The write this repenting for having deleted my orkut account about a week back.
Orkut is an online community that connects people through a network of trusted friends. An innovation by a Stanford Grad and Google employee Orkut Buyukkokten. Hi5 and yahoo360 are other such online communities. Orkut has 20 million users and is growing very fast.
One needs to get an invitation from somebody who is already having an orkut account. Naveen invited me in December 2005. Since then I had collected about 140 friends mostly from my school, college and office. I would have been in touch with only 10% of them if not for orkut. I not only get to know about them through their profile but also can write messages in their scrapbook. Also peep into others profiles and scrapbooks. Since April this peeping activity was limited because each one can know who all has visited one's profile. It will be bad if I know the person, visit his profile and don't add him as my friend. I myself had updated as much information as possible about me, not hiding anything. So anybody who visits my profile will know my full Biodata. I had also given link to my online photoalbum I wrote testimonials for Naveen, Kishore, Prasanna and Rahul. Naveen and Avinash each wrote it for me. Friends used to scrap atleast with anyone of "Hi, How are you?, How is life? How is work? Wassup? Where are you? Do you remember me? etc"
So it was good going in orkut. Good time pass and lot of time passed. What was time pass later turned into addiction with growing number of friends scrapping and inviting to join communities. I used to begin my day at office finding out what is written in my scrap entry and who has sent me friend request last night. At breaks I again visit orkut and forget the work being assigned to me. My colleages found me orkuting most of the time at office. Even my leaders and managers have noticed it a few times. A few colleages used to make fun of me, they used to ask at the end of the day "Tell me what have you done at office other than orkut and cricinfo?". I didn't have any answers. I can defend telling that I have finished all the work assigned to me. It is only upto what I know I have been assigned, my PL will know the works I had not done. Many like me at office began orkuting and company had to block the url itself. That didn't help, we always found one or the other proxy servers to open orkut. My actual priorities are CAT, Office and then Friends. With my orkut addiction it got entirely reversed. I come to office to open orkut.com, in spare time and late in the day do office work and go to sleep, with no time left for my main priority CAT.
Then one day out of madness, not able to find the right way to resist my temptation, I deleted my account. With this Naveen, Kishore, Prasanna and Rahul lost the testimonials I had written. Avinash had written a testimonial recently that ofcourse tells good about me but indirectly more good about himself as to how creative he can be. Whoever visits my profile will immediately find his testimonial and that increases his visibility among my friends. That is all thrashed now. All connections I managed to establish with my friends are lost. I really feel sorry for them. It is all fine if I am able to focus on my top priority and come out successful this time.