&%^$#^% would like to invite you to #$^%$&%

'To join or not to join?'

Over the past month, I have had to bear with that inconspicuous subject line staring at me from within the deep confines of my naive and unsuspecting inbox. And then starts the mundane exercise of sorting out the rubbish into spam and trash. And these emails are invariably condemned to trash. Why not spam??? Because they are sent by people who are near and dear to me but have fallen prey to the social birdie sites!!!

It all started with hi5. Initially i thought it was a waste of time (why did that thought ever change?!!??). But the fever spread far and wide. So far and wide that I found myself connected to my aunt's husband's niece's father-in-law's dog's ex-owner's nanny!(talk about six degrees of seperation..!)Surfing the net found itself a new dimension. Every where i looked my friends were logged on to these newly found hotspots. Your popularity was measured by the number of hi-fives u got and by the number of friends you boasted about. If your profile was not filled by lines and lines of self-praising-crap and reasons as to why everyone shud add u as a friend, u were looked down upon. Guys and girls gauging eachother's hot-meter was the next best thing!!!

So i took the plunge and decided to create a profile for myself and I must admit that initially it was very addicting. So much so, that i was writing testimonials for my friends a night before my exam. I hadnt even started getting accustomed to the wonders (which may not necessarily be pleasant) of this community site that my inbox was inundated with requests to join another. And after much hesitation and coaxing, i ended up joining a site that shared its name with the founder called 'orkut' (how on earth cud parents name their child ORKUT!!??). Now ur coolness quotient was redefined in terms of the number of scraps that ur scrapbook had or the number of fans that u had...or how wacky and interesting the testimonials on your page were. I ended up meeting long lost friends and the number of people on my friends list gave me a rough indication of the number of people i knew courtesy school and college. I also ended up getting friend requests from unknown people and weird scraps like 'would u like to make friendship with me?'. As of now, the orkut mania still exists. Its a nice way of knowing who is doing what whenever the curiosity bug bites me.

The point of writing this article is not to take the credit away from these and scores of other social community sites. They are brilliant ideas and im sure whoever thought of them now sit on pots of gold (pun intended). The reason of writing this is because i find myself in a dilemma yet again. The latest culpirt is something called 'gazzag'. The number of invites I get exponentially rises everyday. Wuts ironical, is that they are from the very same people who grace my friend's list on orkut. From how many places do you wanna keep in touch??Add to that, the pain it takes to remember the user-names and passwords to all the sites that we've registered to. Would i lose my identity and my friends if one day i had to suddenly suffer from amnesia ( and hence forget my passwords)? Would my 'profile' find itself lurking in the deep dark corners of the web as a result of that. For all u know i might just become a victim again and register with the site or i might jus resist and use my friend's description of the site as my only familiarity with it.

But as all this runs through my mind, I cant help but think, that no scraps and no messages can replace the joy of hearing that familiar voice over the phone, or better still, a warm evening spent with the friends we've left behind.