Ripples on the brain

I clearly have my doubts.

Around 2004-05, I too caught this craze for orkut and social networking in general. I joined communities of “like-minded” people, chatted with them for hours together, met them over a coffee and so on. While I did make some new friends and establish contact with some long-lost friends, mostly, it was just another user id and password for me to remember and while away my time if I had nothing else to do.

I guess things started turning for the worse after Google took over orkut. Google then mandated having a unified id and password for gmail and orkut. Social neworking was suddenly over-hyped and all these orkut clones started appearing. People unsuspectingly gave their email ids and passwords to these phony sites and they then had a field day flooding inboxes. Around this time, some bloggers started criticizing these sites and users of orkut who send these funny “franship” requests.

Over the last 6 months or so, I had restricted my orkut usage for birthday reminders and greetings. All these bulk scrap messages started increasingly appearing in my scrapbook. Some contained greetings from friends but there were others that had some magic scripts to increase friends, send bulk messages, identify others who had crush on you and so on. If this was not discomforting enough, today I discovered that I had automatically become member of more than a couple of communities. I checked these communities and found that all these had started only on the last week of February 2008 or so and many had more than 5000 members. One community, started after Feb 15th. had 68000 members and aptly, promised its members that it will teach them orkut tricks!

Clearly, Google’s attempt at increasing security (through locking features built recently for profiles, scrapbooks, photos and so on) hasn’t helped. It is increasingly becoming more and more vulnerable with the increased usage. Over the next week, I will seriously consider deleting my orkut account. The friends list has swelled so much that I don’t think I can use orkut for any meaningful networking any longer (oh, not that I did so much earlier )