Orkut was still alive?
Google 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!