The Orkut Mania!

The Orkut Mania!

Social networking, for long, has been widely unheard of in a country like India. Youngsters usually flocked to Cyber-cafe’s to either play online games or do “mischief!” But a new age as dawned, wherein a great majority of our youngsters who are online, are down with the so-called “Orkut Fever.” The fascination of Orkut is that it does not let you go. Once you have logged in you cannot just leave it. One would have never known that leaving scarps for friends and acquaintances is such fun. After a person joins Orkut slowly and slowly more people start discovering that person. There are a few from some organization, few from some other organization, few college mates and few school friends and it keeps rolling. The list of friends in always growing and as you interact with each other there comes a time when you feel that you have so many things common with many people. This compulsion to find likeminded people can be done through Orkut and so no one can resist it.

If a person is an outgoing, extrovert, fun loving, looking for friends, then, yes Orkut is an addiction. Orkut is friendship based site, where people create their profile, few would be genuine and rest all would be fake, and upload their pictures to share with those friends who are far, and cannot be contacted. The addiction of Orkut is such that it has been banned in many offices and the reason given is wastage of man power. The beauty is that, a notable number of the so-called ‘Orkut users’ do not even know how to switch on their PC’s! They either depend on their parents or assistants in Cyber-cafes.

On Orkut one starts searching friends from one friend, then go on to peep in their profile, search for community that interest you. There are variety communities with such diversity as from cars to condoms or dolls to dialysis. You join a community and then you become active, people will scrap some comment and then it goes on and goes on, and hence the first thing as soon as you are on the net is that you would do is to login to Orkut check a new guy / gal or weather your scrapped or not. Though it sounds monotonous to manoeuvre around this limited website that forces us to do the same mechanical things over & over again!

Orkut is so addictive that one would love to sit on it for hours together, for such frivolous reasons like looking for friends, reading testimonials and scraps for other friends, or serious reasons like searching for communities that might be of an interest to you and its whole group of world filled from New Delhi to New York. I know about people who forget to eat, sleep or even their “morning business!” It’s so addictive, that they type & chat more with strangers hundreds or even thousands of miles away, but are adamant to even throw a word to their family members, centimetres away!

Orkut addiction has reached new levels; people spend their free time reading and writing scraps on this so called social networking site. It is one of the more addicting things on campus - but the biggest benefits of it is that it really does put you back in touch with old high school friends and you can see what they’re up to and all that. So, it’s really helpful for people like me. I managed to “re-capture” all of them!!!

Orkut make available many capabilities including online dating, people who share the same hobbies and interests as well as possible business connections are linked by a so-called “Community”. Once the line of your interest is known you will be able to keep in touch with people having same interest and also create your own community or special interest arena. The special interest community lets you have many discussions on many topics the scope runs deep with Orkut as there are many variations available. Social networking in itself is very addictive, so is Orkut. Be aware! Though the prospects of this website are as vast as the blue ocean, the threats & concerns it offers are also equally frightening!

On Orkut everyone knows when your birthday is and they all say happy birthday, as if they all knew you. So happy Orkuting to you all out there!!!