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“Have you heard of this new networking site ‘Facebook’?” a pretty young British colleague asked me in an upmarket English daily of Dubai in the winter of 2006.

“No, what’s that?” I blurted out in my ignorance.

She immediately turned to someone else to guide her for a story.

*    *     *     *

“Hey, I couldn’t find you on Facebook? Why aren’t you there?” an old friend from my previous workplace rang up on a Friday afternoon in the summer of 2007. I was in no mood to spoil my siesta, that too when I was feeling low.

“Why should I be there?” I retorted. “There are better things to do in life,” I banged the receiver down.

*    *     *     *

“By the way, are you on Facebook?”, a Filipina travel agent casually asked me in April 2008, while we were taking in the skyline of Kuala Lumpur from the heights of Petronas Towers.

“No, not yet... maybe next year,” I replied.

“It’s good. You can upload a lot of photos,” she suggested.

*    *     *     *

“Hey, I saw you on Facebook. When did you sign up?” a good friend and ex-classmate remarked excitedly on a rain-soaked day at a resort on the outskirts of Hyderabad in southern India.

“Just before I started for this vacation to India,” I replied. This was two months ago.

“It’s great, isn’t it,” another friend butted in. “I too saw you there.”

*    *     *     *

Back from my India vacation, I was hooked on Facebook, trying to upload vacation snaps and glance at the comments and pictures of friends and relatives. Soon, I was virtually touring the whole world from Christchurch in New Zealand to California in the US, via India, Dubai and London. I had set up an international network with friends and relatives and asked them stupid questions on my wall. Sitting in my small cubicle in DubaiMediaCity, I could monitor the activities of my two nieces in different corners of the globe separated by an international dateline. While one was partying away with family friends in Auckland, the other was enjoying the company of her friends on the American West Coast. In the meanwhile, two cousins from Chandigarh in northern India acknowledged my uploaded vacation snaps and recalled the wonderful time we spent there in parks, malls and eateries. Three of my cousins in London too had seen the pictures and wished they too could join in the fun. Wow!

The Facebook phenomenon is now slowly taking over the world like Hotmail had done earlier and Google still does. While Hotmail had started the email revolution, Google has a monopoly on internet searches. In the social networking scene, Myspace and Orkut had arrived earlier, but it is Facebook that is taking it at a whole new level, though Twitter is a big hit with celebrities.

In the UAE, the Facebook trend picked up momentum after His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the Vice-President and Prime Minister of UAE and the Ruler of Dubai, made his appearance. Recently, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh too made an entry. There could be a number of other public figures on it.

But my appearance was a matter of chance. Since my two teenage sons are very much into it, regularly chatting with school friends and cousins, I asked them to put me up too. That’s how I made my hesitant entry. I read the comments of my ‘friends’ there regularly (it’s strangely intimate as offspring, parents, cousins, bosses, colleagues, and even your students and teachers can be ‘friends’). It’s one more task for a day, apart from reading mails, junking spams and scanning news, besides traditional activities like watching TV, listening to radio and reading the papers. Unfortunately, there’s been no invention so far to extend the day beyond 24 hours.

I don’t know how long my romance with Facebook will continue, but I can see people being struck by its seductive charm. Frankly, if you can be in touch with your friends by email, why do you need another site to meet them. To meet them all at once, you do have chat groups. I think there are two main benefits – uploading photos is quick and easy, and locating some old friends. In the latter, unfortunately, I haven’t had much success (it was easier finding ex-colleagues). For how do you locate old friends without their photos or profiles? I guess many want to remain anonymous for fear of being stalked, but if you can’t locate friends on a networking site, it defeats the purpose. I know quite a few people have been lucky, but my search generally ends in a stalemate, especially with those I’ve lost touch.

Trying the university finder also proved futile. For, when I searched PanjabUniversity’s batch of 1984, I could find a whole lot of people, but none of those I knew. (By the way, how do you locate the girls you knew, as they have all changed their surnames after marriage?) Trying to view the friends’ list is not much help either as we may not have common friends.

Are they, by any chance, on other sites? I have no idea until I try hitting them too. Orkut is banned in the UAE, while Myspace is hardly known. Which means I may have to start tweeting. Frankly, much as I would love to fly, I don’t want to become a bird. Nor a social butterfly!

So, friends and ex-girl friends out there trying to find me – please come on Facebook with your snaps and profiles. Otherwise, in true Bollywood style, probably we’ll meet at Mumbai’s CST or Delhi’s IG International, and pack off to Café Coffee Day for a trip down memory lane. If I meet any old flames that way, I’m not going to turn ‘senti’ and rue the missed chances of marrying one of them (I’m happily married, with two teenage sons). But sure, it will be fun to meet someone who flickered her table lamp to signal me, the girl I would rush to meet in the University library, or the one who loved to chat while having ‘chaat’ with me. Oh, the memories of those infatuations...!

Social site-seeing

Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg with his roommates and fellow computer science students Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes at Harvard University. The website’s membership was initially limited to Harvard students, but expanded to other colleges in the Boston area, the Ivy League, and Stanford University. It further expanded to include any university student, then high school students, and, finally, to anyone aged 13 and above. The website currently has more than 250 million active users worldwide. Facebook has met with some controversy. It has been blocked intermittently in several countries including Syria, China and Iran. It has also been banned at many workplaces to discourage employees from wasting time. Privacy has always been an issue, and Facebook is facing several lawsuits from a number of Zuckerberg’s former classmates, who claim that the site had stolen their source code and other intellectual property. A January 2009 study ranked Facebook as the most used social network worldwide.

MySpace has its headquarters in Beverly Hills, California, where it shares office space with its immediate owner, Fox Interactive Media. MySpace became the most popular social networking site in the US in June 2006. It was overtaken internationally by main competitor Facebook in April 2008, based on monthly unique visitors. MySpace employs 1,000 employees, after laying off 30 per cent of its workforce in June 2009.

Orkut is owned and operated by Google, named after its creator, Google employee Orkut Büyükkökten. Although it is less popular in the US than competitors Facebook and MySpace, it is one of the most visited websites in India and Brazil. As of May 2009, about half of Orkut’s users were from Brazil, followed by India with 17pc. Originally hosted in California, in August 2008, Google announced that Orkut would be fully managed and operated in Brazil, by Google Brazil. This website is banned in the UAE due to some culturally offensive video clips uploaded on the site.

Twitter is a micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read messages known as ‘tweets’. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the author’s profile page and delivered to the author’s subscribers, known as ‘followers’. Senders can restrict delivery to those in their circle of friends or, by default, allow open access. Users can send and receive tweets via the Twitter website, SMS, or external applications. Since its creation in 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Twitter has gained popularity worldwide, and is sometimes described as the ‘SMS of the Internet’. In March 2009, a Nielsen.com blog ranked Twitter as the fastest-growing site in the Member Communities category for February 2009. However, only 40 per cent of Twitter’s users are retained.

LinkedIn is a business-oriented social networking site founded in December 2002 and launched in May 2003, mainly used for professional networking. As of July 2009^[update], it had more than 43 million registered users, spanning 170 industries.