Remember
those heady days of sending scraps and giving testimonials? We had just
graduated from mass emails and chatting on Yahoo messenger and Orkut was
waiting for us. We didn’t have names on Orkut, we had names with special
characters. Remember friends who called themselves R@nnd$$, arbaz my sweetie
u r so kewl’? Instead of walls and timelines,
we, good old oldies had scraps (from scrapbooks that we pathetic creatures used
in school?). And the ‘friend requests’! Or should I say ‘making frandship’
scraps!!
Today,
30th of September, Google is shutting down Orkut and there have been
many a tearful farewells to the once extremely popular site in India. “Thanks
for helping us showoff when we needed the most” says a tweet. “GrandPaa! Thanks for making stalking so
easy... ;)” says another. “R.I.P. #Orkut. You did
good in your age and time. Thanks for giving me only good memories! :)”… “Someone give him param veer chakra :P”…”I got
laid for the first time via #Orkut L”… Among the various eulogies, shining bright
is Misguided Bramhastra, a song composed for Orkut’s demise. If you are not
crying by now, you will surely be weeping by the time the song ends with “It’s
time for you to lie six feet underground”. Crying for relief that the song’s
ended, that is.
In 2003, Google offered $30 million
bucks for Friendster, one of the very first social networking sites founded in
2002 by Jonathan Abrams. (Remember Napster, the godfather of sharing music with
pals? Well, add friend to that.) Once declined, Orkut was ready to happen.
On
24 January 2004, Orkut was launched by Google on a single server, that was not
even its own. It was built by Google employee and former Stanford
graduate Orkut Buyukkokten. Building it entirely on his own, Orkut used
whatever tools and servers were available to him, most non-Google. It took some
time for Google to even acknowledge it as its own but it did and Orkut took the
world (Well, Brazil and India) by storm. India was completely and absolutely
besotted with this new social networking baby. So much so it even got the 2007
MTV India Youth Icon award. When you saw the ‘Recent visited’ names, you got a
thrill. Don’t deny it, you did! We changed the theme of our page often (Of
course we had nothing else to do. There was no Facebook then!)
Why Orkut did not work finally has
many answers. Maybe it had become too shady, too full of porn profiles with
false names, too full of mass scraps (Remember the million ‘Good morning’
scraps you used to get?) and too full of hate groups. The main ‘maybe’ was,
however, Facebook. Also founded in 2004, just a few days after Orkut, Facebook
hit us hard around 2009. By 2010, Orkut was unofficially quite ‘six feet
under’.
As I go through my scraps a last time, I come across gems
from friends (and no, we can’t see what gems we ourselves have sent to others!!).
Some made me smile, some cringe and all made me nostalgic. Go check out Orkut
one last time if you haven’t already. Download whatever you have there and bid
farewell to an old friend, or old Fr@@nd, rather. We’ll miss you.
