Eeek! I just sold my soul to Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn!

To be able to follow online marketing trends within social networking sites I needed to create my own account and this has not been easy for me. I am not talking about the user interface of Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn, I reckon they are already very good. They really made the sign-up process as painless as possible. The big thing that took a lot of pain and consideration was the fact that my details are now properties of these big social networking organisations. Like it or not, that's really what just happened.

I mean it is not all bad. With Twitter, I will now know more about my friends located across the globe. I can also win mobile phones or gig tickets from Vodafone or get the latest deals from my favourite stores. With Facebook, I don't need to memorise emails anymore. I can get in touch with the people I would like to get in touch with. I can also share anything digital and play online games with my sister who's miles away. I will also no longer miss invites from friends that were just Facebook exclusive. With LinkedIn, I will be able to see what professional service I can offer to people I know and what help I can avail from them. So what's wrong then, you might ask? The things that I just rambled here are actually pretty good. But in my mind I keep on harping on what I lost by joining these social networking sites.

My mind keeps on telling me to say goodbye to privacy and anonymity (if there's such a term!). I am now part of the statistics used by these social networking sites in their respective sales pitches. You can now google me and see what I've been up to unless I change my 'privacy' settings, as if the 'privacy' setting really makes things 'private'! With a few cracks here and there you can pretty much devour as much information as you want about me (and I don't really know why you would do that). So yeah, now I feel naked. Everyone can now peek in if they want to, and people do peek in with varied intentions which I rather not know. Now, a private person like me can become an internet sensation, a facebook loser or a web snub, depending on how things go on my pages. Now, people can grab personal photos and photoshop them and do whatever they want with it (like making it into 'Before' pic for various ads like muscle builder, shampoo ad, etc).

So here I am now, bidding goodbye to the hours I could've spent writing my novel, poems and songs which are now used to updating all of these sites and keeping up with the digital rat race! Oh well, this is the life I need to embrace especially that I am working in the web industry! I am both sad and excited as I'm looking forward to what all of these hullabaloo will bring.