05 July 2014

Adios amigos, Orkut

It was today, that I received an email saying that Orkut was shutting down.

To preserve your memories of Orkut, use Google Takeout to save your account into a zip file (you'll be able to do this only until September 2016).

If you've created communities on Orkut, you should know that Google will create archives of the communities that are public (communities that aren't public won't be included in the archive), so it will still be available on the internet as read-only archives. Individuals can login to Orkut (before 30th September 2014) and delete posts they don't want as part of Google's archive.
You can't transfer communities to Google+. The Orkut mobile app will stop working, and nobody can create new Orkut accounts from 30th June 2014 onward (oops, it's already July).

Nostalgia. That's the word that describes a place I found many of my friends again, shared memories with them, created the Stage Anchoring community which helped numerous newbies who were afraid of speaking on stage, became moderator of the Ipe/Iype community and had fun. For some people, Orkut means a lot more.
Faking news came up with a funny article on Orkut's funeral, ending it with
A highly placed source within Google tells Faking News that servers of the search engine will not perform any search operation during the entire event.

Named after its creator, Google employee Orkut Büyükkökten, Orkut has been around for 10 years, and very popular in India and Brazil. I still remember the time that friends were encouraging everyone to move to Facebook, and I didn't want to, because Facebook's UI was much more difficult to use than Orkut's. Of course, things have changed, and the domino effect of people abroad using Facebook and (probably) thus, the practice of others in India too joining Facebook continued.

Apart from it's controversies, Orkut had also introduced nice features like "fans", testimonials (did you know this feature was introduced to find out which profiles were genuine) and a funny feature where you could mark a person as someone you had a crush on, and if that person also did the same to your profile, both of you would get notified of it.

For me, Orkut is primarily about the communities I created and moderated. Some screenshots:


Really, this was just for fun. Glad both ended up getting an exactly equal number of votes :)

This nice community was created by Ashish Ipe





And a special testimonial from a college-mate who admired how I used to win prizes in college fests in college and in neighbouring colleges. Also because of the hobby project I won.


June 15, 2006:
"Ace of Kalpatharu Institute of Technology...The jack of all traits n some of we guys call him master..You talk of talents b4 him n u get into a super market. Oh man, he is juss a programming freak. Being a mechie mechie its kinda unusual but there is lot much in store behind dis innocent face. He is a total sellout @ college fests n not only me but our gang being d prima facie of it..hey master be innovative as u are n be in touch.."


Well, a big thank you Orkut team, for the connections and memories you created!!!

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