Critically Trivial

I finally decided to bite the bullet and take a break from Facebook. Thanks to all the controversy around the news feed, someone developed a website and a counter for taking a break from Facebook.  To start off this is not a blanket break on all social networks, this is only for Facebook. In case some of my services are connected to Facebook, I’m sorry I cannot disconnect them all.  

Keeping the News feed controversy aside; I have no aversion to Facebook. In fact I am one of those guys who believe in the idea of social network and Facebook. Facebook has improved our lives for better. It has shown us the power of sharing and connections. Thanks to Facebook I can keep in touch with my friends and the world doesn’t seem distant anymore.  I can travel to any city and find my friend or their friends and hang out with them. I love to share. I just want to experience the difference in my life when I stop using Facebook. It’s kind of my own personal therapy.

I am going to try and chronicle my journey for the next 15 weeks to just keep a track of how I am coping without Facebook. I am curious to see how I’ll use all the free time I am going to get after quitting Facebook. How it’ll change my social interaction with my friends? It’s going to get really interesting. I am really excited and happy to have begun this journey.

In case you want to know why take a break from just Facebook?

I had gotten into a bad habit of opening the app for no particular reason and checking on my friends time and again.

At times Ignorance is Bliss. I let useless status updates (stuff which doesn’t affect my life) disturb my peace of mind. It disturbed my mind because all the stuff was about people I know.

In some cases I used to have some anxiety about the people and number of people liking my status update.  

What else I’ll be using and why?

I’ll keep using Swarm and foursquare because for me it’s like a journal of all the places I’ve been to. I don’t open it at random to see what others are doing.

I’ll keep using Instagram because for me it’s like a photo journal, where I post random pics of coolest and artsy things around me. Similar to foursquare I absolutely have no desire to see what others are doing in Instagram

Spotify. I love music. Enough said.

Twitter. I promise I’ll be using it lesser and lesser for next 90 days, but if there is something awesome I have to share, I’ll share it on twitter.

Whatsapp, well friends if you want to talk, ping me and I’ll call. J

IF you can keep your head when all about you 

TLDR:- It's a post on why to keep your Google+/Social Networks profile updated and using them in General.

It all started with a simple question to a friend:

Are you on Google+ ?? 

Let me first start by telling you all about my friend here. He's young ,he's on facebook (aren't we all) but not very active,his main email client is GMail. He would probably visit the facebook site once a week just to catch up and see if there's any major news with his friends.He's well read and quite intelligent.

And me, lets just say i am a developer by day and  social media evangelist by night.I am on quite a few social media networks and I am completely convinced and sold on the idea of being social.

So coming back to the question, His reply was :- 

I can never be on Google+. I don't want my private data to be online and see ads related to it. I don't see the point in using it. How is it useful ?? What's the wow factor ?? 

We had a good debate and my intention in writing this post is to address all these kind of concerns.

A] I don't want my Private data to be online. I don't want to see any ads related to it.

Let's just face it. You are most probably already on Facebook. Get real, people. Your private data is already online and yes though you might not notice it you already see ads on Facebook too all the time.

But more importantly :-

When we use any web services no matter what, we do end up sharing our data partially with the service provider. So our service provider has little data to create a profile for us and you know what, more often than not it always ends up in a disaster. As a wise man put it, 

"Half-Knowledge is Dangerous"

You know Google's services are good and you are going to end up using it.Why not give them good data to help them as well as help ourselves. Is our data really that private ?? 

B] I don't see the point in using it

Let's explore this, Millions of people use Google search and we don't know most of them. When some one wants to offer you a job or check out your profile, the first thing they do is Google you. You want them to see your authentic data which you have filled up, not something that was generated by online bots. Believe me these exist. Just Google yourself and see the social media aggregator sites.

In addition to it, it helps me search for a restaurant and places my friends like and also notice authentic reviews from my friends.

C] How is it useful ? 

Here I could just list out all the features, but I won't do that. It basically does same things as facebook, sometimes better sometimes not so great. Stand out features are better photo experience and Hangouts. But let's be fair it's only as useful as you make of it. There are so many great uses of Hangouts. It's already being used by so many people now to collaborate around the world. 

D] Wow Factor ?

I don't care about Wow factor much but for people who do .. Lets just put it this way.. It's Google !!

I have been a little prejudiced and I totally understand people's aversion to sharing any kind of private data but I believe there are enough privacy noise controls provided by all social networks.

As a developer myself,I do think the more the data we have the easier it is to work. I love to have more data. It may hamper my performance but it makes my job of providing the best possible experience to users a lot simpler and a lot easier. And that makes me happy at the end of the day.