Last week, I got a blast from the past; I received an orkut friend request from an old acquaintance, its been ages since I accessed orkut page much less connect with anyone. This made think about the old days when orkut was a rage and how Indians got the first taste of social networking ( it was simply called orkutting back then :P )
How many scraps do you have ??
People actually kept count of the scraps on their profile and cheered on when they hit land marks like 1000, 2000 etc. Any guy/gal with 5000 scraps was popular but someone with 10,000 scraps was a orkut super-star.
Profile visit kiya but scrap nahi kiya
The creepy feature of orkut allowed you to note people who visited your profile recently, and people took serious offense to not been scrapped when someone left their digital footprint on their profile.
Sugary sweet testimonials
the extension of the how many scraps syndrome was how many testimonials do I have, emotional blackmail and quid-pro-quo ensured. But on the other hand, it did make for cheap thoughtful birthday gifts ;) get it “on your birthday, I really wanna share ….”.
Increasing Fans on orkut
I know one particular friend of mine who would become fans of all people in the friend list, so that even 50% reciprocity would ensure he/she would become the most Fanned person.
Wanna be fraindship
as a guy, I wasn't so bothered but girls got hit on so often with unsolicited friendship requests from English murdering desis :)
Today, orkut has become a sort of relic, with facebook and twitter ruling the roost today, but orkut had its dream run in the days of clunky assembled desktops and seedy cyber cafes. Now we have neat 3G and GPRS smartphones.
Cheers to the initial heady days of social networking!
Another funny thing I used to see on orkut is some orkutters (?) writing 'long time no scrap' .. Most of the times, it was from people whom we see everyday ..
ReplyDeleteI joined orkut quite late when it's charm was fading away ..
And the bizarre thing I found about it is the profile visits ..
As you said, people used to blame(?) me for visiting their profile and not writing 'h r u?' .. :-)
I am not much into this social networking anyway, just find it to be an excuse in relationships, but orkut helped me find my distant and oldest school friends for which I will always be thankful :-)
Btw, this post was Super, Gans ..
Few of my friends even used orkut as an alternative to matrimonial sites then ..
Finding the girl's profile on shaadi.com and then locating her on orkut :-)
Matrimonial sites charge you for messaging, but orkut is free .. :-D
Another pointless (!) thing people did ;-)
@ sandip- haha yes testimonials helped in back ground checks in matrimonial match making :P I seem like an angel in most of them
ReplyDeleteHey, your post reminds me ...wasn't it on orkut that we met again? Oh btw need to check my scrapbook, just in case there were any new scraps :) catch ya later on FB :D
ReplyDelete@ Beena -We did reconnect on orkut, infact you go back long enuf u can read the first scraps:-) smething facebook lacks!
ReplyDelete