Orkut Phenomenon

Orkut is the Brazilian Facebook. And for the teenage world in São Paulo, if you don`t have an Orkut profile you don`t exist. It became a matter of status, your popularity is based on how many friends you`ve got. Many kids started to add anyone they know, or don`t know but have something in common: same school, same neighborhood, same last name. Anything was a reason for an addition to your profile. Result: in a city of 18 million people where everybody is connected somehow through this one website, the gossip increased in a gigantic scale.
To have an idea of how it actually happens I`ll give you an example: When that airplane crashed in Amazon killing 200 people, their profiles were visited by more than 100.000 people in one night. The flight attendants` profile received as many messages of “rest in peace” and messages of support to their families as their mail boxes could hold. Freaky, I know. But that`s how much Brazilians socialize.
I also heard of many relationships that started and that ended because of Orkut. Many people meet old friends there and end up finding a boyfriend or a girlfriend this way. And some couples actually fight because of Orkut gossip, messages from other people that made them jealous (the messages or “scraps” on Orkut are open to everyone on your friends list to see) or the fact the guy had too many girls, or the girl too many boys, on his/her list.
Another interesting thing about Orkut is the photo album. Every time you post a new picture, this information is sent to all of your friends. So you go to your profile and see that one of your friends posted new pictures you go there and look, of course. That increases the number of visits on that profile page, which increases the person`s popularity. So guess what teenagers, desperate to be popular, do? They take thousands of pictures of themselves and post a massive number of them, in a regular frequency, so people will keep visiting their profiles and making comments. The mirror picture became very popular, you know, when you take a picture of yourself and your beautiful camera reflexes. That also made bathrooms a common background for the pictures. Almost every bathroom`s got a mirror, right?
There was this one case of a girl, profile name “Tata”, that liked to post this kind of picture. She had full albums with pictures of herself on the mirror. Well nobody actually checked all of them out, not even her, apparently, but somebody was paying enough attention to actually notice her terrible mistake. You know when you are ready to shower but then decide to use the toilet first? Well, behind the smiley Tata, on her bathroom picture, there was her mother. The woman was sitting on the toilet, naked. It`s easy to miss it, but if you zoom it you can actually see the woman there, and that she needed to lose some weight. Of course you can`t stop laughing when you see it. So the very attentive person that notice the woman couldn`t help but sharing it with the world. He made a webpage with the picture, and a red circle to emphasize the naked mom, and sent it to his whole list of friends. Naturally his friends kept passing it forward. It didn`t take long to the whole city have a copy of the picture and Tata`s profile receive messages from thousands of people. People made jokes, rhymes, poems and even songs about Tata`s situation and they were all posted on her profile. On that night she was receiving 10 messages per second. I can only imagine the girl`s reaction when she first got online after the discovery.