One tear for Orkut

One tear for Orkut

Tech journalists like me are always scanning the internet for the next big online service that will cause epic disruption. So imagine my surprise when out of nowhere ‘Orkut’ popped into my news feed. This news item talked about a toolbar for Orkut that allows users to keep up with their Google accounts. Wait a minute. There are still people who use Orkut? And Google rolls out new features for them? Curious to find out what Orkut looks like these days, I logged on to my account. The first shock: orkut.com was no longer blocked by our office’s IT department. No one, it seemed, “wasted time” networking on Orkut. A familiar blue-coloured screen greeted me. You can tweak the colour to your preference. After playing around with black, purple, red, and back to blue, I saw that there were no updates from anyone on my feed. I had 47 friends. A small number. But as you know, in Orkut, users could check each other’s profiles, photos and leave scraps regardless of whether they were ‘Friends’ or not. After visiting some of their profiles, I found that none among my friends were using Orkut currently. In some cases, their last post was in 2010. Incidentally, this was the year that Facebook overtook Orkut in terms of the number of users in India. Determined to find at least some current conversations, I decided to check out the Groups I had signed up for. First up, was our school group.There were two headlines on the forums. ‘How to earn Rs25,000 every month without investment.’ ‘Everything about Dental X-Ray.’ I moved on to a group I had signed up for — Mumbai. The announcement on this page was that I could claim ownership of this group because, well, the people who started the group were no longer managing it. I passed on the offer to look at some discussions on the forum. “hi i m Mayur, a teen guy from mumbai desperate 4 first sex as i dont wanna be virgin in my college life. so all girls, ladies & aunties out there who could help me by giving me sex”. Finally, a post that was dated July 22, 2012. That too by a creep. You see, creeps and I go way back in Orkut. In 2006, when I was working with Just Another Magazine (JAM), Orkut was its peak, and so we built an elaborate April Fools’ Day prank around it. The designers went to work on my mugshot, and thus was born Natasha, complete with flowing hair, shaped eyebrows and lipstick. She would “luv 2 meet new ppl, freak out and ya party party party!!” Select scraps left by people who wanted to “do friendship” were then published in the magazine. Even Natasha has stopped getting scraps today, though I must add that she continued to get wooed until 2010. I couldn’t help feeling bad for Orkut. To think that this was once the social network to be part of. Where we rediscovered the word ‘scrap’. Where people left cloying testimonies about each other. Now, it is a ghost town with an occasional straggler still hoping to meet “an auntie”. I shed a metaphorical tear before closing the tab. There is this killer new app on Twitter that I HAVE to check out.