A visit to a ghost town...

There was a time when i would swear by orkut. Higher the number of scraps i had, so would be my social standing in the virtual "Social networking" world. One was judged by the number of friends he had and how many scraps he would get. Somewhere down the line, facebook came and changed it all. People got crazy of Farmville and Mafia wars. Orkut did try to catch up by building new themes, providing status updates..However, it was a bit too late. The customers were already frenzied about the cool features of other social networking sites.

A recent visit to my orkut profile made me experience the same feeling, that perhaps one would experience when he make a visit to a ghost town. Every wall (oops scrapbook) had outdated scraps some more than a year old, the picture of people when they really looked different seem to be their last updated photos. Friends who have kids had just shared the pictures of their marriage....And yeah those who got married a few months back, still had their single statuses on.

It felt almost as if something had happened suddenly and almost all of a sudden all activity was gone. Many of my friends were now missing, mostly because they are no more on Orkut. Wikipedia showed me that still the traffic on orkut coming out of India was second in place to the entire traffic that the Google owned site experienced; Brazil being the highest contributor to the traffic on orkut.

The feeling that i experienced in those couple of hours when i browsed orkut was that somewhere we had suddenly changed and a large part of  lives are still chronicled there for everyone to come and have a look at. And now its on Facebook...We are documenting everything there. Just a few clicks on Orkut would reveal a lot about a persons past. Worst, is that since we don't use Orkut anymore, it is clear that the information there is just lying orphaned. There is a big difference in "Social Networking through internet" and "Real world Networking" and that is in Internet everything is logged, cataloged and chronicled for someone to go back and have a look at. I just when through my profile and really felt nostalgic. It seemed like a long time since things have changed, although i don't know for the good or for the bad....