Facebook gained popularity in India in 2007, when most of us were not even in our teens. We were on Orkut back then, when FB suddenly became the new cool. Here are some of the really stupid things we did when we first joined Mark Zuckerburg’s bandwagon.
Punctuation overdose: Anything that was said came with at least a dozen exclamation marks. And all questions needed a minimum of 10 question marks. “I just ate chocolates!!!!!!!!!!!!” “Did you really??????????”
Middle names: We could pick our own display names and of course we went batty. The result? ‘Sanjay LoverBoy Sengupta’ and ‘Priya Chweetypie Rungta’. Football lovers added ‘Cristiano’ or ‘Torres’ in between.
Tag fever: We needed to upload EVERY picture that we clicked and show it to EVERYONE. And how did we do that? We tagged everyone on our friend list, even if they were not a part of the photo. Of course, this disease still exists.
Age fudge: Most of us were yet to turn 13 then so we just lied to Facebook. Don’t be surprised if you find your teenage friend’s birth info showing 12/07/1985.
TMI! Too much information. There was a time when Facebook’s innocuous question ‘What’s on your mind?’ made us believe that the world really wanted to know every little thing that flitted through our mind. The result? Posts like “She isn’t replying to me since last night. I feel lonely!!!!” or “I got a shave today and I look awesome!!!!!!! Sorry for bragging, guys!!!!!”
Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzd: We often forgot to take our fingers off the keys. So a simple, “Hey man, how’re you?” became “Heeyyyyy maaan, howwzzzzzz u?????” The alphabet overdose gave stiff competition to the punctuation marks.
Everyone is a friend: You didn’t need to know each other to be ‘friends’. We would send friend requests to any random person and accept friend requests from strangers equally happily, not realising we would be stuck with their creepy newsfeed. The identity of the person wasn’t important; hiking the number of friends on your list was the goal. “You have just 712 friends? LOL.”
Silly usernames: When we opened our FB accounts, it was with our first email accounts. Hence usernames like iamasweetgirl@gmail.com or assasinninjapunchesyou@hotmail.com were common.
Public conversations: We hadn’t learnt private messaging yet and we’d carry out conversations on one another’s wall, open for everyone to see. ‘You post on my wall and I reply on yours’ was all we knew.
Priyankar Patra
What is the stupidest thing you’ve done on Facebook? Tell t2@abp.in
