Mediaboss Marketing

The social networking website Orkut shuts down forever on Tuesday, September 30.

I was 18 years old when I first came to know about Orkut.

I am not sure how I came across social networking. Those were still the days of Yahoo Messenger chats, Yahoo Groups and scary chat rooms infested with fake profiles. I dont recall if Gtalk was being used as frequently.

But the first ever social network I used was hi5. Hi5 was very flashy in its design and had few privacy controls. It resembled a more colourful version of MySpace. After scourging for friends and adding some newbies there, I began to tire of the addiction. It was more glamour and less substance.

Then one fine day I had to bear a friends ridicule for using hi5. He said, Get on to Orkut, you idiot, and there I was, the next day. He gave me my first scrapbook entry and my first testimonial - a bad one.

The problem started with pronouncing the social networks name - Or-kat or Or-koot? Nobody seemed to be obsessed with this as much as I was, so I just went along.

A rush to get onboard

Within the next six months or so, it seemed that my whole school was on Or-kat, as so was my college. After feverishly adding people as friends, I would post in their scrapbook for fun. The chats were public and non-moderated. But the social media space back then was benign, the right wing saw it as a threat to Indian culture and parents were exasperated with their kids newest addiction. In other words, all was normal in the Orkut world.

Soon it devolved into the now-familiar world of an unhealthy new age addiction, becoming an avenue to express your support for a particular cause (though you might never step out of your house to do something real about it). I founded a group called I Hate Moral Policing after Mumbais cops decided they would shoo away/ harass/ attack couples on the citys streets. The group (or community, as Orkut called it) became a hub for feminists, pseudo-feminists, liberals, right-wingers, leftists, confused Indians, kids, hypocrites, and some others. For some crazy reason I refused to upload a lead picture or hand over the moderator duties to anyone else.

Simple interface in nascent era of social media

See the article here:
Ode to Orkut, the innocent pioneer of a social media revolution