With the ever growing social websites and gaming portals – a part of our personal life has gone to the cloud, some of it public. This post is targeted for people who’re new to the online world – i.e believing that there is a something on the internet apart from reading emails.
So why manage it?
Of course, if you’d want to avoid embarrassment when some one looks up your name on Google.
So How to create or manage it? Here are a couple of tips
Create your “online” social network.
There are infinite social network websites, so only sign-up for the most useful ones where you’re likely to find good interaction/old friends. Listing down a few here.
If you want to search for the user name availability try out KnowEm.com. It avoids the pain to search the user names across various websites.
Twitter – It’s a difficult question if you’d ask me what’s Twitter is all about. In one sentence, I’d say its a great place for quick interaction and if you’re lazy you could throw out your ideas to random strangers and micro-blogging. Get involved in social discussions. Don’t fight.
Facebook – 8 years back, no one would have believed that Facebook would beat Orkut to become the most famous social-networking platform in India. It did it with style. A great place to hang out with old buddies. If you’re not yet on Facebook, now’s the time, go have a online social circle. Ofcourse watch out with the people you’d connect. Believe me you can get stalked here to and beware of addictive games like FarmVille.
LinkedIn – If you like business networking, then this is the perfect website for you. You can connect with old batch mates, colleagues and follow companies too. You can even ask your co-workers to recommend the work you’ve done together.
Got more time to kill on the internet? Here are more..
Digg – This is one place to find breaking news on the internet. This website was so popular that it brings down websites when users storm a single website. There is a term coined for the same – The Digg Effect. You can find information and can even post interesting links to this website. If you get to write a cool post (like this one, may be?) – do digg it.
Orkut – We still thank Orkut Büyükkökten for creating the first social network that kicked us off from doing other useless stuff back at college. This is the first social network for me and a lot of other Indians and Brazilians, while the other part of the world was using MySpace and Facebook.
There are other social network websites, but these are good to go for now.
Get your own domain name
Want your resume to look serious? It’ll definitely look professional if you have a regularly updated personal website. So don’t go for cheap <yourname>.freehosting.com. Shell out a few bucks and get yourself a professional domain name. We at woikr are happy with DreamHost.
Sign up for forums of your interest
Internet forums are the best way to share and exchange information. Most of the times ask for help too. A couple of ones that you can check out are TechEnclave, Consoul. Again maintain peace with the fellow members and forum administrators. Be useful.
There are probably a gazillion things more to do on the internet which I am sure you’ll be able to figure out in case you get started with these, but this post isn’t about them – its on how to manage your identity in them.
Treat a social interaction to be as good as physical one, you never know who you’d meet on the internet. You’re next best friend or your life-mate even :P.
