Community Madness

"orkut is an online community designed to make your social life more active and stimulating. orkut's social network can help you maintain existing relationships with pictures and messages, and establish new ones by reaching out to people you've never met before. orkut makes it easy to find people who share your hobbies and interests, look for romantic connections or establish new business contacts. You can also create and join a wide variety of online communities to discuss current events, reconnect with old school mates or even exchange your favorite recipes."
-from the description of Orkut by its makers.

I was going through Richa's post on some funny advice she got from an unknown guy in orkut. This made me log into my orkut account where am not as active now, as I used to be. And I had a horror waiting there. There, in the front window diplaying my communities, I saw this name 'Proud to be gay'. Enough to send me into a fit of madness. Never in my wildest dreams would I've joined such a community which can put a big quesion mark over my sexual orientation. Neither am I a person who consumes drugs or alcohol to join such communities in a half conscious mind. Then, How could this have happened? My train of thoughts led me to a conversation I had with a friend sometime back. He had told me that some communities in orkut changes their name and description one fine morning and morph into an entirely unrelated new community. Some clever guys create communities under popular titles so that lots of people will join. Then they change the name to whatever they want. But the people who joined the old community will be retained unless they themselves rejoin. So,that might be the case.

I had this habit of joining any community which I found interesting. So I ended up with close to 800 communities, mostly music related. And, now am finding it hard to figure out which straight community suddenly went the 'gay' way. Anyway I unjoined from there the next moment. To prevent me from more embarrasments, I started checking each of my community names and that gave me another shock- "Raju fans club". My first thought was about malayalam comedy
actor Raju, whom I admire. But I didn't remember joining such a community. A closer examination proved that this is some random guy who had cleverly changed the name of some popular community after getting many members. The depths people go in self promotion. As my search for such lousy communities in my list continued, I stumbled upon some real cheesy ones that I had joined about four years ago. Sample these-"I am born to be cool", "I will always make you smile", "GenX Junction", "I will never leave your hand". Now I really fear I were under the influence of drugs when I joined these kinda communities.

So, what the makers say about it has indeed come true, orkut has made my social life stimulating, but not in a straight way. It has also helped me "maintain existing relationships with pictures and messages, and establish new ones by reaching out to people you've never met before". Very true. I donnow how many such new relationships are waiting for me. I am still continuing my unjoining spree from many communities. Its such a long list and I am dead tired now. Next up is my friends list which will be halved if I delete the people who have added me and never even scrapped thereafter. Just thinking about the days in which friends meant the 10-15 guys whom I used to play 'hide and seek' with in the backyard.

Bad Bad server.No donut for u.

PS-Check your community list too. You maybe member of "I suck bigtime" community by now.

your crusader Praveen