Now that's what I call frand-sheep!

“Dude! Get on Facebook, man! Everybody’s there!” Viv got a message from his very excited friend.

It sounded like someone from the old days getting all excited about the Internet – the days when hotmail was cool, and email addresses like hotmale@hotmail.com and coolfriend4u@yahoo.com err… ‘ruled’. Viv coolly ignored it while I decided to do a little bit of exploring. After all, it was a message like this that had got me on blogger.com, and I can’t imagine my life if I had ignored that message. I still remember asking, “So like… what is this blogger thing? You just write stuff like an email? And who reads it? I mean… what’s the big deal?” Oh boy, what’s the big deal it seems.

Anyway, my inbox was also flooded with at least 16 invites to this Facebook thing. Not to mention messages like “Orkut’s so out man. Totally uncool. Facebook is the new ‘it’.” Err… o-kayyy. Thing is – I may crib about all the "hot and saxy guys wanting to make a frand shib with honest and lovely person" on Orkut, but it is a necessary evil for me as I found a lot of my friends there. For someone who had spent her childhood in seven different schools (before you think I was expelled multiple times I’d better clarify that it was because her Dad’s job entailed a lot of transfers), it was an achievement to have found everyone at one place – Orkut. I’m not that active on it, but I do find it a good one-stop-database of my friends from ye olde days. I still remember how I got started on Orkut – two of my blog friends were telling me how they were playing scrappy-scrappy on Orkut and I was curious to find out what the grown-up version of ghar-ghar and gudiya-gudiya was like. The rest, as they say, is history.

So I thought I’d give Facebook a chance and signed up. It was amazing how many more people I found – ex-colleagues, colleagues, cousins, nephews, what not, especially of the non-Indian variety. Facebook appeared to be quite non-sleazy, but then like Clueless says (and I completely agree) – give it time and everything will become sleazy. Anyway, Day 1 on Facebook felt like Day 1 in primary school. Everything was unfamiliar, and though there were people like me around, they all seemed to know their way around. So I fumbled and stumbled and finally made it. I was of course, bombarded with the millions of applications that you need to add to do anything on Facebook. And boy are they clever – they make your friends say good things about you, but you can’t read them till you add applications A to Z! Sheesh. And these applications then appear on your profile page all at once till you have to hire someone just to locate your profile picture on the page.

However, amongst all the applications that I had thrown at my face, and subsequently ignored, I found one really good one. Superpoke – throwing sheep in particular. So this application allows you to fling a virtual sheep above all the ducking heads all the way to the person you’re feeling affectionate (albeit in a strange way) towards. Now that's what I call frand-sheep! There is nothing quite like finding a friend who sat next to you in class twenty years ago, and flinging a sheep at him before saying “Hi, remember me?” I tell you - it’s the best. Of course, you can superpoke people in normal ways such as hugging them, sending them flowers or drinks, etc. but I think it's just too boring. One of my favourite actions is to especially stun the ones who're nice to me on Facebook. Someone sends you flowers or drinks – you hurl a sheep at them. Someone waves at you or hugs you, you hurl a sheep at them. It’s the most fun you can have without getting a rap from Maneka Gandhi.

Of course there are other things you can throw, such as a fish or a chicken. Oh, someone once threw a cow at me. Oh the audacity. But I can't explain to you the joy of prying yourself out from under the cow that was thrown on you, picking up a sheep and hurling it at the offender. You just have to sign up to experience it.

Of course, counting the number of outgoing sheep on my profile, anyone can tell I’m new. Usually, it's the new people on Facebook who are excitedly throwing sheep around like kids of four. I guess the more 'experienced' ones have run out of their share of sheep and are now too dignified to be hurling wolly mammals at their acquaintances.

But of course, the best things about Facebook are the alerts you get when you add someone or someone adds you – specifically the way the alerts are phrased. I cannot explain the feeling of relief-mixed-joy when you find a close friend XYZ with whom you had an ugly fallout almost a decade ago, and your Facebook page now says, “Sayesha and XYZ are now friends.” Now that is closure all right.

Now if you'll excuse me, I must get back to Facebook and throw some more sheep at people before it becomes uncool to do so.