Sunday, August 10, 2014

Adios Orkut!

You have 3 new scraps, 2 friend requests and one new fan!

Does this kind of a notification sound familiar? Or do we know only likes, comments and wall posts?
I am not sure how many of my readers have used Orkut or if any of you will miss it when it shuts down on September 30th. It was the first experience of social networking that I had. Finding old friends , writing scraps and rating friends were all favorite things to do.

Your popularity went a notch higher with the number of fans you had or the cool ratings you got! * Blame the hormones man :P* The scraps turned out to be like chat windows * Damn, my orkut scraps are so embarrassing now that I can’t help wonder what an idiot I was then :D .Not that things have changed massively now: P *

Making new friends through mutual friends was common .Orkut was in fact our first play ground where we started stalking. But it wasn’t sneaky initially *Sigh it was quite, late by the time I realized that Orkut gives each of its users the names of the users who view their profiles unless you deactivate your privacy settings* But nevertheless stalking people was an interesting past time *Oh please! Save the look! All of us did/still do it :P*

It was the new shiny website which we got attracted to! I remember wondering what  xoxo ,tc ,hf,muah, and umpteen other abbreviations were at one point of time. Slowly it became a part of life but I guess we were less obsessed by it unlike Facebook these days. I mean we didn’t have to like each other’s pictures or comments, we didn’t necessarily scream out to the world when we were having lunch or visiting fancy hotels but we still kept in touch with our far flung friends * I know not all of us do it ,but there’s still a vast majority who do. I mean no offence to anyone who is very socially active :P* .I am sure, had Fb not taken over the social networking arena  Orkut would have brought in these features.

 Friends poured out all the love in their hearts through testimonials which brightened our days. It gave us the sheer joy of connecting with old friends , stalking on our crushes, reading feel good testimonials  and then one fine day Facebook replaced its hot spot!

Walls became definitely cooler than Scraps ,Pokes more fun than Fans,Albums and Tagging replaced photo sharing   and we all quickly gave our ‘likes’ of approval to Fb . That’s exactly when Orkut started becoming a memory.With this fast paced life where we quickly adopt new technology , Orkut was replaced very soon in a way that we hardly ever go back to it . *If Twitter was active when Orkut was forgotten a new hash tag trend would have been created : #RIPOrkut #FbFTW .*

                                


This post was for the generation who advanced from Orkut to Facebook and still remembers fondly the initial days of introduction to social networking *And all the stupidity we did then :P*. If you guys also have such memories share them with me. 
Till my next post,keep smiling*friendly glee *and have fun .