Social net­work­ing sites have been spring­ing up every­where like ATM’s did a few years ear­lier. Ini­tially viewed with skep­ti­cism, then with won­der, and finally every­one asks “How did we do with­out them?”. So now we have Orkut, Face­book, and just a few mil­lion more.

I’ve joined Orkut. Made new friends. Regained con­tact with old ones. Main­tained con­tact with exist­ing ones.

So, instead of dis­sect­ing how and why orkut was made (see wikipedia) [read there only if you wish to accu­mu­late trivia & impress (or drive away) your friends], I will dis­cuss cer­tain fea­tures provided.

Con­nected with google accounts / GTalk
This lit­tle fea­ture was added as Google is the owner of Orkut, and what bet­ter way to increase the num­ber of users (and fur­ther your plans of world dom­i­na­tion) than by adding a social net­work­ing site to your portfolio?

Mes­sages
Irri­tat­ing lit­tle things that show an icon on your home­page to act as an in-built orkut e-mail. Essen­tially worth­less and inad­e­quate as it is much eas­ier to use GMail to send emails to friends.

Scraps
One of the most stu­pid and slow­est IM-substitutes. The scrap­ping mech­a­nism works as follows:

1. Choose whose scrap­book you want to defile with your scrap.
2. Go to his (or her)… (or it’s) pro­file and click scrapbook.
3. Write deroga­tory and/or accusatory state­ments in the reply text-box and click post.

Then, the per­son at the other end will recieve your scrap. Read it. Grow angry. And Reply. Of course, as it is not exactly live chat where you can keep ask­ing a per­son “Why don’t you reply?” (until he/she/it replies out of sheer frus­tra­tion or has a brain aneurism and dies in which case you don’t recieve any reply), the per­son can eat/sleep/bathe/go mad/kill 34,678.8 peo­ple and then reply.

Till then, if you’re des­per­ate enough, you wait for their scrap while scrap­ping a few other hun­dred peo­ple you know/are acquainted with/want to irritate.

Tes­ti­mo­nials:
Devel­oped so that every­one can exag­ger­ate about their friends, put them on pedestals (while con­sid­er­ing them … you know what I mean). I was going to ask my friends to write nor­mal, accu­rate tes­ti­mo­ni­als but real­ized that if the tes­ti­mo­nial is not exag­ger­ated, peo­ple will con­sider the nor­mal one exag­ger­ated. (Thus, on pass­ing through the men­tal tes­ti­mo­nial fil­ter — devel­oped by every­one to glean a few grains of truth from beaches of praise — the fact that I occa­sion­ally read books will be trans­lated as : reads 1 novel per year).

Rank­ing Friends:
One of the most devi­ous, despi­ca­ble, devi­ated inven­tions by the (human?) coders at Google. While I sym­pa­thize with their plan of World Dom­i­na­tion (cue strange music) the sys­tem of rank­ing friends seems too low a blow. If, or rather when, (for those among you who rank their friends) this priv­i­leged infor­ma­tion is revealed to all, be pre­pared to be ripped limb from limb or be ren­dered friend­less (which is worse).

There are many more fea­tures but list­ing these and expos­ing their true pur­pose has exhausted me.

(Note: I am a mem­ber of Orkut, visit it daily, scrap friends, wait for tes­ti­mo­ni­als, write tes­ti­mo­ni­als, send mes­sages, swear by GMail and Google Talk. So sue me.)