Off late i have had a inactive social life... ahem ahem I meant the online social life. When asked why ? like any self respecting engineer i wanted to have a more poignant answer rather than the real reasons like quitting IBM, the new job(s), the recent visit to US of A, lack of time, lack of internet access, laziness blah blah. So after careful thought i decided to settle for the age-old excuse
"Overwhelmingly Oversized, Overt Online Overload"
Wait!! the idea of *too much of something is bad*, might be an old one but the stylish quote above is my Original & i hope to see few wows for in the comments. Now whatever be real reason for the idea, once i conceived it i decided to make true of it. Hence, forth i have decided to cut down my online social access to one select interface for each medium. The huge amount of the time i am going to save is to be utilized to appreciate the nature. Like looking at beautiful flowers (on a girl's shirt), the soothing green leaves (of lettuce peeking from a burger) & plush carpet of grass(inside the TV telecast of a cricket match). The rest of this blog is What, Why and When ? of each of the mediums.
- Social Networking : Facebook. The primary reason for deciding this one and the most of the ones below is the reason any reasonable dude would reason if he reasons reasonably(another one man I am good). The reason, _you are where your friends are_. That is reason i was in Orkut before & that is reason i am not going to be there any more.
- Email: Gmail. I have a Rediffmail, Yahoo mail, Indiatimes mail, Hotmail, Gmx mail account which either i would disable or just ignore, if you have by chance had my contact in these domains please delete them. My college mailing group is still in yahoo, but over the years like all things it has become a low traffic low interest mailing group. *Adieu dcemecta04mates*.
- Chatting: Gtalk. Yahoo chat & Facebook chat are hereby obsoleted. Yes even though i would use Facebook for social collaboration i have disabled its chat.
- Voice/Video Chatting: Skype. I would have very much liked to use Gtalk for this too, but its quality on linux sucks. So till Google gets its act right i'll stick to Skype, but i am purely going to use it for Voice/Video chatting. Only text i'll ever type in there is "I can't hear your voice."
- Micro-Blogging/Status Updates: Facebook Status. Bye bye Buzz & Twitter. It was easy to chuck Google Buzz just an ugly appendage, which Google had added in it less creative moments(great guys like Me & Google from time to time reuse older ideas). Twitter was a much harder to let go, its a very flexible and robust app & a lot of serious stuff happens there (like CERN tweets). But who the hell wants serious stuff.
- Blogging: Blogspot. Wordpress don't Impress me much...
- Feed Sharing: Google Reader, the only one i have ever used the only one i'll stick to.
- Documents: Google Docs. If there are others i don't wanna know.
- Bookmark Sharing: Delicious. I really like StumbleUpon, the austerity of del.icio.us wins the day.
- Photo Sharing: Picasa/Photobucket. WTH... i have pics in Orkut, Picasa, Flikr, Photobucket. All of them would be consolidated into Picasa/Photobucket. Why 2 ? because they have size limits on the free account and I am a cheapo who hates to pay ,if you have a free way. I may upload some pictures in Facebook but they are going to just _my pictures_, solely for my narcissistic pleasures.
- Misc: All the specialized sharing like Books , Movies, Playlists will be taken care of by one of the Apps in Facebook or by exchange of a .txt file over email.
- IRC: Freenode. I only have this because of bunch of dear geeks who would not use anything colorful. One day i will move them to a google partychat one day i will...
Note:- This is a pre notice, i'll gradually start to DeBuzz, Untweet, NOrkut ..
