Orkut: would you write me a testimonial?

Asking a friend to write nice things about you is a slightly awkward social arrangement. Orkut gave it a feature name. A testimonial could sit on your profile, explaining to visitors what a delightful person you were, in somebody else’s words.

If you had ever struggled to describe yourself, this had its advantages. The difficult part might come later, when the friend who had praised you so generously wanted one in return.

Alongside scraps and communities, testimonials belong to a vocabulary that can bring back a particular period of being online before you have remembered your old profile photograph.

Your profile came with other people’s contributions

The Indian Express’s retrospective (opens in a new tab) describes Orkut’s scraps and testimonials, and communities formed around interests including Bollywood and cricket. There were different ways to make yourself visible: what you wrote, what friends wrote about you and the groups you chose to join.

A testimonial made affection unusually public. A friend could take considerable trouble over an appreciative paragraph while wanting it to look as though the words had come easily. The person being described would know whether it sounded sincere. So, potentially, would several mutual friends.

A community did something different. Its subject gave strangers a starting point for conversation. You could seek out people interested in something you liked, rather than needing to know them before you arrived. Joining also added another small detail to the version of yourself a visitor could see.

None of that means the old web was always kind. It does explain why the memory of Orkut can attach to a particular feature rather than a general sense that social media used to be better. A scrap or a testimonial involved a specific thing somebody had taken the trouble to write.

Google put a date on the goodbye

In its June 2014 farewell (opens in a new tab), Google announced that Orkut would close on 30 September. It said growth at other services, including YouTube and Blogger, had outpaced Orkut, and gave users time to export their material.

That was a fairly definite ending for the original service. It didn’t depend on whether a particular friend group had already moved elsewhere or still checked in. There was a date after which the old routine would no longer be available.

The announcement also proposed an archive of public communities. That was the plan Google described then, rather than a promise that every old profile, exchange or photograph can still be recovered now.

A familiar name doesn’t bring the scrapbook back

Later discussion about Orkut’s founder or a possible return can be interesting without amounting to the restoration of the original network. The old relationships and their written traces were part of what people used, not just the name above the page.

Consider the testimonial again. A new site could provide the same box for appreciative words. It couldn’t reproduce the moment when a particular friend sat down to explain, rather enthusiastically, what you were like.

Somebody may have oversold your sense of humour. You may have approved the testimonial anyway. That is a more recognisable thing to miss than an abstract version of a simpler internet.