Facends

I have more than 680 Facends. But what the hell is a Facend? Simply put – its Facebook Friend.

Thanx to social networking sites like Facebook or Orkut or MySpace – meaning of the word Friend has changed forever. In good old days Friendship was all about knowing people, understanding them, be there for them when the chips were down, share a laugh/joke, and finally accept friends just the way they are. There was not false pretence between real friends. Actually Facebook started as a network for Friends but now it has become free for all. There are many acquaintances on Social Networks rather than friends. Sometimes people send invitations to connect & it almost becomes very difficult to turn them down. So its almost like trespassers on Facebook are made friends and hence I call them Facends.

As a result we can’t speak our minds openly and we all pretend (of course there are exceptions).

I’m genuinely thinking of a Network that is ONLY for FRIENDS rather than FACENDS.

Things we take for Granted

Typhoon Nuri went away & the weather improved. We managed to catch up with friends over lunch to celebrate my birthday. As always I got a couple of lovely books – biography of Lakshmi Mittal, A lonely planet coffee table book on World Cities, and a BBC Book on 20th Century Innovations.

As I browsed through them today I realised how many things we take for granted today were the biggest innovations of their times. In some cases its a work of a lifetime but we seldom acknowledge that. Just goes on to prove that what you innovate today will be taken for granted tomorrow.

Reincarnation

This is my new blogging avatar. I had a few avatars before and the last one was quite good. But it died a slow death because of my crazy travel over last 18 months and inertia to connect over the weekends. I then installed a blog uploader app on my desktop & I kept jotting my thoughts. It didn’t work that well.

So finally beginning of this month I killed my inertia – spoke to Parag – who has always helped in setting things – and started configuring the blogging platform.

I was planning to launch it over the weekend but today we got an unexpected holiday because of a severe typhoon headed Hong Kong’s way. Incidentally it happens to be my birthday as well and hence it made perfect sense to launch.

Here’s to my new Avatar – Rays, Reflections & Refraction.

Thank You Parag!!!