So the other day I was invited to join Orkut, a friendster-like social networking site. I have mixed feelings about it.

There is a grumpy part of me that despises Orkut, Livejournal, instant messaging, and other such things as frilly nonsense. "Oh look! I have 58 friends in my friendnet and I'm a member of 37 communities! Look at all the funny avatars in my buddy list! Let me go peruse the pointless crap all my online friends post in their fotoblogs!"

Bah. Humbug. I'm trying to get rid of friends here, not increase the efficiency with which they waste my time. This is why I hate instant messaging so much. I sit down at my computer, ready to do some programming, and someone starts talking to me! And they never have something they actually need to say either. All instant messaging conversations are worthless chatter. That's why I never run instant messaging clients anymore.

But then there is another side to me that isn't so grumpy. When someone invited me to join Orkut, this side was very curious. Once I joined, I began to think that it was actually really neat. It's fun to see the friends of your friends and explore these networks. Before I knew it I was trying to add as many people to my list of friends as possible.

Practically every day now I go to Orkut and see how the network around me is developing. And every time I do this, the grumpy part of me gets very embarrassed because it has to share a body with such a pansy.