The on-line community is abuzz with the Social Media Blitz that is taking the world by storm now ! Even news media veterans are calling out to keep up with the Social Media . Everyone is now by default assumed to have a blog or a twitter page . IM is passe and tweets are in . The Net is here to stay and the crowd is on it . What about the scene is India , the country with a clearly huge number of knowledge and IT workers in the world ? I thought that this would make a good post for today , so here goes ...
The oldest memory I have of anything "Social" on the net in India is egroups , everyone who had net access in the late nineties either had or belonged to an egroup that had a bunch of people with something in common . Back then it was cool to be in an alumni egroup or a java egroup and things like that . There was a lot of focused discussion happening in these groups and it was very useful for the members . In many ways it was also instrumental is nurturing the phenomenal talent pool that India had . Then the IM revolution happened , everyone had either an "official" yahoo or hotmail id and hence got affiliated to one of the messenger clients . The IT services companies that had the guys working for them started buying better software for the proxy servers and IM blocks became a way of life . Around this time , egroups sold out to yahoo and yahoogroups was born . The power of the egroup expanded exponentially . Then the employers in India dealt a definitive death knell to accessing yahoo and hotmail from work when a vast majority blocked accessing external mails from office and to this day many companies follow that religiously .Along came Google and gave you the power to forward mails to any id you want and everyone was free again !! Blogger became a hit the minute people realized the power of push button publishing . At this point it is worth noting that that Indians are by nature a talkative lot and good expressers by extension of that . The Indian adoption curve to blogging was amazing and the sheer depth a quality of the Indian Blogosphere is amazing , to say the least ! There were general blogs with stupendous following and there were niche blogs that were deep and steep . Suddenly , the bloggers were here !!
The micro-blogging edge of twitter came and took us by storm . The tweetverse had a considerable Indian edge now , including yours truly at @v_shakthi . The most stunning demonstration of the power of twitter in India was during the coverage of the 26/11 terror events in Mumbai where the mainstream media actually derived live info from tweeple and acknowledged it openly . The BBC's online coverage of Indian Elections aggregated real time tweets from India to get reactions and trends (yes , me too featured there !! ) . So Tweets are here and they are here in a Big way and to stay .
Coming to the point of this post , what about India as a whole ? Well there are a few deeper issues here . India still has miles to go in terms to adoption of the internet as a source of information and the alignment of infrastructure to support that . The available infrastructure is limited to urban and semi-urbanized areas and penetration of technology is still a myth here . Both of these need to change . Next is the corporate mindset and adoption ratio , Indian corporates all have net presence but only a woeful minimum are Net-savvy . The crappy policies restricting access and work should go and people should realize the utility of leveraging the net for information in constructive ways . Companies need to evolve a tech and net savvy policy base to facilitate that . Stupid rules like you can't carry your personal laptop to work should go and things should get better . I am also eagerly awaiting the impact of 3G mobile networks on Internet adoption . If used correctly that can be a killer method for rural penetration . I hope the Telcos smart up to that and get it going .
Hence the Final verdict is , the Tiger is new-born here , it is up to us to put it in a circus or a forest !!
See you in the next !!
Twitter has brought about a drastic change. No two ways about it!
ReplyDeleteHad a lovely read!
:):)