Facebook socially outplaying Orkut!

Posted on 18 May 2010 by BMMBoxer

Back in the year 2004, from the warehouse of the online biggie Google, came the pioneer website for Social Networking, Orkut. www.orkut.com was recorded as the most popular website for staying in touch with people across the world. Orkut definitely didn’t expand with the help of any promotion or publicity. The loud and swift word of mouth was enough to get millions of people hooked onto this website.

I still recall those lazy days in the year 2007, when my friends and I were nothing less than Orkut addicts. We were in the final year of our school and we had this funny concept that we ourselves had invented – ‘Scrap Badhao Abhiyan!’. In school, we would talk about creating polls, communities for our batch, making interesting forums. Oh! Being a Moderator was a real matter of honor. We would return from school and there our fingers almost raced on the keyboards as we discussed the exams that were approaching, the journals to be completed on Orkut. We would plan our parties, send invitations online via Orkut. That was the beginning of Social Networking and it elevated obsession to a complete new level. Parents blamed Orkut big time when their teenagers refused to attend the marriage ceremonies or the Pujas held in the complex. Orkut was such a craze that it even came up with a verb form of itself as in Orkutting.

E.g.:
My friend puts forth this statement. “Hey! I had called you up but you didn’t receive my call. What were you busy with?”
I answer it glowingly, “Oh! My cell phone was on silent mode. I was busy Orkutting.”

Orkut was nothing less than an elixir for people from almost every strata of the society around the globe.

Just like every civilization falls and a new one rises from the ashes, same thing happened with Orkut. Facebook can be called the successor of Orkut. Though it launched itself just after a month Orkut was launched; it gained popularity in the recent past.

Taking my own example, I honestly found Facebook highly complex in comparison to Orkut. Hence, even after receiving way too many requests, I didn’t bother to join Facebook as an active member. While the other fact is, I was too obsessed with Orkut to think of even being a part of the Facebook community.

As the law of Diminishing Marginal Utility states that everything after a certain point of time, reaches the level of saturation, I feel this is what is the actual cause as to why Facebook suddenly turned out to be a massive hit among the people who earlier vouched for Orkut. Facebook groups, quiz and updating status became the passion and Orkut lost the appeal it had earlier.

Today, you meet someone new and before asking for their phone numbers, you tend to ask whether they have a Facebook account or not. This clearly states that Facebook is the latest and the most happening thing in the online social networking circuit.

Never to forget, these social networking sites do have their cons. The controversies associated with these websites are definitely unforgettable ones. But, who cares about them as long as you find your buddies to chat from any nook and cranny of the world??

Cheers to the success of Facebook and I hope twitter does not defeat Facebook the way Facebook defeated Orkut.

Let’s keep our fingers crossed to see what’s the future of social networking! Till then, happy Orkutting, face booking and tweeting!

Arundhati Chatterjee

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