My usage of social networking sites has dropped down to a bare minimum. I had a very brief fling with Facebook but with all the poking going around and walls being torn down by spam messages, I was forced to abandon the monster. I do have an account but am no longer active. I am or rather was active on Orkut till about a year or so back.

It’s surprising how things have turned out for me in the social networking world. Orkut with its scrapbook, testimonials and finding long lost friends was brilliant for me. But as time passed by and the cheap thrill of adding long lost friends to my friends’ list only to forget all about them the next moment became bland, I began to gradually shun Orkut. The rate at which the number of scraps decreased exponentially, currently getting down to a trickle a month only points to the frequency of my usage. Guess I am getting old to ‘keep up with the times’ and waste time on useless stuff.

All said and done, this post is not about my decreasing usage of Orkut. Rather, it was an annoying conversation I had with one of my friend that leads to me to rant. As all users of Orkut/Facebook know, the ‘birthday reminder’ feature is one-stick-it-in-my-face facet of Orkut. I will be reminded of birthdays of my friends (as long as they have it in their profile) on my home page. All well and good and everyone’s happy. What pisses me off is this friend coming and talking to me about how his scrap count jumped by 100 on his birthday with 100 of his friends – close and far, wishing him a happy birthday. When I say ‘talking to me’, make that ‘gushing to me’. I failed to join in the enthusiasm.

My non-enthusiastic response probably emanates from the fact that people who scrap you on your birthday probably won’t even remember the next day as to whose birthday it was the previous day. In this era of fleeting attention-spans, this is bound to happen. I am personally guilty of wishing so many of these friends on their birthdays – but only on orkut. For one thing, I could just have easily e-mailed them with a personal note and wished them on their birthday (but nope, we don’t have the bloody time!). For another, I wouldn’t care to say beyond ‘happy birthday, have a great year ahead’ or something on those lines and almost immediately forget about it. It all sounds artificial. I am probably from the old school where I either pick up the phone or drop in a personal email and wish my friends a happy birthday. All this orkut scrapping and birthday reminders sounded nice initially but I have grown out of it. Over the past 6 months, if I could not call/email, I simply wouldn’t wish the other person on Orkut. It simply didn’t make any sense.

That brings me back to my friend’s gushing and blushing face. I obviously didn’t want to disappoint his enthusiasm but I did ask him as to how many of those wonderful 100 friends called him up/emailed him/would remember his birthday say a month from now. He clearly didn’t understand what the fuss was all about when love was radiating from his friends from all parts of the world. I didn’t bother explaining. I left him alone to deal with his ignorance.

P.S: I still don’t understand why Orkut has not come up with different anniversary reminders, along the lines of birthday reminders? You know, with all those happy engagement anniversary, happy marriage anniversary…choo cute, choo sweet et.al., its quite a market for increase in scraps and hence visibility. Who know, with the different gift ads that will pop up on the side, it may well be worth a try for Google.

P.P.S: The other day when I logged into Facebook after nearly 6 months, I had a question on my…what do they call it? The Wall or something. ‘What kind of German philosopher are you?’ Apart from uttering some niceties on this profound question, I just replied ‘Sorry, I Kant’.