Social networking

After days and weeks and months of resisting the social networking sites, I finally succumbed and signed up for Orkut. It was instant addiction! I found many of my old school and college friends, colleagues. I spend hours finding old friends, updating my profile, and mostly scraping to other friends.

Keeping in touch with friends is really easy with Orkut. Profiles let you do that - give you all the material to talk about. You can selectively export info about yourself to your friends, friends of friends, or everyone :-) In addition to this, the concept of "scrapbook" pretty much is the antithesis of emails: every message to you is publicly displayed on your profile. Scraps are not private.

It is easy to see why Orkut is popular: you are there, you are everywhere. You can access it from anywhere. Your friends can reach you from anywhere: another country? sure. Another continent? definitely! It is so easy to use! (Just like Picasa, but that's for another post!)

Now, I'm not really a fan of everything that Google and Apple do. But one thing both companies seem to do very well is make these complex things easy to use for anyone. That's one place where M$ fails miserably. But then I guess others learnt from M$'s mistakes.