I volunteer - ugh, I met a student recently and she told me that she is into a Social Networking Organisation where she conducts a Community. This was an amusing encounter for me as little did she know that I am a net person and quite savvy with Social Networking on the web. She happened to be running a community at 'Orkut'!!!

Well, in recent times, its the latest buzz with employees of Organizations volunteering to be a part of their company's Community Programmes. These communities are on a rise in the Corporate sector where time, effort and money is spent to prove socially responsible citizens who emerge to work as NGOs or work for the cause of Aids, Education to underpriveledged children, for the Disabled - a host of volunteering projects in the diversed areas like environment, slum cleanliness, post-disaster rehabilitation, suicide prevention, etc.

However, on the web, we find Social networks on a rise. Earlier, I got a lot of invites for Friendster who has now introduced its own for-pay blogging tool as a money-making scheme. LinkedIn started charging for its job listings. Social networking like Blogging communities or the Myspace, Hi5 or the Orkut are all great attractions as reports come in to my desk that teenagers are spending more and more time with 3-5 hours per day on an average, just talking with friends on scraps or writing blogs, joining communities, sharing pics and so on. Even I hanged on these places for a while to explore and I feel, its just 'Tempting' - also tomfoolery, wasting time, money and energy for people who are into serious business on web.

Google released a social networking service called orkut in 2004, named after Orkut Buyukkokten, a Google software engineer who developed the project during personal time allowed to him by Google.All employees at Google are allowed to spend twenty percent of their time working on personal interests, a policy Google has to encourage creativity. Buyukkokten had an interest in social networking and so developed his service. Google decided to open it to the public and here, Orkut is just a Craze with guys n gals, irrespective of the negative that Orkut offers a lot. As many schools in India adopts and embrace technology, children at school are given assignments and they need to get a personal computer/lap tops for them. Little do the parents or teachers realize what they do, many of them hang around these social networking places and I feel this is a 'warning' signal. Even if you are a music lover, these places offer audio as well as video to watch and sure, you get hooked.

This site Social Networking Meta List is interesting on web. It features all the networking sites that you can choose from. All you need is your reach to places on web and of coz, the TEM, like I said - time, money and energy - Enjoy! Be careful, too!

- ilaxi