the rise and fall of social networking
Lately, I have been asking people around me questions like "Are you still a regular on Orkut?", "You don't seem to be orkutting much these days?". I get common answers. Most of the answers are like this: "Yeah, I don't get much time!", "The whole world seems to have switched to another social networking site - Facebook" or "Its not cool anymore". For the uninformed or underinformed - Orkut is the most popular Social Networking Website in India and other developing countries.
I have been tracking the popularity trend of Orkut for quite a while. Here's how I'd like to describe the lifespan of Orkut so far. This can well be extrapolated to a ton of other social networking websites.
They came, they saw, they conquered....they got bored....they moved on!
I remember getting sparse invitations to join Orkut as early as begninnnig of 2005. I had roughly 15-20 friends on my list. Some friends in my current friends circle and some long lost friends. I got interested by the idea of locating a lot of old friends. Things fizzled out and just like most others, I forgot about Orkut.
Then, in mid 2006, there came a sudden spurt of invitations to join the friends' network on Orkut. I got more interested. I started finding more and more old friends on Orkut. It became a topic of discussion at most of our weekend meets with friends. We would discuss and gossip about who's scrapping whom and what. I started spending many hours even at work checking people's profiles on Orkut. It just got too addictive.
I had my current friends, school friends, college friends, engineering friends, little cousins ... everyone in the world that I knew of my age or younger were on my friend's list on Orkut. There were some who I would message once a week. But more than 80% of the people on my list would have got just one message from me - "Hey, seeing you after such a long time...how are things with you....I'm doing good". After that, I never bothered to message them, look at their profiles or see who they're scrapping. I am sure its the vice versa for them too.
Orkut was very much at its peak around the end of 2006 and early 2007. Random guys with a filmstar's picture in their profile would message women, ladies and girls of all ages things like "hi, you look very cute .... you have a very good smile .... would you like to be friends?" I wonder why would guys scrap things like these to women when they would have 'married' in their profiles. It was still quite a trend.
People started chatting on Orkut. Just for kicks, I would read scraps of my younger cousins. They would be chatting about things that happened in college on Orkut. I found it quite fascinating. Kids started having a competition on who's got the highest number of friends in their list or who's got the highest number of scraps in their scrapbook.
Now that almost everyone's on Orkut and they've done the most interesting part of discovering their old friends on the same...what next?!?! Thats a tough question. Thats when the activities on Orkut started to plateau.
Come mid 2007, Orkut has started showing signs of ageing. There was a desperate attempt recently to add videos, blog, other features and a newer look to Orkut. How well that's working out? The bad news is - not so great! I look at people's scrapbooks to see the reducing frequency of scraps in the scrapbooks. What used to be 10 scraps every hour has now come down to 3 scraps in a day or even maybe, one scrap in 2 days.
I, myself used to check Orkut every other hour to see what new scraps I got or just to check someone's profile. I do that once in two days now. We cannot deny the fact that Orkut is ageing and its ageing fast. The reason is simple. What goes up full speed, comes down almost at the same speed - a.k.a. fad!
They say everyone's moving onto facebook. That's not good news for either orkut or myspace or friendster from where people have moved on. Worse still, its bad news for facebook too. Just like tonnes of people have moved to facebook leaving behind their older networking site, the odds are high that in a year or so, they'll move on to something else. The sad part is even before the social networking sites can figure out a revenue model for themselves, they'll face an end of life.
P.S: Guys who advertise their networking websites on TV and print are plain STUPID! They gotta realise - only WOM works, duh!
I have been tracking the popularity trend of Orkut for quite a while. Here's how I'd like to describe the lifespan of Orkut so far. This can well be extrapolated to a ton of other social networking websites.
They came, they saw, they conquered....they got bored....they moved on!
I remember getting sparse invitations to join Orkut as early as begninnnig of 2005. I had roughly 15-20 friends on my list. Some friends in my current friends circle and some long lost friends. I got interested by the idea of locating a lot of old friends. Things fizzled out and just like most others, I forgot about Orkut.
Then, in mid 2006, there came a sudden spurt of invitations to join the friends' network on Orkut. I got more interested. I started finding more and more old friends on Orkut. It became a topic of discussion at most of our weekend meets with friends. We would discuss and gossip about who's scrapping whom and what. I started spending many hours even at work checking people's profiles on Orkut. It just got too addictive.
I had my current friends, school friends, college friends, engineering friends, little cousins ... everyone in the world that I knew of my age or younger were on my friend's list on Orkut. There were some who I would message once a week. But more than 80% of the people on my list would have got just one message from me - "Hey, seeing you after such a long time...how are things with you....I'm doing good". After that, I never bothered to message them, look at their profiles or see who they're scrapping. I am sure its the vice versa for them too.
Orkut was very much at its peak around the end of 2006 and early 2007. Random guys with a filmstar's picture in their profile would message women, ladies and girls of all ages things like "hi, you look very cute .... you have a very good smile .... would you like to be friends?" I wonder why would guys scrap things like these to women when they would have 'married' in their profiles. It was still quite a trend.
People started chatting on Orkut. Just for kicks, I would read scraps of my younger cousins. They would be chatting about things that happened in college on Orkut. I found it quite fascinating. Kids started having a competition on who's got the highest number of friends in their list or who's got the highest number of scraps in their scrapbook.
Now that almost everyone's on Orkut and they've done the most interesting part of discovering their old friends on the same...what next?!?! Thats a tough question. Thats when the activities on Orkut started to plateau.
Come mid 2007, Orkut has started showing signs of ageing. There was a desperate attempt recently to add videos, blog, other features and a newer look to Orkut. How well that's working out? The bad news is - not so great! I look at people's scrapbooks to see the reducing frequency of scraps in the scrapbooks. What used to be 10 scraps every hour has now come down to 3 scraps in a day or even maybe, one scrap in 2 days.
I, myself used to check Orkut every other hour to see what new scraps I got or just to check someone's profile. I do that once in two days now. We cannot deny the fact that Orkut is ageing and its ageing fast. The reason is simple. What goes up full speed, comes down almost at the same speed - a.k.a. fad!
They say everyone's moving onto facebook. That's not good news for either orkut or myspace or friendster from where people have moved on. Worse still, its bad news for facebook too. Just like tonnes of people have moved to facebook leaving behind their older networking site, the odds are high that in a year or so, they'll move on to something else. The sad part is even before the social networking sites can figure out a revenue model for themselves, they'll face an end of life.
P.S: Guys who advertise their networking websites on TV and print are plain STUPID! They gotta realise - only WOM works, duh!
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