy as sending an SMS.
6. Google Wave came; I got a Google Wave invite; so did you, I’m sure. And I’m also sure that like me, you played around with it before forgetting you had an account at all. It’s nice to be able to edit conversations and have them stacked, but that it only works with other Google Wave users meant a lot of people gave it up for a lost cause. Google Wave? Meh.
7. The recession continued to affect people and woe-is-me blogs mushroomed. The most popular of all these? FML, which stands for f*** my life, and which is now a common Facebook status. People here spoke about why their life sucked.
What will the new year bring us? More optimism, more changes? Maybe this year we can lift up our heads from our laptop screens and cell phones and go out and have a real conversation with people without feeling the need to broadcast it to the world.
Meenakshi writes a blog at the compulsiveconfessor.
blogspot.com. Send her your queries at meenakshi
madhavan@gmail.com