Orkut, I will miss you

Orkut, which introduced most of us to the world of social networking and helped us take baby steps towards socializing online (with friends and strangers at times), is shutting down on 30th September

Host of networking sites have come into existence over the past few years riding on the wave created by Orkut and sudden fancy that we had taken to networking online. But most of these, I would guess, have not created the kind of frenzy they would have liked to and in the process lost prominence. Lot of us joined these not-so-popular (may be defunct by now) sites, lost interest later on and stopped visiting them. Today, we are least bothered as to what happened to these sites, whether they still exist or not as we are not using them anyways

But Orkut is an exception. Despite not having logged in to Orkut for a long time, I was a little taken back when the news broke and felt sad about it closing down. At the end of the day, it was Orkut which helped us find our old friends after years as most of us were not ‘online’ prior to the development. We were in touch with only those who we could touch, literally! (I mean close friends who we were in touch with regularly!). This is precisely the reason we have an emotional connect with Orkut. Because by the time other networking sites became popular we were ‘connected’ anyways, through one way or the other. So there was no ‘discovery of friends’ factor at play! One could even go further and describe Orkut as the school of social networking from which people graduated to the popular sites that exist today, but hey, school is always special! Why it is even more special in my case vis-à-vis any other is because I never graduated to the next level. I started with Orkut and stopped there and never joined any other networking site! Why people in our part of the world are even more regretful is because India along with Brazil was (and still is) one of Orkut’s biggest markets in terms of number of users

If you were to ask anyone as to what went wrong, you would get regular replies like it was not innovative enough to compete with other alternatives, it didn’t change with times, and especially when people started switching to networking on their mobile phones, it almost lost relevance. There could be multiple reasons. Google executive did mention that since other similar company websites had taken off well, there was not point continuing with Orkut. I will miss Orkut.

Bonus: Google’s practice of allowing employees to spend 20% of their time on things which may not be related to their job responsibilities gave birth to Orkut (called ‘the 20% project’). Who would have thought that what Google employees worked on during their free time (i.e. 20% of their working time) would lead to something like Orkut (read social networking) where people would end up spending almost 100% of their time!

Maria Sharapova versus ‘select set’ of cricket fans

Chetan Bhagat’s ‘3 mistakes of my life’ may be a best seller but if Maria Sharapova decides to write something on the ‘mistake’ committed by her and names the book as ‘the only mistake of my life’, I don’t think it will have any takers in India! As the ‘mistake’ she has supposedly made is that of upsetting those ‘select set’ of cricket fans/followers/fanatics who expect the entire world to know Cricket despite knowing themselves that it is only played by a handful of countries. One may argue here that ‘not knowing cricket is okay but how can you not know Sachin Tendulkar?! And a simple reply here would be that if someone does not follow any particular sport one bit and especially someone in whose country that sport is not as popular, chances are that he may not know about its best players.

Recent episode involving Maria Sharapova who did not recognize Sachin Tendular drew irk from hundreds on social networking sites and in few cases the comments and reactions did cross the limits of decency. And the reason why I describe them as ‘select set’ of cricket fans is because they form a very miniscule percentage of the total cricket fans in India but they have managed to disrepute an average cricket fan like most of us. I am sure most of these so called cricket followers cannot name top 5 players of our Hockey team which is our national sport, forget about naming the Kabaddi team’s captain. Despite being ignorant about other sports in India themselves, they expect outsiders to know Cricket.

But if you think over this entire situation a little bit, you will realize this is not surprising as this ‘select set’ of fans will not spare even their favorites when they fail to perform. They will burn their effigies; throw stones at their houses etc. I fail to fathom as to why we go to such extremes? Making fun of someone online is fine as long as it is done in good humor but why make it personal and nasty? My only request to these ‘fans’: please don’t embarrass Sachin Tendulkar. If we actually think of him as the ‘God of Cricket’ (which the whole of India actually does and rightly so) then please understand that Sachin Tendulkar like God is beyond reach of most of the sports personalities, beyond criticism from any human being and certainly requires no certificate of recognition from commoners like you, me or Maria Sharapova for that matter! And coming back to my earlier point about writing a book on Maria Sharapova’s mistake, how about naming it “Maria yeh tune kya kiya?!”