The Orkutiyas, the Facebookiyas and the Twitteriyas

So around 2005, all Indians collectively and quite suddenly felt the need to have a full-fledged existence virtually too. Perhaps because they felt they were too cool for the real world and needed to channel their coolness elsewhere, or probably just because they sucked at living, generally.

Anyway, at that time, Orkut was all everybody was looking for. Orkut was just perfect. And that indicated the rise of an era, and the rise of a new dominant species called the ‘Orkutiyas’. You remember of course, the time when the words scrapbook and scrap took a whole new meaning, there were only three relationship statuses, those silly (but agreeably totally awesome) communities, and random people sending friend requests… or rather fraand requests. That was a world where privacy was quite secondary and ‘scrapping’ and writing about mes !_1k€ ?|-|1s (like this) was important.  Orkut was great in that we found many friends that we had lost, and it was easier to send messages to our present friends. We also interacted with strangers from Brazil and Pakistan. But it had its cons too. We wanted greater powers of documentation, more apps to play on when we were bored, maybe a more interesting interface and finally, we realised we needed greater control over privacy.  That’s where facebook rose to prominence.

Facebook was all new and shiny. It didn’t take long for the cool kids of Orkut to migrate to Facebook. The genuinely cool people and the hipsters came first, then the wild orkutiyas. They made up the ‘facebookiyas’. The beginning was smooth. It wasn’t as annoying. But slowly came the annoying facebook girls (not restricted to only girls) who somehow felt the need to document every small part of their life in form of million status updates and a new photo album. It was the narcissist’s paradise.  While all the incomprehensible estrogen-driven posts got big like-counts, the truly intellectually-driven witty posts were conveniently ignored. The newsfeed was depressing. At present, it’s filled with the same tired content that’s essentially stolen from reddit, shared gazillion times by different people. Yet, we are addicted. It’s a well known joke – Facebook is like your refrigerator. You keep opening it up every few minutes when you get bored, hoping to find something new and exciting, but nothing’s ever different.

So the smartasses of facebook got frustrated that their wit wasn’t validated by their own friends, and twitter came as a blessing. While the facebookiyas, used to the frills of facebook, weren’t too impressed by the boring concept of twitter that didn’t allow them to ‘like’ and ‘comment’ and upload albums, it was perfect for all who didn’t care and just wanted to broadcast their views within 140 characters. It was the perfect place to get your news about things all over the world and even the opinions of many people on all things. This was also the place where they could find celebs and (try to) interact with them. Therefore, twitter was where the revolutionaries of the internet lived, as well as the refined hypocrites. Here, it was the madness of getting followers, of getting tweets retweeted and getting thoughts acknowledged and approved by the elite. The average timeline was a rich source of smart, well-founded opinions. But these were from monkeys who were slaves to intellect. These were the ‘Twitteriyas’ who generally assumed themselves better than the ‘Facebookiyas’.

Now as a Twitteriya myself, I love twitter, and I wouldn’t want it to get polluted by the IQ deprived facebookiyas, or the blissfully backward orkutiyas (if they still exist). Twitter seems to be the pinnacle of evolution in social networking. And I totally understand that I may sound stupid within the next 3 years… just as Orkut, which was the greatest thing of its time, is comically depressing right now. But I have hope in my fellow Bharatvasiyos that we will remain addicted, to something or the other.