orkut

I've gone and done it now... I got an invitation the other day from Ramon Stoppelenburg to join orkut, and found another online distraction. If you haven't heard of it (I first read about it on Darren Barefoot's site), I've pasted this from their FAQ section:

orkut.com is a new social networking service named for the Google engineer who developed it, Orkut Buyukkokten. (Orkut is easier to spell and pronounce than Buyukkokten.) This was created as an independent project and is not part of the Google product portfolio.

In less than 12 hours, I've joined no less than 11 communities (the numbers on the right represent how many members there are in that community at this moment):

Travel Hints and Tips (479)
Travel (125)
Vancouver (210)
Simon Fraser University (55)
Canon Digital Cameras (279)
Scotland (35)
Canadians (258)
Scrabble (276)
Bloggers (1532)
Bargain Travel (45)
Canada (284)
Blogger (59)

It occurred to me as I was thinking of who to invite to join orkut, that most of my friends are not online junkies like me... some of them don't have computers, and many who do have them are not surfers, just e-mail readers and reference users -- movie listings and some news. So, I don't know if they would even be at all interested in orkut. Most of them hardly e-mail. Believe it or not, I have to *write letters* to some of these people if I want to reach them! Fancy that!! We're a funny bunch, those of us Gen-X folk who actually didn't grow up with a computer (I'm still on my FIRST computer, and it's four years old), those who remember the pre-solar calculator days (remember when you actually had to go out and BUY them, they didn't come free with a magazine subscription??), and were in school when Donkey Kong and Ms. Pac-Man were all the rage...

Anyway, before I slip into a death-grip vortex of nostalgia, if any of you plan on joining orkut, just do a search on my name and it should come up... we'll see how many degrees of separation exist between us!