Free Topic: The Transition of Internet in my life? - Week 12

To me... internet is simply the remedy to ABSOLUTE BOREDOM.

I started using the internet when i was about 9 years old. I remembered that before internet invaded my life, i was pretty much into watching tv or spending time outdoors. But everything changed when i started getting hooked on the internet or perhaps the computer.

Back then, i was really into gaming. But at that time, to play DECENT or FUN games, you had to purchase them, at during that time, games were really expensive. So i remember buying them and playing them for a very long time even if i got sick of it. But den, internet was evolving at such a rapid speed that soon, many things were available on the internet(games, music), FOR FREE, but that is of course only if you know your ways round the internet.

At 11, i got hooked to chatting in chat rooms. The most popular chat program then was mIRC (Internet Relay Chat) or ICQ (Internet Chat Query). I wasn't much of an ICQ user, but i was an avid IRC user. I would log into it on a daily basis and stay hooked onto it for hours each day. At that time, there was no broadband bundle or unlimited access and whatsoever. If i didn't remember wrongly, my internet package only had 16 hours of free usage,

after exceeding that amount of time, you will have to start paying for your usage. And i would choke up to $200+ over worth of bills. At mIRC, it's not only about making friends, there were also channels there whereby you could download music. You could choose to be a leecher and just download from people or you could opt to be a server and let people download music from you(music sharing). When you qualify to be a full board server by clocking a certain amount of hours within one week, they will let you gain access to their music storage database. It was pretty much back in those days, and i continued to be hooked on mIRC until i was in secondary school.

When i was in secondary school, i was introduced to 2 phenomenal web; Neopets and Friendster.

Friendster came much later in teenage ye

ars. So neopets! It is a virtual pet website where users can own/adopt pets. Users can train their pets and level them up for battles, do trading of items, set up businesses, doll up their pets and even play simple flash games. At that time, this was pretty entertaining and addictive. It was also pretty phenomenon because everyone knew what neopet was. Users could also exchange/trade items with other users or send gifts to them. Perhaps this is already one of the

predecessor of social networking sites. After school everyday, people would rush to the free access computer lab in school to "chope" a computer so that they could play neopets.

And then... when i was in upper secondary, friendster took over the world, or my world,

by storm. Everybody grew obsessed with uploading pictures of themselves

, adding/finding friends, looking at other people's pictures and then most importantly,

writing testimonials for friends. Testimonials were also always

the longer the better, because it would

probably mean that the person is "very good". And the more testimonials you have, it means the more popular you are. But soon, the purpose was defeated because friends were just posting funny comments and such, not the exact kind of proper testimonia

ls. As Friendster's primary function was to upload pictures and write testimonials, the craze soon fazed out after 2 years, and that is when facebook took over the world.

And after all these, we now have facebook, twitter,

tumblr, blogging, live journal and etc. I have all of these right now, and i log into them daily too. This is the way to stay connected to your friends, to the world. Not only will you know what's happening to your friends, but through some of your friend's updates, you can also get to find out what's happening around the world. I would feel pretty lost these days without using them, it's like there's something missing.

It's undeniable that social networking site has made an immense impact in our lives and brought about great changes. I don't think i can survive more than a week without all these social networking stuff. I may be exaggerating, but truth is, i really do not want to go back to days without the existence of such great inventions.