Meetup and tweetups- these are new names for get togethers. With the advent of social media as our personal life is well publicized so is the concept of meetups. It can be a normal hangout with your friends and earlier you never ever thought of giving it a name, tweeting about it but now you will announce it on various mediums. Facebook to be precise, because Twitter is random who will check and who will not, you never know. If you are in the mood then you would even go ahead and create an event page of Facebook and give all the details of the venue, timings et al. On Twitter you would create a fancy hashtag or else how would you track the happenings ( read tweets) and storify it. Yes there is an app to make the story of the tweets and if you have not heard of it then Google it with the same name. You would find it right there. So now your event or meetup or session or tweetup has been announced.
Now the D day comes and you are there. You feel a bit disappointed because the enthusiasm which the people showed on Facebook by clicking “Yes” to your event are not here now. You have, hold your breath, 10-30% of the total attendees who said yes. This will often happen if you have by any chance added a little bit of seriousness to your event. Show to your friends/group/ network that this is going to be a gala party then your event may rock. You curse your luck but still you know you have to make the most of the meetup and so you do just that. You log onto Foursquare, you check on Google Latitude, Facebook places once you are there at the venue. You greet people or friends and their names are mentioned again on social media channels that they are there. You click snaps and talk a little with all. Then food is served and pronto comes the Instagram addiction to click the food pictures. In the meanwhile your friends are also informing where they are and with whom on their social media channels. Those who didn’t go to your meetup know exactly what is happening here and if they are not paying attention then they will be anyway served innumerable photographs on their timeline of the event by you and everyone who went there.
It is late now and you wind up before announcing that the meetup is over and when it will happen next. In all this you forget one thing. The heart to heart chat with your friends, the intense discussion, the debates, the arguments over a issue. Now all is lost and in place of that what is there is only too much share of something superficial. Is it actually a meetup? Are we interested in meeting anyone?
(Disclaimer: This is just a personal observation and is done in good humour and is in no way intended to hurt the sentiments of anyone)
