New Delhi: At some point in your life you have wished you had the spontaneous timing of Chandler Bing to wriggle yourself out of a sticky situation armed with nothing but scathing wit. The iconic American situational comedy F.R.I.E.N.D.S might have redefined popular culture and made inroads into the Indian set-up, but in the last decade it was social media that shaped the way we deconstructed our lives for complete strangers and made friends.
When Facebook was launched in 2004, it was just another website that connected the people you had lost touch with. You still wrote letters (snail mail) and called up friends. As its worthy predecessor, Orkut was the site everyone had a profile on - posting photos, writing steamy bios that were mostly lies, asking for recommendation from friends. The bubble burst when spammers found their way around the website's security features.
Friendship still meant getting a spangled card that played music on your birthday. The complex labyrinth of relationship on social networking sites that the youths today balance was a thing of future in the virus-infected Orkut days.
Over the years, Facebook has been joined by its competitors Twitter and Google Plus as Peddlers-in-Chief of online kinship. There are many manifestations, but these 10 stand out as the main vessel of making new friends who, while remaining unobtrusively virtual, shape your online persona and give you support....
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09:06 AM, Aug 05, 2012
