Let me super-poke you!

This is something that has happened often enough for me not to dismiss as mere coincidence. Each time I log into Facebook (generally once in two weeks), the next 2-3 days I receive at least half a dozen invites. How does this work? Is it that each time I log in, Facebook sends out an alert to everyone “Argha Sarkar logged in yesterday. I guess you know what this means...you better send him an invite”? And how does Facebook decide whom to send these alerts to?

Around a year back, social networking seemed a simple enough task. Everyone I knew seemed to be jumping on to the bandwagon by creating their Orkut profile, scrapping people left, right and centre, and discovering the surprising existence of long-lost acquaintances. There was the simple pleasure one derived from watching one’s female friends receive random requests along the lines of “Will you pliz make frendship with me?”, “I was luking thru ur profile. It seems we have a lot in common, will u be my frend?” or “Hi. I liked ur profile. I am also from Bangalore. Let’s be frends.” As a response, said female friends would remove their profile pic from Orkut and replace it with a random object, or a very arty-looking pic that however gave no indication of what said female in question looked like.

As a guy, the only unsolicited scrap you’d receive would be along the lines of “Hi. I noticed that your interests include Bavarian wild boars. I have started a Bavarian wild boars community on Orkut, where like-minded people such as you and me can discuss our passion for Bavarian wild boars.” Any visit to the community would have you come across fascinating threads of discussion such as “Why Bavarian wild boars are superior to Hungarian wild boars?”, under which some passionate Hungarian wild boar fanatic would’ve interrupted a wholesome debate on the merits of the Bavarian wild boar with a comment such as “Bavarian wild boar suckzzzzzzzzzzz. Hungarian wild boar RULEZZZZZZZZ!!!!!!! Go rot in hell, you Bavarian wild boar lot!” (to put things mildly). At this point the discussion would degenerate into angry chants asking Hungarain_WildBoar_4life to go mind his own business, with the choicest of expletives being hurled at him.

And of course, who could forget the communities of people with same names! Soon after you joined Orkut, someone else named Argha would send you a scrap saying “I could not help but notice that your name is Argha. Come and join the community of people named Argha, where we can discuss the merits of our wonderful name.” The threads in such communities would be limited to half a dozen members introducing themselves and sharing some interesting anecdote about their name, at which point there was nothing else left to say. If you think sharing the same name sounds like a flimsy excuse to form a community, you are horribly mistaken. You would probably come across communities in Orkut such as “Battlestar Galactica Season 4 Episode 8 is the BEST”, “Lovers of Judas Priest in South-Central Delhi” and “People who use a red towel on Tuesdays”.

You either fell into the category of people who initially showed a lot of enthusiasm for Orkut, rediscovered long lost friends, joined a few communities before slowly losing interest and reducing the visits to simply checking when one has received a scrap and replying to the same - yours truly being a prime example of someone in this category. Or you could fall into the category of people who would check their scraps at least thrice a day, dutifully reply to every scrap, send half a dozen scraps of your own, manage to wish happy birthday to everyone on your list, and maybe even start and maintain a community of your own, if you’re REALLY adventurous – I suspect both my ex-flatmates would have fallen into this latter category. The bottom line, though, was that Orkut seemed to be just one step beyond an SMS – albeit free of charge. But you understood everything, and felt like you were in control.

And then something sinister started to happen. First it was just one person, but slowly every second person would tell you “Oh, I’m not on Orkut anymore, I’ve deleted my account. I’ll add you on Facebook though...you have a Facebook account, na?” You decide to keep with the times and join Facebook – you figure it would probably be the same and you’d get the hang of it in a day or two. But lo and behold! Life just isn’t that simple anymore. Everyone around you is poking or winking at each other, someone has found out that they resemble Kareena the most among Bollywood stars, someone has super-poked you, someone has asked you to figure out which ‘That 70s Show’ character you are and someone has offered you derivates on the Peruvian Futures Index. And if you think that is where it ends, you’re sadly mistaken. The next time you log in someone has hurled a sheep at you, another person has rung a bell at you, someone has fattened a pig for you and someone wants you to participate in their coolest friend contest. Where do these people get the time to do all of this? Does it not feel like a full time occupation just figuring out what all these things are supposed to mean, leave alone participating in them? Yet, everyone seems to be doing it effortlessly and is still hanging on to their jobs quite comfortably. How?

And these are the same people who then start sending you invites to join Hi5, Gazzag and an assortment of various other social networking websites...how do they manage it all? For someone who finds it a challenge to even upload pictures on an Orkut or a Facebook, I wisely refrained from joining any of these new-fangled sites. Life is complicated enough with strange animals being hurled at you, you getting poked at, participating in sundry other quizzes and polls, you getting super-poked even though you have no idea what it means and why someone would do that to you. And then there’s Linked In, which I had joined a long time back under the naive illusion that it would be a good platform for creating some business contacts. Or perhaps that wasn’t an illusion, perhaps Linked In is useful...just that I’m not in the “networking” mode anymore.