Pretension..thy name is Orkut

Have you ever known real pain?-the kind that makes you want to pull all your hair off at one go? Real pain is when some guy calls you up at 2 in the night and asks you to get his net connection fixed because (of all the godforsaken reasons in the world) orkut is not loading (now you know where all the hair went).The blame, though, lies squarely on my short stint as the LAN secretary of my hostel, the travails of which I’ll describe some other time (I wish this will shed some light on the sad plight of the guy in your hostel who takes care of the LAN and you start to pay more respect to him/her)

Orkut (as we all know) is the place where every one is cool and sexy, where everybody looks like a movie star and/or cute animals, where pretentious idiots1 add friends and scrap total bull randomly. Even I am guilty of the oh-so-unforgivable sin2 of trying to woo maidens with (what I thought was) fancy English and sexed up profiles with a list of all the rock bands that a google search on rockbands would come up with and then some more (I genuinely doubt whether there are as many rock bands as people populate their musical taste space with). Again one of the other sections to showoff ones "cooler than thou" credentials is the movie section. One of the big favorites when it comes to the movies section is SAW. I personally cant believe how people can have such a disturbing movie as a favourite...maybe the guys think it exudes machismo to have pervert movies in your favourites...even girls with all their love of barbie and mushy romantic films seems to have SAW as a favourite-beats me...barbie and the SAW puppet are two poles of the doll dimension, maybe they also think pervert movies in their favourites will make them look ubercool ( the likely-an-MCP apologizes for the likely-to-be-perceived sexist comment) There are no limits to the bull people fill up their profiles with. It’s quite surprising how orkut which is a failure3 and a damp squib of a social networking site with no real USP or niche compared to other networks is still going strong. I hope orkut meets with a painful death and the skeletons forever to be lost in the dark depths of the nether where most defunct and long dead sites lie( anyone remember altavista, aol, netscape or askjeeves??)

Social networking is soon going to be dead (and I’m going to be one of the few happy people for it).Its going to go the same way blogs went-they said everyone was going to have one, but if I was too lazy and bored to update and maintain my own then about 98% of the other people on the net were too. If you want proof- Microsoft bought a part of facebook for a sum that could easily have wiped poverty in the world twice over4. There you have it- absolute, undeniable proof that social networking is dying and we all know how smart Microsoft people are; the blue screen of death and the three button tap dance (Ctrl+Alt+Del) being the only cultural phenomena they have ever been credited with.

To my friends (and competitors in the world domination game), Google and Mark Zuckerberg. You hoped to take over the world while we were searching for profiles of cute females. Better luck next time...your experiment in mass mind control looked good for sometime-the bluff has been called and anyways with Microsoft in the picture you better move onto newer things. They have this thing with screwing up good and viable domination plans- they just take the monopoly thing a bit too far and get sued all over the place.

I will never know any pleasure greater (subject to revision...I hope sex is as good as it is made out to be) than writing an eulogy to the great farce of social networking. This is the beginning.


1. Most of them tend to be the classic losers with no real social life-the type you would generally stay away from in high school.

2. Washed myself clean though with a purge of all the random females I’d added in the short and crazy period of my life I call “the Orkut delusions”.


3. Orkut is a dead network in most parts of the world except for India and Brazil-and I’m pretty sure 90% of all Brazilian profiles are spam profiles with bots that sell Viagra and link to porno. Gotta give it to them though- Pretty bots.

4. They reportedly valued each profile at an average of $725.You definitely know they have IQs comparable to jellyfish when they value your 20 or so fake profiles at a $725 a piece.