I wrote a blog last year World and SmartPhones , now this article shows my adoption to the gadget tools.
WhatsApp needs no introduction, it is embraced by the SmartPhone users worldwide. I heard people saying WhatsApp me instead of saying text me exactly the same way how we say google it to search for any information on internet. Thanks to Jan Koum and his team for this great innovation and his offering to the community.
The instant messaging app became popular within no time, there are many functions and features that makes it unique. I am not here to talk about the features of this app. The idea behind this blog is to share my personal experience on usage of this app and as a whole usage of IM tools.
About 2 years ago, I was in India and was scheduled to fly back to Minneapolis from Delhi. I approached some of my college friends for a get together meet. Appreciate the gesture one friend stepped in to organize the event and made me feel that I am special for them. It is not easy to manage time during week-days especially in a busy city like Delhi, but in short it was a great feeling for me to meet my old pals after ages. The organizer used new WhatsApp group for event communication and its success proves how effective it was. Note the group is still active, though occasionally we see some interaction in the group.
During my recent India visit I used the same group to communicate well in advance for a get together meet. The response was very disappointing, although I managed to meet just few of them by calling them separately. I came back to Minneapolis but was sad, as my friends raised the bar high last time honoring me as special guest. I called one of my friend to check if my Delhi visit was known to him. The response I heard was eye opener. I was told that the messages received in various WhatsApp group, he clears them all first thing in the morning to free-up space in his iPhone 
. It didn’t surprise me, but reminded me of my own action.
Few months ago my friend’s mother passed away (may god bless the soul), the message was broadcasted to local MN WhatsApp friends group. Unfortunately I didn’t notice, usually I am behind catching up with numerous messages in the group. I also clear the group messages occasionally and it seems the important message was deleted. After few weeks we came to know about this incident through a common friend, and it was a real embarrassing situation for us to call the family. We visited the them the same day, but it was hard to explain the situation.
Question is how effective are these IM tools especially the group messaging, we may receive lots of them on daily basis. It all depends on the purpose of communication, and ranges from sharing jokes, humor, news or in some cases even propaganda which you may not be interested in. In some cases the group purpose is ignored which may be un-intentional, but people start spamming the group with all sorts of irrelevant text information. At times this could be dis-respectful for other group members.
My personal take is, I would avoid using WhatsApp group for important personal communication. Also be respectful and share messages to the group which is relevant and appropriate. I would love to hear from you what you think, thank you for reading this blog, hope you liked it.
Note : This article was initially published on Dec 30th, 2017 on my other blog site. My goal is to gather all the old articles on this website.
