Missing those Orkut Days

Gone is the era of orkut ! Oops, if you are a millennial, you might not know what it is. Is it a fruit? Because, it rhymes with the word.

Orkut was my introduction to the so called social media. While I was clearing my inbox,in 2020, I got to see some emails of orkut notifications. Sadly the site is no more and I cannot recover the data.But, it took me back to those days for a while.

Orkut was fun. It was not like facebook or instagram. It used to give daily updates of my stalkers. “Who visited your profile” option was right up there in the feed. Everyone knew the option was there but still we used to stalk shamelessly. Privacy or secrecy did not exist. All my orkut friends can view my scrapbook. Say, all your whatsapp contacts can read your whatsapp messages. How cool is that?

People used to write long testimonials for each other. No,we were not that jobless.

Coming to profile picture part, all the girls had cute baby pictures or pictures of popular actresses of those days on their display. It was a taboo to use own photograph. What if it gets misused.It was same with boys also. Very rarely they used their own photos. If today’s video platform tik tok can speak to orkut, it would ask” Am I a joke to you?”

I remember my bestie adding all the possible strangers as her orkut friends thinking it was the social media behavioral pattern. Under peer pressure or influence, some of them became my friends also. But, being the ambivert of half introvert I am I could not maintain it as good as her.

Years later, there was this buzz about Facebook which was the new, path-breaking social network and we all had an exodus. The hightlight was you can stalk anyone without letting them know about it. And, the user interface was much more interesting. Then there was no looking back, people forgot about orkut and the good things it did for us. Orkut declared it own end. But you cant never forget your firsts. The 90s kids will have it as a nostalgia, just like Doordarsan, Shaktiman and the like.