taking the plunge-- and joining orkut

Yesterday, I met a fellow who urged me to join LinkedIn-- it's basically a social networking site for white collar professionals, if you didn't already know. He was a nice enough fellow, but I already meet many white collar professionals through my job-- and I have to "reign in" my technology/science/geek tendencies around most of them in order to get along with them. It's frustrating, having to pretend to be something else just to get along with people for their convenience. Why would I want to meet more people like that during my personal time as well?

If anything, I want to meet people "beyond" the range of people I meet at work. I want to find the hypothetical one percent (in personality profile terms) of the population out there that is like me.

And this is where my previous thoughts about orkut collided headfirst with my new realization. See, I'd heard of orkut before but the fact that it wasn't all that popular in the United States (compared to MySpace or Facebook, that is) discouraged me from joining. After all, if I couldn't get to meet these people conveniently, what was the point of joining?

And yet, if you want to meet people "beyond" the range that you typically do meet (at work, at home, during the course of your daily routine)-- you are going to have to do some serious travelling (new countries, new languages, new cultural norms and customs, etc.) in order to do it, right?

(Damn, where's a TARDIS when you really need one?! LOL)

So, basically, meeting this fellow who insisted I should join LinkedIn has prompted me to realize how foolish I was being about NOT joining orkut, and I've finally taken the plunge and joined. Granted, the majority of profiles are from India or Brazil, but you see some exotic ones too-- like Estonia! Remember them from the news stories months ago-- about how the very infrastructure of their country was so tightly linked to the Internet, and they were under a cyber-terrorism attack? Or Iran! Yes, I've seen profiles from Iran, too. When you can talk with people from a country that appears in the news, it helps see beyond the-- I don't want to say propoganda exactly-- but the very narrow point of view that the media likes to portray of certain countries.