Un-social networking

After seeing my Linkedin profile one day, a friend of mine asked me:
“Dude why are you on this website?

I gave him the best answer to my capabilities:
“It’s a professional social network. It helps me maintain relations with other like minded professionals and helps in networking. Isn’t that sort of self explanatory?”

He retorts: “But how has this ever helped you?”

I shot back: “Well, so far it hasn’t to any significant extent but it will later, hopefully.”

This really got to him.

“Dude Rishabh! You know I am sick and tired of Social Networking. Seriously man! Orkut was bad enough and then finally when I got off my lazy tushy and signed up for Orkut, I realised I was a tad bit too late for it for all my friends were now on Facebook.”

Facebook, ah, the plight of so many of us. With its never ending applications and it “uncluttered” look, why it would irk me so much, I wonder.

He added, “And now there’s a professional networking site, Jesus man.”

He continued, “You know what I want to do Rishabh? I want to make an un-social network. You know, what’s the point in doing something that everyone’s doing? I want to innovate. So here’s what I propose: Just leave social networking. Anyone can make friends there. It’s futile. What’s cool is that I give you a month’s time and hundred real life friends and you have to lose them all. Piss them off; ignore them, anything, but after a month I don’t want to see any of their filthy faces in your friends list. Now that seems like something a Venture Capital should be willing to seed. That’s what I am talking about.”

You can enter anytime you like, but you can never leave

The social networking websites bombarded the internet as we entered the new millennium and have being continuing to do so till date. First it was Orkut which made the public go mad (at least in Swadesh) but that was until the cleaner and sleeker Facebook arrived. Just as how there was a social class created amongst the social networking sites in the US where the educated University going people migrated to Facebook from the ubiquitous Myspace, where every layman had an account.

That was the past.

The future is a nightmare.

Facebook is as cluttered as a college going student’s room. It’s got a list of hazaar applications. It’s just the most irritating thing on the planet. It’s got a widget for everything and I mean everything. I get a million quizzes a day which will compare my performance to the three hundred pals’ of mine and then analyse them. Facebook has been minting a lot of money from these. So once you’re fed up of this you think to yourself that I just want to get out of this mess and so you deactivate your account. But here’s the catch: deactivating your account doesn’t delete your profile, which still exists on Facebook’s servers. Quitting it isn’t as easy as you’d have thought. The manual process makes you sweat more that you’d have at those cricket coaching sessions. As this article rightly says:

Mr. Das — who described his plight by quoting lyrics from the Eagles song “Hotel California” that say, “You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave” — has found himself cast as an unlikely mascot for disgruntled Facebook users. Several of them have found his empty profile and sent him messages, “ranging from Eagles song quotes to those of support,” he said.

I joined Facebook out of sheer peer pressure. Everyday I’d check my inbox and what would greet me were five new messages from my contacts from Orkut asking me to join Facebook. When I finally did, I realised that I had way too many contacts on Orkut, so now I had to accept all those guys all over again and has to confirm how I was connected to them and anticipate their writings on my wall.
I compelled to start-up with a social community meant for people who are sick of all the other communities.

Posted simultaneously at Mutiny.in