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“Orkut is dead. Facebook murdered it” – read the name of a facebook page which had millions of likes around the time I started using facebook.

If we can fall in love with social networks, Orkut was my first love. And like all firsts, Orkut was very special to me.

Everyone on Orkut had a scrapbook. It was like the facebook wall. Anyone could write in your scrapbook, and anyone could read your scrapbook (unless you’ve changed the privacy settings, of course). Back then, there was no ajax or continuous scrolling. One could see only 10 scraps at a time, and had to press “next” to see the next 10.

Scrapbooks used to easily fall prey to worms every now and then. One such Brazilian worm fondly called “Bom Sabado” (Good Saturday) spread when people clicked on a link in one of their scraps. It would send everyone a “Bom Sabado” scrap. Incidentally, this was asked in a tech quiz while I was in Class XI and I answered it right.

Communities were central to the Orkut experience. They used to have polls, events, and forums. Discussions in these forums were probably the first time I came across rationalism, and a lot of other beautiful stuff.

For a very short time, I was the moderator of Dr APJ Abdulkalam Fan Club which had over 2,00,000 members at that time. I was also the moderator of a cricket community for a long time, although I didn’t have much interest in Cricket.

A couple of years after I quit it to concentrate on class 10, I met the owner of that community in a super-fast train following a series of bizarre events. Me, +Nishan Ansari, and +Rajendran Sir (our Physics teacher) were travelling towards Kannur from Calicut after a medical quiz organized by the Calicut Medical College. We reached the railway station just in time for Rajendran Sir to barge ahead of the queue and get a ticket for the Mangala Express waiting on the platform. In the hurry we got into a reserved compartment. The ticket examiner let us sit there till the next stop. As soon as we got down at the next stop and got into the general compartment right next to it, I realized I didn’t have my Nokia 3120 Classic with me. I ran back to the first compartment to see if it had fallen where we were sitting. Rajendran Sir followed me, but Nishan stayed back in the general compartment. The train had begun moving when I discovered that the phone was inside my own bag. In short, we had left Nishan alone in the general compartment and come to this compartment for no reason.

And then, while we were standing at the door reading Nishan’s SMS about how his compartment was filled with cigarette smoke, a man with long hair that stood out like it does when you touch a Van de Graaf generator, emerged from the toilet side, and shook my hand asking if I was Akshay. He revealed himself as Unmesh Menon, aka Arcadian, the owner of the cricket community I was talking about. He was on a family trip to Kerala temples during his holidays between the PhD course he was doing in Optics at some German university. And that became the strangest coincidence in my life till then, and it remains so.

Orkut allowed us to see who visited our profile. Pretty much like how LinkedIn allows it now. This was both good, and bad. Good, because you could find out if someone is looking at your profile, and bad, because you can’t stalk at other’s profile.

There was also testimonials – you rate people and write a paragraph about them. And crush detection – you could tell Orkut if you have a crush on someone, and if the other person does the same to you Orkut will notify both of you about your crushes.

Above all, Orkut gave a huge prominence to our “about me”, much unlike facebook. Maybe facebook ditched that because “How would you describe yourself?” is a tough question in interviews.

I signed up and operated Orkut for a long time using a dial-up connection provided by BSNL. I think BSNL still provides this dial-up facility. All you had to do was connect your phone line to the modem of your computer, and then create a new dial-up connection with *99# as the number, our phone number as the username, and “bsnlten” or something as the password. The billing was based on the duration we remain connected and not on how much we download.

When I made it impossible for anyone to reach my home over phone, my parents had to get a broadband connection. And after that, I’d shuttle between school and Orkut all the time of my life.

On December 21, 2010, all my online accounts were cracked. My facebook account was defaced, my username changed to asdofpakishthan, (from asdofindia). My Google account was deleted, along with this blog, and so was my Orkut account. I could repair the damages and recover almost everything. Except the poor Orkut account. A new Orkut account was created automatically when the Google account was restored, and the old account was lost forever.

And for me, that was the end of Orkut.

Google decided to say bye bye to Orkut yesterday. And I have no data to take out from it.

Cliché, yet human beings are social animals. We can not live without social validation of our thoughts. That is why we communicate. That is why we debate, fight, and struggle hard to prove ourself right. Heck, that is why I write this post even.

Maybe this is an evolutionary trait. If we do things that are accepted by others, they cooperate with us. And then we copulate.

A less rudimentary way of looking at it is that our brain likes to have an accurate and complete idea of the world around it. It keeps updating its world-view to fit facts and observations that keep pouring in.
Lose a tooth. Now try to keep your tongue away from the hole that leaves. Impossible? Because the brain wants to make sure what it thinks is missing is actually missing.

