Hey... how come you are not on Orkut?” a friend asked me anxiously a few years ago when the Orkut fever was just seeping in the virtual world and I wasn’t aware of its hysteria yet. “What’s that?” I asked in return. The expression of sheer disbelief on his face after hearing my question forced me to check out what Orkut was all about. Once I did, I got hooked on to it too, just like the others.

But my excitement and addiction died down just as fast it had developed. Getting in touch with long-lost friends, seeing a new scrap in your scrapbook everyday from someone or the other, receiving flattering testimonials from friends — all the thrills and frills overtook one aspect: lack of privacy. ‘Accessibility of your info to one and all’ was what made me go off Orkut and I am not the only one.

Minaish Lakdawalla, a student, shares similar reasons for a switch over to Facebook from Orkut. “I had joined Orkut for recreation as I like chatting with people. But after a while, there were a lot of profiles of my friends which were hacked and the pictures were being misused due to no privacy settings. So, I stopped using it. The Facebook is not safe either, but it’s more private than Orkut,” she says.

According to Mehul Rahul, a marketing professional, “Orkut was one of the first sites to provide access to friends whom I had not seen for years. But I found the site crude with faulty privacy settings. And once the Facebook came, with much better features, people never turned back to Orkut. Yet, I think it’s not easy to move from one site to another because not all friends in the older site are using the new one,” he explains.

Techie Hemant Tuli, who joined the Orkut to keep in touch with friends, continues to be an Orkut loyalist. “I have an account only on Orkut. I find it too much of a hassle to search for people on new sites. I find Orkut comfortable since it’s easy to use and was the first known social networking site. Most of my friends are here and it has a lot of features,” Tuli maintains.