To hell with Orkut

The past one year has seen my mouse cursor go over “Delete Account” on Orkut more than the number of times I’ve ‘scraped’ someone. Yet every time some invisible force within me prevents my finger from pressing that left button on the mouse while at it. The point is simple – ORKUT IS SHIT. Yeah, I might have not said the same thing back in 2004 when I joined Google’s latest ‘wonder’. Even though I’ve changed a lot since then, Orkut never seemed to have got the ‘Change’ bug. Not even during Obama’s Presidential campaign.

The mantra of Orkut’s compatriot Facebook’s (I wouldn’t dare  say rival because Orkut never has been any competition for FB) success have been Change, Evolution, Revamps. True, FB does have a new group popping up protesting every time they come up with a new interface, but I’ve always liked FB ‘reinventing itself’. Orkut came up with something called ‘themes’, though only in name. Anyone who’d used the themes would know they attract nobody but Indians and Brazilians with the mindsets of 2 year old kids. Seriously, what else should you say when you got ‘themes’ depicting a tiger or a snowman or a friendly ghost. The album section which is ripped of from that of FB is like one of those cheap Bollywood remakes of foreign movies. Unlike in FB there are no notifications and so you end up seeing  a comment on some photo of yours a month after it was posted. There is not one decent application worth even checking out, let alone using it regularly.FB has more than just sending messages across. You have a lot of applications that you can actually get addicted to like I am to Mafia Wars. Commenting on pictures can be more fun than anything you could think of. I’ve seen comments running upto more than 100 for some people’s photos. Yet the only thing you do on Orkut is sit, scrap and wait for the return scrap. And they say THIS is addicting. Jeez. Really?

But what pisses me the most is when you’re searching for someone using their own name and you find nothing. Rather they tell you to type some god knows what characters and some weird quotation or song from some stupid movie in the search box to locate the profile. The problem only doubles up when someone you may know sends you a friend request but as a name they have those weird characters and if that was not enough they have an image of David Beckham or a Hillary Duff as Display Pics. How the hell are you supposed to know who the person is? Why would you wanna put up the picture of someone who doesn’t even look remotely like you. I may be able to understand if girls say their pictures might be misused, but guys? Do they actually think they’re so gorgeous that people ‘misuse’ their pictures on gay-porn sites? It is your own fuckin face and if you don’t think its good enough, then no else is gonna think it is.

I’m not saying Facebook is THE best social networking site out there. You don’t have to join FB because of its brilliance but rather because of Orkut’s stupidity. I’ve a lot of good friends who are not able to relieve themselves of their ‘addiction’ for Orkut and refuse to switch to FB.  This is the invisible force I was talking about preventing me from deleting my account. If I delete my account, then it would mean that I lose my only resort to keep in touch with them online. To define Orkut in one word would be ‘monotonous’.