When the knowledge is incomplete, the brain seeks feedback to make it complete. If you see someone moving, you look up at his face to know who he is. If you hear something fall, you turn around to see what it was.

When it comes to ideas, brain seeks feedback from other brains. This is what I called validation. We express ourselves so that others agree/disagree with us so that, in turn, we can strengthen/correct our idea. That is why authors love feedback and artists perform better when audience applauds.

Social networks make this process easier.
They bring people together on a single platform so that people can exchange their views, and give feedback on others’ views. They let our brains relax and feel at home.

This also makes them an essential part of the internet. The internet is analogous to the world. The users are us people. And the discussions on social networks are the conversations we have in real life. It is difficult to lead a life without communicating – in the real world, and on the internet.

Orkuts will die. But social networks will live on.

The ability to read and rationalize is unique to human beings. It could be the so called “fast paced environment” in the 21st century
that caused it, but we do not read things
carefully these days.

In ancient past the only way for people to communicate was to talk to each other – in sign language, or through pictures, or through a proper language. Conditions improved when we discovered script and ways to write down words. Printing press made it absolutely easy to create multiple copies of what we had to say. But computers connected to the internet changed the scenario.

With the ability to copy-paste and spread a word without spending a penny came a detestable habit – forgetting to read and analyse what is going through. While copy-pasting needed one to define one’s selection by dragging with their mouse around the right words, “Share” or “Forward” makes it a single-click affair, and much worse.

Here is an audio (in Hindi) which tells us how this ease-of-use has actually made us lazy to think about even the consequences of a click. A radio jockey pretends to be a Facebook manager who is rewarding active users and calls up two guys – a Muslim and a Hindu – who had put status updates against each other on the preceding day. When asked about what they had posted, they are ashamed to answer.

Notice that at the end of the audio the poor fellows accept their mistake and admit that they were “copy-pasting what someone else had posted”.

This happens in chain forwards too. Most chain forwards begin with a claim of authority (“The Scientific Association of ABC warns that…”) which is directly followed by a false claim (“…eating XYZ is harmful for body as it contains UUU…”). Following this there is either an unscientific explanation of how this works, or a very emotional story of someone being affected by not following this advice. And at the end there is the quintessential “forward this to your friends and relatives”.

The people who actually read this critically will focus on two things – the authority who is claiming it, and the explanation behind it. They proceed to verify that the authority has actually issued such a warning or that the purported harm is plausible according to the given explanation.

But the people who forward it mercilessly focus on different things – the claim, the emotional story, and the “harmless” opportunity to help a lot of unsuspecting people. I wonder if they even read the claims. They gloss over the long piece of text and then think “Uh, oh! What if this is true? This affects a lot of people, I suppose. After all there is no harm in just sharing it.” Click. Shared.

The people in the above audio clip might also have done the same. They would have superficially understood the emotions being conveyed in a message. And then they would have taken it for granted that the claims in it are actually true. And, worst of all, they would have shared the message with best intentions.

It is when we forget to slow down and think that mistakes tend to happen.

When in doubt, do not share. When you are compelled to share, “say something about it”. Add your opinion, or doubts about it along with what you share. And never share something that you have not read fully.

This post will tell you everything you need to know about:

1. Having to never lose any of your contacts
2. Having to never lose any of your chats/messages/whatsapp conversations, etc.

Required: An android phone (though the concepts presented in this post will apply to other smartphones like iPhone, and Blackberry too)

What you need to know
Your smartphone has two kinds of memory – the system memory (the internal memory) and the user memory (SD card, external storage)

So what?
So, when you inadvertently burn your phone’s motherboard, or decide to format your phone, you’ll lose everything on the internal memory and nothing on the SD card. *

How to utilize this knowledge and save your ass
Now that we know what kind of memory is vulnerable to being lost, we can think of backing up things stored on it – contacts, accounts, settings, application data, etc.

There are two places you can back your data up at:

1. SD card
2. Cloud (that is servers of google, apple, etc)

Contacts
Easy way: When adding a new contact, an often neglected option asks you “Create contact in: Google Account, Phone, or SIM?”

If you choose “Google” as the answer to the above (instead of “Phone”), you’re done. Over. That contact will be synced to your google account the next time you’re connected to internet, and voila! You’ll never lose it.

Note: Contrary to what some people think, choosing that the contact be saved in Google doesn’t mean that the contact won’t show up on your phone. A Google contact acts just like a phone contact, only that it will also be synced to the google server.

What about existing contacts on phone?
Moving the contacts you’ve already saved to your phone from your phone to Google is also going to be a piece of cake.

