orkut mania in kashmir

: Waseem Mushtaq, a media student from Kashmir University is a frequent visitor to cyber cafe for the last few months to surf his favourite social networking site Orkut. He visits his favourite site to be in touch with his school time friends and the new ones he made recently on orkut.
“Orkut has turned out to be a blessing for me. It is through orkut that i got in touch with my lost friends. After leaving the school almost all of my friends went to different places of the country for pursuing their education and we lost contacts with each other. But now thanks to our school community on orkut i have re-established the contacts with almost all of my school time friends”, said Waseem.
“Social networking sites like orkut also provides platform for socialising and making new friends”, he further added.
Orkut, which has become a popular name in world, is the brainchild of Turkish software engineer Orkut Buyukkoten. The search company Google officially launched Orkut in January 2004.
In orkut, a user creates a profile, in which he provides social, professional, and personal details. Users can also upload photos and videos into their profile. “Scrapping” is the most popular feature on orkut, which allows a form of offline and online communication.
The other important feature of orkut is easy to set up forums called communities. Anyone with an orkut account can create a community on anything. One can post topics, inform users about an event, ask them question or just play games. There are more than one million communities on orkut with topics ranging from pizzas to pasta or from film star Aishwarya Rai to big B Amitabh Bachan.
Orkut is the most visited website in Brazil with 62.9 % traffic coming from Brazil followed by 19.2 % from India. A significant portion of internet users from Kashmir particularly the youth are taking keen interest in social networking sites.
“A year ago very few of my friends knew what orkut is all about. But now almost all of them have their profiles on orkut and even some of them have put up photos and videos”, said Tariq Ahmed, a university student.
“The students of Kashmir University have created a community called “Kashmir University” on orkut which has some 700 odd members. This community has become a perfect place for discussing matters relating to students and academics”, added Tariq Ahmed.
There are certain security concerns on orkut as well. A number of fake and cloned profiles exist on orkut.
“People should be very careful while making profiles on social networking sites. Personal information and photographs should be avoided as they can be misused”, cautioned Imran Amin, a software engineer.