Bye bye orkut

When we log on to a social network, it is not only about an online profile. We actually build up to an alter ego of ourselves. We start adding friends from our real life to the alternate life, posting events until the gap between the real you and the online you narrows. And then one day there comes a better social network and we catch on to that starting again building our second life online.

That’s been the story for close to seven years now. At first, there was Hi5, then came Friendster, MySpace and finally Orkut.  For us in India, Orkut was the first mainstream social media network.  Almost everyone who was on internet in those days became an Orkut user.

Writing testimonials for people, communicating via scraps and joining communities was part of the daily routine for an internet user. If your community had over 1000 members, you were almost a celebrity.  Long-lost friends from school were back in your life. While we enjoyed this newfound freedom of social media,  Facebook came up and leveled the playing field for all.

The advent of Facebook spelled doom for Orkut. All of us switched to Facebook without a qualm, as this new site with its invitation-only format for adding friends made it easier to keep unwanted stalkers out. Orkut was floundering.

Google tried to revive Orkut without much success. In 2011?? They launched their own social networking product, Google Plus. That clearly meant that Orkut’s days were numbered.

Finally, on June 30, Google announced that Orkut will shut down. People had sometime so they could download their data and and have an archive of their Orkut profiles. Orkut will officially shut down on September 30.  But if you still have data on Orkut that you want to preserve, there’s  a solution

To preserve the nostalgia , NetTantra Technologies has come up with a Facebook application HostMyOrkut which can extract your Orkut data from an archive that you can download from Google. It helps you catch hold of the memories of the Photos, Scraps and Testimonials etc.

Once you download your data using Google Takeout, you can log on to the facebook app and upload the archive which you downloaded from google. The app creates an orkut like profile which enables you to view and browse your profile in the same manner like orkut.

HostMyOrkut is a free application and respecting the privacy of the users, the app doesn’t post or collect any information without their permission.

Beyond everything, the app is a gateway to mine your memories which you may never access after September 30th.