HYDERABAD: While many took to the streets at midnight on June 2 to celebrate the formation of Telanagana, the more tech savvy pulled out their phones to ‘check-in’ their current locations.
Priyanka Wycliffe was one of them who tried using the location tagging option on Facebook to update her current city to Hyderabad, Telangana. However, the option didn’t show up. Like Facebook, many other social networking sites that are frequented by users to tag geo-locations are yet to reflect the new born State.
While the crowd-sourced internet encyclopedia, Wikipedia was instantly updated to show Hyderabad as a part of Telangana, people who wished to Instagram the midnight revelry were left disappointed initially. By Monday afternoon though, the new state was listed and available for geo-tagging.
Perhaps reflecting a confusion among smaller circles in the city, the service listed the city as both Hyderabad, Telangana and also Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh.
Google maps on Monday evening nevertheless continued to show the capital city as a part of AP instead of Telangana.
While most people who wished to revise their location could only hashtag themselves or in case of Facebook, tag pages like the ‘Telangana, Landmark’ that was created for the purpose, it didn’t stop them from reflecting their newfound status as denizens of Telangana.
Considering that location services are usually quite quick on the uptake, a few in the city seemed a tad disappointed by the rather slow transition in the web world.
Says Mithun Reddy, “I logged on to Facebook at 1 am on Monday because I wanted to update my city. But, the new state is yet to be added to their location list.”
However, if virtual services were checked out of curiosity, questions regarding changes in address and official documents are bound to rise. And denizens of other states, who have already gone through the process give us an idea of what awaits Hyderabadis.
Ratna Upadhyay, who hails from Uttarkand, says, “Piles of official stationery and letterheads with the old state logo were wasted and the same is likely to happen here in Telangana as well. As for documentation, they remained the same while the new documents reflected the change in state. Hopefully, that will be the case here.” She added that if a change was required, the process could prove to be tedious as processing new documents itself took much time in her home state.
All in all, while people begin to accustom themselves to these more significant yet minor changes, the habit of signing off as AP could be prove to be a logistical inconvenience.