See if in your Contacts –> Menu or Contacts –> Menu –> Settings there is an option meaning “Move contacts”. If it exists,
Step 1: simply click “from: phone” and “to: google”.

Most phones I’ve come across does not have the above “move” option. For these, we’re going to take a scary approach.
Step 1: Contacts –> Menu –> Export Contacts
Choose “phone” and it will save all your phone contacts to your SD card.
Step 2: Contacts –> Menu –> Export Contacts
Choose “sim” if you also have some contacts on your sim card.
Step 3: (Scary step) Contacts –> Menu –> Delete all contacts! (Don’t worry, we have exported all your contacts to SD card in step 1 & 2)
Step 4: Contacts –> Menu –> Import Contacts
Choose “Google account” when you’re prompted where to import contacts to.

Alternate way
If you do not ever connect to internet, an alternate way to back up your contacts is to follow steps 1 and 2 above, and then step 4 when you need to restore your contacts. The disadvantage of this approach is that this is manual.

Alternate way with software download
Just download Contact Backup apps and these will do the above alternative automatically.

SMS Messages
The SMSes are unfortunately never backed up to the cloud by default. If you still use SMS for communication after all the TRAI regulations, I have the following app recommendation

SMS Backup+
It is free, and it works charmingly well, backing up all your SMS conversations to gmail thus allowing you to use gmail’s search to search even your SMS conversations.
Advantages:

• Backs up SMS, Call Log, and even Whatsapp conversations (excluding group messages)
• Backs these up to GMail!
• Free!

Whatsapp Conversations
Whatsapp has a built-in backup feature. By default it is on, and runs at 4 AM every day. It creates a backup of all your chats to the “Whatsapp” folder of your SD card. You can also trigger a manual backup, in case you know you’re going to break your phone.

To-do:

• Never “Delete and exit group”
• Never “Clear all conversations”

Restoring data after crash:

• After you install whatsapp again, it automatically detects the backup inside “Whatsapp” folder on your phone’s SD card, and offers to restore conversations for you.
• Do NOT choose to continue without restoring. Once you do this, you’ll potentially fork your message history thus leaving you with no chance to have a “total” history of your whatsapp messages.

Advanced restore: (If you buy a new phone or something)

•  In your new phone, and new SD card, there’s no “Whatsapp” folder. So, when whatsapp runs it won’t detect the backup (because there is no backup)
• Just copy the “Whatsapp” folder and paste it in your SD card BEFORE installing whatsapp. Now, whatsapp automatically detects your backup and restores messages from it.

PRO-TIP:
The whatsapp backup file is saved in your SD card. So, if you lose your phone, and lose the SD card along with it, you could end up losing whatsapp backups too. But there’s a way to sync those backups to the cloud. Checkout Dropsync, or Auto Backup for Whatsapp
 
Settings
In newer android phones, there is a setting “backup & restore” that allows backup of all settings. But otherwise you’ll need different apps. Just search “backup settings” in play store.

Other apps
The way android is structured, the data of apps cannot be accessed by other apps (unless you’re rooted). So, if the app (whose data you’re trying to backup) doesn’t have a backup option, you are out of luck. (If you’re really into it, you can root your phone. Although this might lead to countless sleepless nights)

*Some phones have an external storage that is built-in, or comes with the phone. I haven’t played around with this a lot, but chances are that this acts like an SD card.

That it is not about the social network, it is about me.

I had just one thing in my mind when I took a break – “focus on studying”.
I thought facebook was the reason why I could not focus on textbooks, that I would automatically start doing better when I stop using facebook.

And boy, was I not wrong?

I started getting distracted by gmail!

I started to read more of the email subscriptions I have, I started visiting more and more online magazines, reading through them, article after article.

It only felt counterproductive.

What was missing?
Having eliminated what seemed to be the greatest distraction, I was still distracted, and I started wondering why. I decided to observe myself. And the results? Not surprising at all.

I simply could not read more than a paragraph of my textbook without getting distracted. Either I would start thinking about something in the textbook. Or I would start thinking about my college. Or I would get a great new idea which will change the way world works. Or I desperately want to visit some random website on the internet.

I simply could not read.

But why?
I don’t know.

I know only one thing. That there is something wrong with my will. I have an obsessive disorder. I am addicted to distractions.

If all goes right, I will come out of this. I will curb that incessant urge to be in the know about everything. I will learn how to ignore some of the unread notifications. I will learn how to archive some emails without going through them. I will learn how to even check email only in two slots every day.

But I will still be spending hours to fix tiny errors on my blog template.

I know. I am crazy.

Internet has made traditional journalism obsolete. But we have not realized it yet.

