In memoriam

Orkut is shutting down today. Does that mean anything to you?

Maybe it does, if your early twenties were spent fraternizing on the only social network around – the facebook, twitter, Instagram, linkedin, pinterest and more - rolled into one.  For me, it had humble beginnings during my Germanic internship in the summer of 2004 as the only communication medium allowed during office hours. It was only later that I realized the fun in discovering school friends after years, and later one solid way to keep in touch with college folks, and much later, the established way to continue communication with ITC and ITC-era folks. (On a side note, the more time passes, the more it seems difficult to keep ITC out of any of my reminiscences – it sure is punching above its 2-year weight in my 30-year existence). It is hard to believe that there was an era when not insignificant daily concerns were surrounding how cool and non-wannabe your profile looked, whether the allowed 12 pics are the best you could showcase of your existence, whether the testimonials showed you in good light, and whether the ‘scrap’book needed clean up.

It became a part of life through the connectivity it established with long lost peers, conversations it elicited through scraps, gossips it started through following simultaneous scraps across multiple people, the hopes it gave wings to, through the crush/love meter, was it?, the show-off you could be through your profile – the possibilities were endless!

But then, in the meantime, we grew up. Some changed geographies, many changed relationship, marital and then parental statuses, most changed jobs, a few went on to found successful companies, some disappeared with no return addresses, and almost everyone advanced in life, and moved on.

The scrap wars weren’t as much fun, gossip-mongering was time taking, crush-meters never transpired into a meaningful fling, and communicating with folks through offline scraps and reverts… let’s just say it began to become a chore. It lost novelty gradually, but relevance with an unrelenting ferocity. The supreme reign on 4-5 years paled into insignificance in a matter of months, upended by younger upstarts.

I wish I could shed a tear in the memory of its passing, but the inconsequential nature of its existence means that with time, it might pass out of living memory as well, to be remembered as a small blur during young adulthood.

While Google could never go on to develop the BMW of social network, Orkut was, and will always be, the Model T of the personal Web.