Never have I been so emotionally attached to any article on Vulcan Post as I am with this one. The long forgotten social network made by Google employee Orkut Büyükkökten, Orkut, is finally and officially dead now. If you are North American, Indian, Brazilian or Pakistani, you’ll know what Orkut meant to its users, especially if you were using the internet during the early 2000s. For me, it ruined my grades, made me very famous in one community and introduced me to the girl I eventually married.
Orkut is was, a social network platform where, exactly like in Facebook, you can could create a profile, brag about yourself, make friends, join communities of what you like (they copied this feature in Google Plus), be a moderator there, create albums, upload photos, share links, create polls and do whatever else you wanted to do on a social network.
You could also chat in Orkut, using the Gtalk messenger (which also died and became Google Hangout) which was later introduced and even share files. You could rate your friends on features like Cool, Trustworthy, Sexy and others, on a scale on 1 to 5. You could also add people to your “Crush list”. You could choose ‘themes’ to look different, although this feature was experimental and was released much later.
True, Orkut lacked modern features like the ones we see on Facebook today. For example, the games or the purchases; or the unique storage in Google Plus – but we are talking about 2006, not 2014. Orkut was pure unadulterated social media fun, without the complications that came with the advanced features of today.
Orkut died due to Facebook’s appearance and Google’s couldn’t-care-less attitude. First and foremost, with millions of active users already in Orkut (16 hours of activity a day!), why build Google Plus? Orkut single handedly kept Facebook out in Indo-Pak and Brazil markets, a market with almost 2 billion people!
Why didn’t you allow us to migrate from Orkut to Google Plus, carrying all our photos, friends, testimonials (nothing LinkedIn-ish about these) and most importantly, the communities with us? Every Orkut user wished and moaned for an opportunity to carry their Orkut legacy onto Google Plus. God knows and Google knows.
The salt on this wound is that Google sent every Orkut user an email and allowed them to download everything in a zip format before they closed down. I downloaded everything (yes, for all my 3 accounts, because only a fool should have one Orkut account) but now I have no clue what to do with that. All my years of Orkutting, all those debates, polls, comments, link sharing, image sharing and lack of sleep is in a zip file?
Technology, why would you rob us of happiness like this?
If you visit Orkut now, the community has been replaced with a landing page to look through their community archives. So long, Orkut! Its millions of loyal users will miss you.