I may not know about you, but personally I find them annoying, pesky and downright a thorn in the flesh. Or a pain in the bum. Whichever you choose.

For me, privacy is an integral part of my life. If I choose not to add people I do not know, it is my choice. I hate people, complete strangers, whom I know nothing about, coming up to me in social networking sites and say “hey let’s be friends add me pweez.” To that I say go jump off a bridge, I do not even know you.

I only add personal friends I know in Facebook. Keeps the interface clean and simple. No more stupid updates from vague acquaintances. I just went and deleted like two dozen contacts whom I regard as no more than annoying additions to my Facebook-ing experience.

And what a relief it was to slam the door in their faces.

What would you feel when someone adds you just for fun? At first it might seem okay, there is no harm done right? Yet after some time it gets annoying. You get updates from people you barely know. I really, really despise that.

So yeah. Goodbye strangers.

Have you ever heard of the term social media? If you have not, then I am pleased to at least introduce you to this concept.

Social media phenomenon has been around since the advent of Web 2.0 – again this might be a new term to you. We have been exposed to Web 1.0 since the dawn of Internet, where content on the Internet are created primarily by businesses, webmasters and gigantic Internet portals such as Yahoo! and MSN.

With Web 2.0, there exist another side to the equation – user-generated content. Previously, content lying around on the Internet cannot be controlled by us. Pathetic aiy? Good news is, with advancement of technology, many user-generated and user-centred sites have popped up like mushroom after rain (translate that to Malay yourself). These include high profile sites like Facebook, MySpace, Friendster (sadly, nearing its end), and so on.

It all started when weblogs, or popularly called ‘blogs’, became mainstream. Previously the domain of geeks and Internet lovers, now even grandpa’s and grandma’s have blogs. The growth of blogs around the world is unprecedented. The fact that you are reading this shows that you might have caught up in the blog ‘tsunami’ too.

So you have blogs, you connect with friends in Facebook etc.. that is great, of course. My task here is to introduce you to various social media sites that you might not know.

Now what is social media exactly? Well according to Wikipedia -

Social media is online content created by people using highly accessible and scalable publishing technologies. Social media is a shift in how people discover, read and share news, information and content; it’s a fusion of sociology and technology, transforming monologues (one to many) into dialogues (many to many) and is the democratization of information, transforming people from content readers into publishers. Social media has become extremely popular because it allows people to connect in the online world to form relationships for personal, political and business use. Businesses also refer to social media as user-generated content (UGC) or consumer-generated media (CGM).

This means people power! The democratisation of information, as they call it, enables users like you and me, to determine what is ‘happening’ on the web and what is not. Users now determine what they like, what they want to see, and they are the main force in voicing out opinions and belting out creative, genuine and sometimes funny user-generated content. Youtube is a huge testament to this (yes, some of you are addicted to it.)

Of course, social media are not limited to that. There are many sites that you might not know and I shall introduce them in the coming posts. Examples include sites like StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit, Twitter and many more.

Thank you for reading!

Everybody knows what Twitter is. If you have not heard of this phenomenon, then you probably were living in some stone cave somewhere in the Polynesia.

Twitter is a micro-blogging tool where you sign up and start sending out ‘tweets’ or short 140-character messages to your followers. Followers mean people who are on Twitter who, well, follows you and get instant updates whenever you send out a tweet.

This phenomenon took the social Web 2.0 world by storm and it does not look the momentum is going to die soon. Even big Fortune 500 companies have Twitter accounts and typically news and media Twitter accounts like New York Times are followed by tens of thousands of people worldwide. Can you imagine what it would be like for celebrities? Yeap, they have millions. Ryan Seacrest has 1,852,859 followers. Picture that.

Now, people might feel funny or see this whole Twittermania as pointless, time-wasting social media phenomenon. Fact: it IS a funny, pointless, stupid idea. Fact No. 2: and this idea has turned into an unprecedented cult status, rising to the ranks of social network giants like MySpace and Facebook.

If you ignore the fact that there are millions of people using Twitter to update tiny little details about their life, celebrities and big famous personalities like the Pope and Queen Rania of Jordan have used Twitter to astounding effects. Twitter redefined the way people connect and gives a really personal touch to Internet media. Now this tool is also being used with devastating, mind-numbing effect from the aspect of Internet marketing. Big companies and corporations add a special touch to their customer relationship via Twitter.

It will be soon before this social media tsunami hit Malaysia. Already there are many who have caught up with this Twittermania, e.g. JJ from Hitz.fm (food for thought: Najib on Twitter? Wow, his account will explode. Twitter will probably crash for 2 days.)

So, have you started Twittering yet?

p.s. I joined Twitter for 3 months, have 210 followers already. I have absolutely no idea who they are. But it is extremely fun.