The biggest secret behind Facebook’s success revealed

The greatest of all inventions that humans have made till today have been successful because they address our fundamental needs. Humans are hungry for appreciation. We want to flaunt our achievements and hide our shortcomings. Since childhood, a baby who hasn't yet learned much tries to grab attention of the people around. Once she grows she wants her mom and dad to praise every little move she makes and every little word she utters. In school, she wants a pat on her shoulder and a star in her book by her teacher. As grown-ups, we want people to like our opinions, our decisions, and our ideas. We strive for acceptance and approval. We make friends who like us and search for our soul-mate who acknowledges our actions towards him/ her and gratifies us with something we call love. Once we have children, we want them to be proud of our achievements. In our old age, we tell our heroic stories to people around us to gather appreciation and to satisfy ourselves that we led a fruitful life. We want lesser regrets and more contentment. And even after our death, we still want people to talk good about us; hence, we only write our achievements on our tombstone. Have you ever seen someone’s tombstone saying - killed 5 people and robbed 13, or had 27 enemies and no relatives? We all say - lived like a hero and died like one.

“There is more hunger for love and appreciation in this world than for bread.” - Mother Teresa

Basically, what we look for throughout our life, and even post that, is appreciation and gratification.The biggest reason why Facebook has become a household name is it offers instant gratification. The best part is that it doesn't take much to gratify others. In fact, all it takes is a quick click of a button and that too for no cost at all (technically there's a negligible cost involved in the internet connection that you pay for, but you get the point right?) Facebook helps us share our selected and filtered thoughts and actions not to the world, not to a large unselected set of people but to a group of people that we carefully choose by being "friends" with them. These friends become our fans as they get to know about our selected achievements. Facebook has given "grass is greener on the other side" a whole new meaning. Each of us feel that our friends are great achievers and we are surrounded by amazing accomplished people when in fact they are the same people who surrounded us even before Facebook was invented. Now you would argue that other platforms such as Twitter and Google Plus also allow for the same gratification. But your premise is just partly correct. On Twitter, anyone can follow you, so if you're followed by your enemy, he/ she can write comments that you have no control over, and so is the case with Google Plus. But with Facebook, you first choose the people to be your friends carefully and even if a friend turns into a foe, you can delete his/her comments or simply"unfriend" him/ her and restrict that person from responding to your updates. I wish real life were so easy! 

Facebook has become the place where you feel good about yourself and where you get news about your friends and family easily. There is a reason Facebook has never introduced, and I reckon will never introduce, a “dislike” button. If it does, the dislike button will belittle our thoughts and actions due to which we will not want to go on Facebook anymore, because it will just be a replica of our real life. Currently, people are addicted to Facebook because of the single-most yet most impactful reason - instant gratification! Do you think you’re addicted to it too?

SQL - the database champion

SQL - stands for Structured Query Language, is a programming language to handle DataBase Management Systems (DBMS). The above sentence might ring a bell in many of the geeky minds, but may not be perceived in the same way by a non-geek. Let me handle this definition in a more simplistic manner.

Let’s imagine a small 10-page book with minimal words and a few pictures (more like a comic book most of us read in our childhood). If we are given a task to find a particular unique word within those 10 pages, it might take us not more than 10 minutes (much lesser if it’s an interesting comic book that we have read repeatedly). Now let’s increase the difficulty level a bit. If we are given a 100-page book and asked to again find a specific unique word within those 100 pages, it might take us a couple of hours (if the book is one of our academic books, then it might take a few days as well). And finally, if we are given access to a library that contains more than a 100 books and we are now asked to find a single unique word among them - that can be a month-long arduous assignment. This is where database management technology comes into the picture.

Blog numero uno

As i start writing my first blog, it's quite a mixed feeling.. A feeling of Excitement - because it's my first attempt at opening up to the world in the true sense(unlike twitter, where you have to restrict your sentences to 140 characters..i mean, how can anybody express their true emotions with a character limit!!) mixed with a flavor of joy of sharing knowledge and a tinge of fright - because it's quite intimidating to actually put your thoughts in ink and surface it to anyone on the World Wide Web(the www). Though some people blog with relative ease, i feel a sense of responsibility i owe to myself for sharing my thoughts, which i hope are unbiased,pure and true to myself. 


Having said that, it's quite amazing that we are experiencing a time, in which a simple guy like me can sit in Mumbai and punch in words, and someone remotely far can read them without having to know anything else about me except these three set of characters - ekmind.blogspot.in. This level of interfacing was unimaginable a few decades ago, but to the people belonging to the current Internet age it's a way of living. It's so easy for strangers to talk to anyone around these days and make friends, we feel, but this whole experience of talking to people over the internet is taking our lives to a superficial level. Today people wish their friends on their birthdays and anniversaries over Facebook and send cards via eGreetings, but how can an electronic message or a virtual card ever replace a hug or a shake hand? The personal touch to relationships is losing and we have nobody else to hold responsible but ourselves. We think we are making it easy for strangers to talk and make friends using the internet but what we are really doing is distancing ourselves from the already close ones using the same medium. Facebook, we say, has changed the way of socializing for good, but has it really? Earlier the friends who used to personally meet on weekends to catch up on the latest gossip, now sit online and chat to 10 more friends on the internet, but the essence of communicating with another person is missing. In this innovative age I wish we reach a stage, in which instead of our messages reaching another person we could personally transport in time/space(more like a 'time machine') and reach the desired place as quickly as our messages reach today. I earnestly hope that we will have something similar in the future and all these social networking sites are a stepping stone towards it. If it does come true humans would have crossed the biggest barrier known to them - time, but if it doesn't, we would really be living in a hypothetical world losing the most natural thing about us - physical interaction with another human.