My Three Years on Twitter

On the 13th of August this year, my twitter account celebrated its third anniversary. I joined Twitter when it was in its nascent stages in 2007. I had heard about the site where you can share stuff regarding What you were doing at a particular time. I thought of checking it out and registered myself with the handle alagappan_nitt. At first I didn’t fully understand the need for sharing my current status with strangers. And I didn’t have any followers or any interesting people to follow. I tweeted once and disappeared. I never used it for another 8 months or so.

Any social network starts becoming interesting and useful only after it has gained a significant user base.  And twitter started gaining traction in 2008. A few of college buddies like @a4arvind and @sathyaphoenix joined twitter. Even in 2008 I just used the site for chatting with my friends about random stuff. It was like a substitute for IM clients. But I felt the features like tagging someone using @ very useful in linking to others’  profiles. I felt it could also be pretty useful for sending info to a group of friends. But the harder part was convincing friends to join twitter. I tried a bit but failed badly. Still I occasionally used twitter for updating my status during vacation and other holidays.

Around mid-2009, Twitter started becoming more interesting due to its explosive growth. It got a lot of media coverage and a lot of celebrities started using the service. And hence general public too started adopting it. A lot of my college buddies too started using it. Eventually I migrated from the old handle to the present one that is @alagappanr. Then I got the opportunity to interact with interesting people and follow them. I started using the service more often. Though I sticked to the web interface most of the time I also experimented with a few twitter clients.

Gradually twitter was being used for different purposes than what it was originally intended for. It began to be used a major real-time news source. As a influential PR/Marketing tool. As a tool to track events. As a major knowledge source. As a way to stay connected with friends 24×7. As a tool for fun. It was so overwhelming that Twitter changed its standard question from ‘What are you doing?’ to ‘What’s Happening?’.

In the month of June in 2009 I attended Twitter Unconference in Chennai – Buzz140. It has some interesting presentations on what twitter could be used for etc etc. It was wonderfully hosted by Kiruba and Co. I got hooked to the service ever since. I have been tweeting regularly and have connected with quite a few people.

As far as the interface used is concerned I have been using the web interface predominantly. I find it simple and easy to use. Apart from that I use/used a number of services like Echofon, TweetDeck, HootSuite, SMSTweets, TwitterSMS etc. Twitter through SMS is one feature that I guess is the most useful.

As I was writing this post I found a site called MyTweet16 where you can get your first 16 tweets. It was nostalgic. My first tweet was about Orkut. Orkut is now dead for me.

Though I am still a small user with a small following, I guess I am more connected with the internet than ever before. I guess just existing on a service is not a big achievement. There is a long way to go for me to extract the maximum out of twitter.

[Find out When you joined twitter at www.whendidyoujointwitter.com] [Follow me at www.twitter.com/alagappanr]

4 Ways to Save Orkut Pictures

Orkut is a great social networking site where you get to share your images with your friends. A few months back Orkut had disabled right click on images for security reasons. Whenever I used to add images to my profile there were a few friends who asked me to send me those images even when there are numerous ways for them to save the images themselves. If you are one of them, here are four ways using which you can save Orkut images instead of asking the owner of the pic to do so.

1. Drag the image to a new tab.

This is the simplest way to save an image. All you have to do is to drag the image to a new tab. The image which you get in the new tab can be easily saved by using Ctrl+S.

2. Image Fetcher Add-on

If you are a Firefox user, then you can install the Image Fetcher Add-on for Firefox. On installing this add-on you get a small save button at the nottom left corner of each image. Here you can select the destination folder and then save the image.

3. Firefox Tools

This is also applicable only for Firefox users. You have to click on the Tools menu and select Page Info. (Keyboard Shorcut – Ctrl+I). Here you got to the media tab and then locate the image which you want to save and then click on the Save As button to save it.

4. Print Screen

This is a crude way of saving images. You can capture the screen by cliucking on Print Screen key on your keyboard. This would capture the screen onto your clipboard. Now you can open MS Paint and paste it. Then you can crop the image to get the picture you want and save it.

There are many other ways to save the images which are avaiable. Thats one of the main reasons why you need to think twice before posting content online.