It has become a regular feature now.
"Just a friendly reminder that I invited you to Shelfari. Come see the books I love and see if we have any in common. Then pick my next book so I can keep on reading.
Click below to join my group of friends on Shelfari!
http://www.shelfari.com/
someone
Shelfari is a free site that lets you share book ratings and reviews with friends and meet people who have similar tastes in books. It also lets you build an online bookshelf, join book clubs, and get good book recommendations from friends. You should check it out."
Invariably, every month or so, some jobless geek or some clueless organization hits upon this "unique" brilliant idea of starting a social networking site which focuses on one special interest or the other. One seeks to bring together book loving people on a single platform and the other claims to bring all the party-people together. Then, of course, there are the platforms which seek to bring together singles who didn't/couldn't find a life partner.
Barring the last set of websites, I find the others useless and pointless, and a sheer waste of an asset which could translate into a huge commercial success.
Even today, India doesn't have a good, reliable gifting chain (for good measure, let me acknowledge Kinshuk's idea here). If I have to send a gift to someone, I don't know where to look. Do I go look at a website? Do I visit a kirana shop or an archies? But then who will deliver my gift to my friend who lives in another city, another country, another time zone? If I go online, which website do I go to? Even if I do get to a website, locate a chalta hai gift and want to checkout, do you have any idea how painful it is to do so! I have to fill out my credit card details. Worse, I have to fill out her (I wont gift to a guy!) address which I will have to dig out from some dust filled diary, or one of the myriad, address books in my computer.
I digress.
Point number 2 being: Someone please start a good gifting chain which spread nationwide and anyone from any part of India can gift anything to anyone anywhere.
Point number 1 being: Enable me to gift to my friends with a single click through one of the hazaar social networking sites (e.g. orkut, facebook). Imagine - a birthday reminder of your friend's birthday pops up in your inbox. Next to the reminder, there are options for gifting - send flowers, send chocolates, send something! anything!, and all you have to do is click any of these options and voila! you are done!. Your credit card details were already fed in your profile. Her address was already in her profile. You need not know her address at all and yet the gift will reach her and you r card will be charged appropriately. What more could one ask for? I don't have to remember her address, her birthday, her likes/dislikes. Heaven.
Enable me to utilize my network on the platform. Let me do something with it physically rather than just exchange some messages and chit chat. Enable me to do this and the social networking site will rake in huge money. They can tie up with various businesses from who they can take a sign-up check. After sales commission arrangements would mean a perpetual flow of perfectly good money.
I had always found social networking sites frustrating. Now I know why.