Newspapers in print were limited by space and functionality, which restricted the stories they covered to only those very few important ones and some fresh stories. Today’s first page news would be buried inside the daily tomorrow, and will be forgotten the day after. There might be a follow up story, but it is published only if it is of enough importance to warrant another covering.

For the public, this means that there is no continuity. Stories stop abruptly. Promises are forgotten. Impressions fade. They are constantly distracted by newer, more exciting events. And they conveniently forget the older, more important ones.

• What is up with the investigation of that infamous crime?
• Where is that famous person now? What is she doing?
• Which film is that controversial director working on now?
• What happened to that sincere police officer who was receiving death threats from various points? Is he even alive today?
• Where is that ground breaking cure for the terminal illness? Why can’t I buy it from the drug store already?

That is where the internet comes in.

Blogging sites, and micro-blogging sites have up to an extent relieved the pressure on newspapers to publish all the stories they receive. What is not fit for the print edition, goes to the web edition. Permanent columnists are given blogs which they can update at their own will. And individuals can publish on their own, and link to their stories via micro-blogging sites which then take care of content delivery.

But it does not have to stop there.

Newspaper websites can change their form. They can switch to a publish-subscribe pattern. And it needs minimal change to the way they are already working. Here’s how it goes.

Every news item will have a “subscribe to this story” button on it. A user (identified by emails, or by creating an account on the site) who “subscribes” to a story will get all the follow up items from that story. Those follow-ups which are not worthy for prime attention, will not go on the front page of the website, but they will nevertheless go to the feed/email/equivalent of everyone who has “subscribed” to the story.

Furthermore, there could even be an encyclopedic division of stories, which a new user can browse and subscribe. That is, on clicking “browse stories” the user would reach a page with many categories listed, like “movies”, “celebrities”, “politics”, “crimes”, “disasters”, “accidents”, etc. Under each category there could be sub categories, like for “crimes”, there could be “rapes”, “theft”, “murder”, “bribery”, etc. and so on.

Essentially, this website will look like twitter accounts maintained by journalists. Instead of following “people”, the user can follow “stories”.

But isn’t that what content aggregators do?
Yes, and no.
No, websites like reddit and stumbleupon cover only wide topics, not individual stories.
Yes, Google news has “See realtime coverage” button under each story, but this is “determined automatically by a computer” and doesn’t connect non-contiguous coverage. For the time being, the function I’m proposing is best served by Wikipedia. Each notable event gets its own wiki article, and volunteers update the wiki with latest coverage of the story. This is unreliable, and not enough.

We need paradigm shift in how journalists cover stories.

If you are a journalist, and you covered a story once, you should make it a point to follow that story up till its end. You should make sure that promises are kept, that justice is served, that people are not forgotten. You should keep the timelines alive. And do not worry about having no audience, because if something is worth covering once, it is worth covering till its completion. If it is not, then you should not have covered it at first.

And media will rise as the relentless pursuer of truth.

The law is clear.

IPC 354A
1) A man … iv) making sexually coloured remarks, shall be guilty of the offence of sexual harassment.
…
3) Any man who commits the offence shall be punished with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to one year, or with fine, or with both.

But it is not complete. What is a “sexually coloured remark”?

• “You are looking gorgeous today” ?
• “You look stunning in this dress” ?
• “I would kill to be your husband” ?

If you follow this definition (which you’re bound to by law), you cannot seduce a woman without sexually harassing her. If you can’t seduce a woman, how can you ever dream of having sex with her? If you can’t have sex with any woman, how can you satisfy your biological urges?

For resolving this Gordian knot, we shall take a cue from the Holy Quran.

• 33:59 [edited for men] “Tell thy husbands and thy sons and the men of the law-fearing to draw their cloaks close round them.”
• 24:31 [edited for men] “And say to the law-fearing men that they cast down their looks and close their eyes to not look at women, and let them wear their head-coverings over their eyes, and not see anyone except their wives or their mothers, or the mothers of their wives, or their daughters, or the daughters of their wives, or their sisters, or their sisters’ daughters, or their brothers’ daughters, or their men, or those whom their right hands possess, or the female servants not having need (of men), or the children who have not attained knowledge of what should be hidden from men; and let them not strike their feet so that what they hide of their manliness may be known”
• 33:55 [edited for men] “It shall be no crime in them as to their mothers, or their daughters, or their sisters, or their brothers’ daughters, or their sisters’ daughters, or their men, or the slaves which their right hands possess, if they speak to them unveiled”

We shall walk around wearing veils. Not looking at any woman, not giving our natural tendencies a chance to arouse our masculinity. We shall refrain from talking to women, from thinking of them as potential mates for courting, from having romantic pleasure. We shall abstain from sexuality.

And we shall castrate ourselves.