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!