Orkut, bidding adieu

Orkut named after its creator Orkut Büyükkökten , a former google employee, stagnating over years now google has finally laid it to rest for good. Having two social networks (Orkut and google+) was a really awkward product offering for google anyways.

image courtesy: ZDnet.com

back in 2005,  I fondly remember making a google account just to login to Orkut (obviously with my wrong age, hehe). Connecting with friends was a totally different experience when compared to facebook, the number of  scraps (small messages) were considered a measure of your social status, anyone could view them and make conclusions. Albeit what I did on orkut was pretty much the same I do on facebook (sharing lol pics,videos,supporting my team,and the occasional social awareness status) but Orkut had its own charm, it included the thrill that you were using an "adult" website. Oh! and how can i forget the gifs we used to scrap each other with, using power scrap. (a third party tool, an enhanced way to scrap other people)  

And Academy of hacking community which got me started to experiment with random scripts on my poor old laptop.

 A Big thankyou to AOH, even though I never became adept at hacking but the plagiarized (most of it was) content helped me in a lot anyways, running random scripts  here and there then trying to revert my laptop to a stable state, in all it was awesome!

I miss gifs on facebook!

Until facebook came along......

It literally annihilated Orkut and myspace, the UI was way better, the community was better, having no support for gifs, html codes actually benefited facebook, giving it a uncluttered user interface. To be honest even google+ hasn't managed to catch up to facebook (I hardly login to google+) but google has cleverly (or rudely?) managed to make google+ a "backbone" of its other products such as Android, Google Play and blogger (and YOUTUBE!) itself. Google+ has managed to justify its existence but I doubt it will be ever used as a direct competitor to facebook which it was primarily aimed to compete with.

To my readers who have fond memories of Orkut

A reminder to save all your memories

Orkut will be officially shut down on September 30, 2014. Until then, you can:

• Log in, play games, & use your account as normal
• Export your photo albums to Google+
• Save your Orkut profile, scraps, testimonials, & community posts to your computer using Google Takeout (you can do this until September 2016)

Goodbye Orkut, thanks   :")