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Journalism of Courage
Can you reveal your age without revealing your age? That is what corporate honchos, actors and social influencers were busy doing on Thursday as a new trend rook over Twitter. The idea was for the people to revisit their childhood and mention something only their generation will understand. Participating in the trend were Paytm CEO Vijay Shekhar Sharma, actor Swara Bhasker and many others. While Swara mentioned “Blank call” as the answer, Sharma mentioned “A/S/L (Age/Sex/Location)”.
The trend was triggered by a post asking, “Without saying you age, say something a young person today wouldn’t understand.” A Twitter handle named Keh Ke Peheno posed the question along with photographs of antenna and the Doordarshan icon. Among other things that the post dug out was Orkut.
As #Orkut started trending on the micro-blogging platform, memes, jokes and a generous dose of nostalgia flooded Twitter. Memes tried to explain Orkut to the younger generation used to Meta and Snapchat, while others remembered the good old time where online world came without controversies.
https://twitter.com/arpit_apoorva/status/1486661766750740482
https://twitter.com/WPSettingbox/status/1486636147212099584
Last year, a similar trend was seen when speculations were rife that Twitter and Facebook maybe banned in India. Among the many ‘Plan B’ that netizens came up with was the long lost Orkut.
Named after its creator Orkut Büyükkökten, a Turkish engineer working with Google at the time, the platform was launched in 2004 but gained widespread popularity in 2007-08, particularly in Brazil and India.
On September 30, 2014, the website announced that it was shutting down the platform. Although its creator later launched a similar platform called Hello, it never got the same love.
Orkut was launched in 2004, the same year when Facebook was founded. According to reports, Orkut was a “20 per cent project” or a project which was born out of Google workers spending a fifth of their time on ideas, not necessarily related to their job responsibilities.
