Online Me...

We were looking for a tenant for our Nagpur apartment recently. Apart from letting some relatives and friends know about the vacant apartment, we posted ads on a couple of web sites. Not surprisingly enough, most of the leads came through the online channel. Yesterday, we were about to finalize the deal with one family. We did not know the person earlier nor there were any other references who knew the person. However, based on the person's name and employer, it took less than 10 seconds to locate him on Facebook. We could read all (almost) the attributes of the person which we wanted to verify before making a decision to rent our home to him. Who are the people in the close circle, what kind of family they are, the educational qualifications, their likes are dislikes, and many more things.

It is very important to carefully commit anything into Internet since there is no 'delete' or roll-back button there. With advent of Big-Data technologies like Hadoop, it is very easy and near real-time to dig out the needed information. One may seriously lower or exceed the chances of success (job selection, finding a home, a business deal, life partner, and you name it...) based on one's online personality. The 'Online Me' is at least as important as 'Me'.

It is very important to carefully establish connections online as much as in real life. "A man is known by the company he keeps" holds even more true with the online personality. Especially for the professional life and professional networking. The casual 'likes' and 'dislikes' also need to be carefully done. Since there is virtually no difference in 'Me' and 'Online Me'. The difference if at all any will be no more in very near future. The online personality development is as important as the real one.