Friday, October 30, 2009

Graduating from Orkut to Facebook

Yes, I have finally done it. I am now officially on Facebook. I am now a part of the millions who use Facebook everyday of their life to share stuff with their near ones. Surely there must be something right about all this. (I hope i am not sounding like SRK in the Airtel ad).

Wow, Facebook, what can I say. Good, cool, clean interface. Very nice. What’s more? I have found something that I just hoped would be on Orkut i.e. Community photos. Ahh. ..I wish this was available on Orkut. There are so many Brazilian footballers’ photos that I wish to add to my “I Love Brazilian Football’ community. But anyways, no issues.

Unlike Orkut where you have a scrapbook, in Facebook you have something known as a wall. (Now wait to minute, I have not joined Facebook only to get a wall. My house has more than 1). Well it’s not that kind of a wall. A wall in Facebook is something where al your friends can share with you stuff and post things on…hence wall. Neither the Great Wall of China nor the Berlin wall, simply a plain wall. Now though this wall may have its advantages, it also has its disadvantages. If this wall is yours then its also everyone’s. What I mean is not only all your activities and those related to you are displayed here, all your friends and their activities, all your communities and their updates and discussions too are displayed. Its something like in Orkut terms a fusion of your scrapbook and updates section. Now this thing makes sharing stuff really easy. You get all your friends updates and posts at a single place. You know what your friends are upto, all the applications they are using, all the games they are playing, all the things they are challenging you at, almost everything. That is something really awesome.

However the biggest drawback comes into the picture if you have many friends who are really active in Facebook. In that case, if you manage to find some stuff you are looking for in particular, then least I can say is that you are looking for a needle in a haystack. With time and posts everything just keeps going downwards. Time here is not measured in hours, its not minutes either, better say seconds. At the end, most of the time you'll give up just after a few clicks on ‘Older Posts’. Well but there is partly a solution. It may not be fool-proof but it does happen to help in certain cases. That is checking out your own profile. That is the only place I think that is yours alone on Facebook. Here you will find only your stuff and everything posted by you and none else. Its also over here where you can edit your profile, change your profile picture, etc. basically all the tasks you could do in the Profile section of Orkut. At least something’s similar.

Well apart from the many cool features on Facebook like the page doesn’t refresh when you become a fan of a community (same as member in Orkut) and sharing options (like pictures, videos, links, etc) and also the many famous people being online, I truly find Facebook truly lacking in user-friendliness. I must say that if you are an avid Orkut user, it’s really going to take a lot of patience and time for you to get accustomed to it. Orkut has everything organized. All your videos are in the videos link; your scraps are in the scrapbook, etc etc etc. But you know as the saying goes that “One man’s food is another man’s poison” this not-so-user friendliness of Facebook is probably one of the main reasons that it has a very less number of fake profiles.

Choosing from Orkut and Facebook is not easy. While Orkut boasts of user-friendliness and a very large Indian base; Facebook boasts of privacy, cool features, global reach and amazing applications to never get you bored. If you are out there to make a choice, then heaven help you. If not, then be like me…use both.

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