Taking off from where we left yesterday, I have been doing my rounds of the social networking scene in India. I do this not from the inherent hope of bumping into some cute, 24, female, aspiring model sort of profiles. I do so only because I am working in the internet space and want to assess this space. What I have found so far is that most recent social networking sites in India have a huge percentage of non-serious users, users who are there precisely to scavenge for the kind of profiles I so vehemently denied earlier. Sample this entry from a user's blog in one of the sites:

Looking for genuine beatuful sophisticated genuine friendship from brilliant beautiful girls who have rich values from India....

The spelling mistakes are not mine of course. And this was just a sample representation of a majority of the content available out there. Sites like Orkut have made it big in India not because they were the first movers (they weren't). I think what worked in their favour is that during Orkut's popularity upswing, the access to internet (in India) was expensive. Hence, most people who bought internet access back then were more serious users. Once the costs of surfing (trudging in India) the internet came drastically down, many less serious users had access to the internet. And hence, we now have the wonderful profiles on all the sites. I love the current scenario. I am not sure how the owners of these sites plan to make their money, but I think we shall definitely see a lot of "a/s/l" queries being now manifested into the form of scraps. That is the fun of watching social networking right now :-) By the way, keep your fingers crossed. You might just get scrapped by a hot, female, single with the tag line "Hai, wanna do frendship with me". Until then, keep checking this space.