Good Bye Orkut

The First time I had a email id and a social media account I was barely in high school. 10 years back children of my age were even not allowed to have an email account let alone a media account, as we had to be 18 years to have an account for socializing.
The first few networking sites that  launched were a trial and error attempt to encourage socializing online   Friendster, Friend-of - a-Friend, Hi5, these online friend networks were just basic in nature where one could meet friends, add friends and chat to some extent.

It was January 24th 2004 when Google had launched this media platform. Its popularity grew in leaps and bounds, indeed socializing online was a talk among young teens of my age at that time. Other online friend sites slowly began to fall out of grace. 

Google's Orkut stood out, developed by a Google employee Orkut Büyükkökten created a soaring success as a social networking site, In less than a month after it was launched, it became the talk of the town. Orkut could boast of having close to 1,00,000 members and seemed to have been discussed everywhere both online and offline.

I had a Hi5 account as well and it  worked on  simple concepts. After  joining the site, one describes his or her interests, particularities and you make a list of friends, invite them to join. When Orkut set foot, it was not just these basic details that we had to put up, we could invite our friends, navigate and look at their friends and make connections with people whom we did not know at the same time who shared our interests. In this way we became a part of our own network and thus created new ties .

That's basically it.  All a tad trite,  a great way of doing away with your time, although admittedly it must be fun to suddenly find an old friend in this way. Orkut was incredibly hip, and it was especially popular among the internet savvy.

Just in a few months Facebook was founded. At first Facebook took time to lay its foundation but once it stood firm, it topsy-turved everything for Orkut. Facebook became a skyscraper and Orkut stood like a hut no match to Facebook at all. 

Today Facebook  is the pioneer in social networking.It is the 2nd most visited website (Next to google) in the world and according to Facebook's CEO Mark Zuckerberg, it has approx 1.28 billion active users. Now Orkut ranks in the 89th position of social media with more than half of its traffic from India and Brazil. Google managed to sustain this social media for a decade and finally they have decided to put the media to a full stop. Google has now decided to focus on YouTube, Blogger and Google+ which have taken off, with communities springing up in every corner of the world.

According to Economic Times: Orkut, Google's first social networking site, will cease to exist after September 30th, 2014, with the Internet giant deciding to shut down the service launched 10 years ago which is very popular in India and Brazil,  however, did not do so well in other parts of the world and lost sheen to rivals like Facebook. All Orkut users have also received an adieu mail stating that it will close down in September. 

Now that some of us including myself cannot recall how our Orkut profiles once looked, since we have completely lost touch. After ten years of sparking conversations and forging connections, It is time to say good bye to a social network that would have been a part of networking lives at some point.