28.7.14

A quiet chat

Do you remember ICQ and MSN and Yahoo messenger and GTalk?

I used to use several of these, because different friends had different addresses and preferred the look-and-feel of a particular one. And then people started shifting to Orkut and FB and Twitter and Whatsapp and Viber and Snapchat.

It slowly got lonelier and lonelier.  After all, in this always-connected world, who needs those old IM platforms when the smartphone apps are so much better? (Well, people who don't use smartphones, for one!) 

I still use one of the old ones, mostly for work.  Till not so very long ago, there used to be a regular flow of friends on it.  But slowly slowly, the logged-in list has been growing shorter and shorter, till now it's only populated by those who know it's the best way to reach me for conversations (when they can't talk, of course).

I guess the reasoning is not without logic - why bother to log in on multiple platforms when nearly everybody is on the two-three big ones? And for those who aren't, well, tough. In a world where we have too many friends in too many places and too little time, a few are bound to slip through the crack, right? And if they do, and you don't really miss them, then obviously they didn't matter to you that much, yes?

Whatever. All I know is that I have to continually log on to bloody FB to keep tabs on my friends. 

And let's not even get started about emails. 

7 comments:

Tabula Rasa said...

... or people you stop chatting with because they forgot their password. (happened to one of my closest friend/chatbuddies -- now we just email :-p)

Space Bar said...

Always, always prefer email. I'm always invisible on chat and I don't have a smartphone.

??! said...

You lucky people with your email-friendly friends.

Well, that's a little unfair. I do have friends who email - except they now do so as if they're texting.

Maybe I should attempt an email-revival.

The Bride said...

I know loads of people on gtalk. I stopped using it because a very creepy thing happened whereby my messages misfired to random other people, and Google was very shifty about admitting there had been a problem.

I now use Skype exactly as I did gtalk/msn messenger, because msn messenger sold out to skype.

FB is for sporadic conversations with non-besties. The only person I'm close to that uses FB to chat is my sister. Wish I could wean her off it.

km said...

What is this FB that you whippersnappers speak of?

/really, email is an AWESOME "platform".

??! said...

The Bride: You're the only one I know who uses Skype for text-chat. Don't you find it too cumbersome, though?

km:
I know, right? I keep trying to convince people of this, only to have them give me a pityig "Oh you Luddite, who uses email for anything except work" look.

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