How I use social networking

I was introduced to social networking probably sometime in 2003-2004 with Orkut. At that time I was 6-7 years younger and quickly collected my friends into the platform. I started joining groups, communities. Slowly though I started to lose interest, and logins to orkut became very less frequent as there was not a lot of adhesive to keep me glued to the platform. While I joined a lot of groups, still the drive to connect waned down, because while the group sounded fun, the interests I subscribed to were probably not doing enough to bring me back to the site at regular intervals.
Then came facebook. Joined again, as that seemed to be the norm of the day. Quickly got hooked to the social games from Zynga, like Farmville and others. Obsessively, I came back to facebook every weekend, so that my "crops don't wither!". (I will probably write in a future blog post, why people perform repetitive tasks, apparently with no value, in order to receive some intangible rewards). It did not take me long to find out, that I could not progress ahead, unless I have a lot of friends within the game. My real life friends and acquaintances were not playing a lot, so I reached out to absolute strangers, who like me, were looking for in-game friends to move ahead.
Some of these people play with an account they created just for the game, while others, like me, play with their real accounts. I have started to connect to some of these people, and that made me pay more interest to the news feeds posted on my home page.
The next thing I noticed is integration. One advantage that facebook has (In my opinion) is the integration options with other networks like twitter, flickr, foursquare,blogger, etc... So, truly speaking, while I look into my facebook home page, I actually see updates from a host of other general and specific network sites. One advantage obviously is that I get a quick snapshot of all the networks, while the other is that I get to know about other new players in the field. To make my point further, I have had a twitter account since 2009, but have really become an active micro-blogger only this year, after I have seen various possibilities of the medium, right on my facebook home page. I have seen people using applications like foursquare, and it really does not require anyone to be an Einstein to figure out, that foursquare (Or a similar concept) would go a long way in the future.
It has now created a snowball effect. If I summarize my journey in the social network platforms, we can see that I have been trying out various platforms in isolation, but the integration has cascaded into a snowballing effect, with "fire feeding fire".
To summarize my journey into the social platform as a case-study

• Been in Orkut since donkey's years, but interest slowly waned
  
• Been in Flickr and other special interest photography sites, also for a very long time
  
• Tried my hand in blogging also for countless years. But it really did not take of (yet) because I rarely have something to say
  
• If I have something to say, and only a few listens, then it is highly demotivating (at least for me)
  
• Been in facebook for 2-3 years - similar mode as in orkut
  
• Been in Twitter for the same period, in isolation, less than one post a quarter
  
• Started playing the social games
• Started taking interest of the strangers who play with me
  
• Started noticing the facebook news feed
  
• Understood the integration of the social media and also became aware of a lot of new stuff (From facebook as well as twitter)
  
• Renewed interest in blogs as I am hopeful that twitter and facebook will draw in more reader
  
• Started contributing to foursquare by adding unknown places in Kolkata
  
• Learnt about waze from twitter
  
• Started my ambitious goal of popularizing waze in Kolkata - As somehow I am fascinated by GPS and navigation technologies
  
• ??? What's next?
  

I would leave it to the readers to comment on my journey with this revolution, as a person who was born at the cusp of "Generation X" and "Millennial". Readers, I welcome your valuable insights.