“I take Facebook seriously. I don't go there to chill out”

Quick, what is the longest you've sat j before a computer? A couple of hours? A day? Srikeit Tadepalli once sat down me in front of his PC and didn't get up for three days straight. The year was 2006. It was summer vacations after his Class 12 board exams and he was doing what he loved most: editing Wikipedia. "I was averaging around 500 edits a day and I was hooked," says Tadepalli. By July 2006, he had close to 9,000 edits on Wikipedia and was nominated to become an admin. A month later, he won by a landslide -112 votes for, 1 against - and became one of the first few Indian Wikipedia administrators.

QUOTABLE QUOTE 'For me, Facebook is not just a form of entertainment. It's like going to work or going to school'

Signing up for Orkut in 2007 was a natural progression but initially, Tadepalli, who is cur­rently an advertising student at the Symbiosis Institute of Media and Communication, Pune, dismissed it as a waste of time. "You don't really think of it as a social network, but the fact is that before everything else burst on to the scene, Wiki was and still is a very active social community and I preferred being there because unlike Orkut, it was something constructive."

So naturally, he thought the same of Facebook. "I thought it was a tool for entertain­ment more than anything else," he says. "But then, everyone signed up for it and it snowballed into something really big." As a student of advertising, Tadepalli followed the thumb rule -you go where the crowd is.

So soon, Facebook became THE place to interact, catch up, educate, promote and market practically every single thing. "I spend pretty much all my waking hours connected to the Internet," says Tadepalli. "I am a true-blue digital native, in the sense that for me, being on Facebook is not just a form of entertainment. It's like going to work or going to school. Facebook is not simply for chilling out or play­ing Farmville. It's a potent tool for marketing and education along with entertainment."

Being a digital native does come with a price. In 2006, Tadepalli had to repeat Class 12 - twice. Even when he cleared the exams, his percentage was in the low 30s. "It was terrible," he says. "My parents were going berserk and my mom wanted me to quit Wikipedia. But I was so addicted that I used to edit it on the sly when my parents went to bed."

Those were the days of crummy old dial-up modems that emitted loud squeaks - the technical term is 'handshake' - when they connected to the Internet "which I used to muffle with a pillow," laughs Tadepalli. Then he got admission to Bangalore's Christ College purely on the basis of his Wikipedia administrator credentials. "I guess they were impressed. I was really lucky," he says.

Today, Tadepalli manages seven official Facebook pages of various organizations, including his own college and a Bangalore-based band called All the Fat Children. Last year, he got an intern­ship via Facebook and even managed to find his hostel roommate on the site.