Orkut was still alive?
Posted in Social on July 4th, 2014 at 21:14:46Google announced this week that they will be closing down Orkut at the end of September.
Most people reacted with “That thing still exists?” (Unless, of course, they are Brazilian.)
I was an Orkut hipster; I joined before it was cool. (Specifically, I joined back when the network actually wasn’t ~fully connected; my roommate in college and I had different ‘friend graph’ sizes, IIRC.)
Apparently, I used my crschmidt@livejournal.com email to join Orkut. I was able to login and see my profile, and see some of the testimonials that were left for me a decade ago, mostly from friends on LiveJournal.
The one that gets me, is this one (left by an anonymous user):
I would not push Chris Schmidt in to oncoming traffic. Normally when I say that about somebody, it has to do with my ethical code. In this case, though, it has a lot more to do with who Chris is as a human being.
At the time, I’m pretty sure I figured out who left this testimonial, but the cultural context in which it was left has been lost to me now. So I’m left with a vaguely positive testimonial from an anonymous source from a social network I abandoned a decade ago.
… Actually, that sounds about as positive as an end-of-life social networking experience can be. I’ll take it!