There are a zillion social networking websites out there which focus on one theme – being in touch with your friends, family and relatives. Following the success of small regional social media websites like Hi-5 and Orkut, Facebook decided to bring the concept onto a global level and featured more compatible applications which made contact management fun rather than a chore.
The time-line of different applications for contact management can be easily traced right from the time people had a pocket diary and a pen noting down phone numbers and addresses of acquaintances. Cell phones proved to be a more sophisticated form of keeping in touch with people. This time-frame saw the evolution of instant messengers which enabled easier maintenance of contacts.
Nowadays, you can hardly find people who are not aware of Facebook and Twitter. People find the need to use the Internet to keep in touch with their contacts because of the simple reason that this platform is multifaceted – mails, messages, texts, chats, calls and more all in one single platform. The trend has changed from exchanging phone numbers and email addresses to asking people if they have an account on Facebook. The verdict is that cell phone numbers and email addresses are easy to lose; further, they don’t really provide you with information as to what the other person is doing every day.
With Facebook and Twitter giving you the ability to post status messages as frequently as you want to, your friends and contacts can receive updates of what is going on in your life every hour of the day. Further, its integration with mobile devices has increased the flexibility of posting since people no longer have to sign on to their computers to access Facebook and then post their status message.
The next big step in contact management happens with the different applications that are compatible with Facebook and Twitter which aim at segregating contacts into groups. While the social networking platform serves as a system, there are several fine tunes available as applications which integrate the profiles of people in different websites over the Internet, giving a comprehensive report of what each person is doing. Currently, there are applications under development which focus on getting information from different blogs, online communities and other social networking interfaces about your contacts and merge them into one report giving you a concise picture of what people around you are up to.
As long as people live on the Internet, you get to see what is happening with their lives.