Sameer Agarwal

Well I don’t know if I’m not cool or young enough, but I can’t understand why people are using Orkut scraps/Facebook Wall as a public chat. ‘Scraps’ like “Hi” and “What’s your number” are so common on scrapbooks that it’s not funny.

I thought scrapbooks were like “Visitor Books” – a one-way communication, more often an endorsement or criticism. How this became 2-directional is something I can’t fathom. Especially weird is the fact that this is being used as 2-directional communication without any synchronization. To illustrate, lets see How Scrapbook A and Scrapbook B (individual entities) look :

Scrapbook A
Person B: Hi
Person B: I’m doing fine. What plans for the weekend?
Person B: Oh wow! Send me pics when you’re back

Scrapbook B
Person A: Hi, How are you? 
Person A: I’m off to the Bahamas

Weird. Now don’t scrap me to tell me what you think about it!

There’s a site called Browse Happy which is nothing but a campaign against Internet Explorer. That’s “hate groups” coming of age! Well disclaimer – I’m not supporting this campaign in particular… especially because I’m making this particular post from IE (my office computer ‘standard built’ browser) even though I use Firefox on my home computer.

Firefox is of course good with plenty of plugins freely available, tabbed browsing (that’s standard in IE 7) and “more security”. Though I know nothing about what that “more security” is but guess if the world thinks it’s more secure I’ll assume it’s more secure.

But anyway, I guess what’s happening is that it is a war between communities and organizations. Organizations are sort of trying to create communities (that’s the whole Web 2.0 strategy piece) while communities are sort of becoming enterprises (take Firefox or WordPress as examples) in a way. It’s a strange convergence where warring factions seem to be becoming more like the other, even though the purpose of their existence ‘was’ different.