The Centennial Man

Some milestones invite celebration, usually so if they can be represented in nice, round figures of 10, 25, 50, 100, 500, 1000 and so on. Such an event, inconsequential yet observable, occurred a couple of days ago in my Orkut scrapbook. It reached a post count of 1000.

I turned back to the old posts to see how things had shaped up. The first post is on the date 10th October, 2004. Presumably, this should have been the time around which I would have signed up for the Orkut account. Not strangely, my first post on this blog is dated 24th July, 2004. Thus, it was around third quarter of 2004 that I had started warming up to the idea of "Web community" and becoming familiar with its now ubiquitous tools of blogging and social networking. Not bad, since Blogger underwent a major redesign in May 2004 after it was bought by Google in Feb 2003 and Orkut was launched in Jan 2004. I was well on my way in keeping pace with the technology curve.

It struck me that the posts should hold more information than just giving a kick by adding to a big number of 1000. Immediately the spreadsheet application, Excel, was invoked to get a sense of what constituted this number. By the way, that's an essential trait one picks up while undergoing Management education.

Here is a picture of what I pulled out of the 1000 odd posts. Its a month-wise distribution of the post counts. As I reflect back upon the events that took place over the last two years or so since the Orkut account has been active, the graph starts appearing to make sense to me. It is quite a remarkably accurate representation of my social networking and how it was affected by the events in my life.

1. The initial surge in the activity is as expected due to beginner's curiosity.
   
2. The first peak in Dec 2004 is a result of point 1 combined with a flurry of exchange of New Year wishes with even those whom I have known for long (aka "acquaintances") but never wished before. Seems that in a way, social networking site does make one more "sociable".
3. The dips of Jan 2005, Aug 2005 and Nov 2005 are spot on! These were the periods when I was preparing either for a transition between employers or for a "certain feline obsession" (as Morpheus once quoted and to which I responded).
4. Activity during 2005, otherwise, is pretty stable and consistent. Not much was changing in my social circle and no new additions were happening.
5. The Jan 2006 surge is the result of a wave of congratulations emanating from my success in belling the "feline creature" mentioned in point 3.
   
6. Surprisingly, the Dec 2006 posts are lesser than Dec 2005. I had expected them to be higher as a result of combination of New Year wishes and congratulation messages. While the "All the Best"s made a satisfactory mark, the New Year wishes went down considerably. This modifies the observation made in point 2. Social networking sites can give an initial boost to the social skills but cant guarantee a sustained improvement; people can slump back to their usual self even in online space.
7. Feb and Mar 2006 have the similar stable levels as seen throughout 2005.
8. The "feline creature", belled in point 5, is finally conquered in mid of Apr 2006. The surge in the second round of congratulation messages is even more highly pronounced than in point 5. The spillover continues to May 2005 at the same rate (almost a straight line). It could have dipped towards later part of May. But now I was a prominent blip on the radar of many observers and they deemed fit to send Birthday wishes even when they had never done before. I can't call it a comeuppance of my similar behavior in point 2.
9. Jun 2006 dip resulted from another transition - from employment to unemployment (or better termed as "higher studies"). However, the base level has now increased. Its a function of new people added in my network through the "feline" conquest and probably the resulting better recognition among the people I already knew.
10. New levels of "scrapbook interaction" are attained in Jul 2006 with the added nodes in my social network. However, as noted in point 6, the initial boost started fizzling out at a continuous stable pace. The pattern was reliving itself and gives a peek into how things shape up for me in a new social circle.
11. The new nodes added in point 9 were not due to my efforts. I was invited by my new peers to join their social circle. Jan 2007 surge saw my proactive action of adding more people from new peer group based on better knowledge about them. Needless to say, some of the newer nodes formed in point 9 have all but become defunct as and when I evaluated my comfort level with them. The newer nodes are a better representation of my currently sought social circle.
12. Jan 2007 surge is a combined effect of point 11 and exchange of New Year wishes in my extended social circle. It seems that New Year is the most celebrated occasion in my scrapbook; much more than all other Indian festivals.
13. The slow dissipation in activity, which had started becoming noticeable in late 2006, appears to continue into 2007. The older acquaintances who were quite excited about my new educational institute seemed to have moved on with other celebrations and eye-grabbers. I have had my shot at one-day fame! Till the next big event.........
    

Trying out Orkut videos

I may be quite late on catching up on this side of technology curve and adoption. The thing with uploading videos is that, well, one should have a video worth uploading. Not adding to the woes of YouTube by deciding not to upload Copyright content doesn't leave much choices. However, that doesn't stop me from relishing some videos which are related to my taste of entertainment.

So, today I decided to compile all the various videos I have watched over a period of time into one place - my Orkut profile page's video section. It took my around 2 and a half hours to search out the relevant videos on YouTube and Google Videos, edit their description and sit back to beam happily at the result.

During the process, I realized couple of things:

1. Its an instantaneous connection others can make to you on a social networking site by looking at the kind of videos uploaded by you.
2. Orkut is allowing only Google owned videos to be linked here. The flexibility and power of the feature could have been greatly enhanced if other online video content could also be linked. (But, cant blame them after the Viacom lawsuit fiasco).
3. I guess MySpace has a similar feature. I am not a MySpace subscriber so can't say how the features measure up against each other. My social network is currently being well served by Orkut and I am happy for now.
4. The video content is uploaded on YouTube servers. This allows Orkut to virtually accept unlimited number of video links. However, the Orkut albums section has photographs uploaded on Orkut servers. So they put a limit of 12 photographs to save space. It wouldn't be surprising if they extend the videos concept here by linking album to Picasa. Maybe it will help in further integration of the Google services, not to mention about possibilities for AdSense.
5. My two and a half hours of effort would need to be replicated if I want to post all my video links (along with the descriptions) to my blog. Its high time the social networking sites exposed framework for data export. When IMs can link up together and Google Chat is already being hosted inside both GMail and Orkut, this should be around the corner.
6. Like blog services (or better, like Twitter), Orkut should provide facility to add comments on the album photographs and video collection. It will be more pertinent at that point than having a comment added in the scrapbook.

I will let Orkut worry about these. For the time being, I am hoping that others will enjoy the show at my profile page.

Update #1: 22/03/07

Adding new video links pushes the older links to later display pages (like the scraps). However, the idea of videos is not akin to the scraps, where it makes sense to keep the latest scrap at the top. I want to arrange my video list to give a sense of priority to the videos I consider best. Orkut doesn't support manual sorting of the video list.

Update #2: 24/10/07

This is a bit late but still. Orkut has been introducing new services over the past few months. Some are addition of Blogger and Picasa feeds, removing the limit on album size, allowing to scrap directly next to video and Picasa feeds and "Friends Update" feature (which alerts when your friends edit their profile). Removing the limit of album size and integrating feeds had to come in as part of the bigger picture of integrating all Google services. However, still, Orkut has to do a lot to catch up with Facebook. Facebook has slowly and steadily started gaining the critical mass in the college/university networks. I was forced to open a Facebook account when the number of Facebook invites from my existing friend circle became a regular feature. I haven't yet filled in my profile details there. In fact, that is the more tedious part. I can still live with a rich Orkut profile and sparsely filled Facebook profile as long as my friend network does not stop using Orkut altogether. A similar migration experience example is that I now use GTalk primarily for instant messaging. Though I log on to Yahoo, I don't receive any pings. However, I am still tempted to keep using Yahoo because of one very important feature which GTalk still doesn't have - "Stealth Settings". Its a faux-pas when I log on in the middle of the night to chat with a particular person, receive pings from others in the list whom I don't want to enter into conversation at that time and then have to either give excuses or ignore them.