The Quintessential Outsider

…that keeps amazing me even now, more than two years after joining it. First it was just a nice way to keep in touch with existing friends and meet new ones, then we saw how and why it is better than other similar ‘networking’ sites, then there were the discoveries like how to find out which of your friends have most recently signed in, how the crush-list feature works, then the profile views, better ways of searching for people and communities, of organizing your friends list, and of course, coming across long-lost friends. It keeps getting better – we now have a faster and easier way of replying to scraps (which existed in Firefox earlier, and has now been introduced in IE).

And now, I have come across another ‘fun-fact’ . How do you find out when did someone join Orkut? Well, you can check their scrapbook, but what if they have been deleting their scraps? (I know a lot of people like that) I think there’s no way of finding out the exact date, but there is, as I found out, a very precise way of comparing, say between two persons, who joined Orkut earlier.

No, I am not that ‘lukkha’, to sit and try to discover weird things about Orkut, or anything else for that matter. However, I noticed that whenever I tried to save my display pic, or a pic from my album, I would get a number, the same number every time, for any pic from my album, ‘593364.jpg’. I knew this for a long time, but never gave much thought to it. However, recently, I came across a few nice pics in some friends’ albums, and I saw that these numbers were revealing a pattern – the later someone has joined Orkut, the larger is the number associated with their pics.

It was easy to ignore this earlier, as the numbers could be dismissed as some random six- or seven-digit crap. However, with the number of Orkut users crossing 30 million now, it is easy to distinguish between those who have been on Orkut since 2004 (with six-digit ‘user numbers’, if I can call them that), and those who have joined recently (with 8-digit numbers).

So now, if you come across the profile of a certain Orkut Büyükkökten claiming to be the founder of Orkut, you have an easy way to verify it . Meanwhile, here’s a task for the real ‘lukkhas’ – find out the first person to ‘join Orkut’! You can begin with my ‘user number’, 593364, and work backwards. In fact, you will find a lot of people in my friends list with lower six-digit numbers. I am yet to see someone with five digits or fewer, though. Progress can be reported by commenting here, or in my scrapbook .

There are a few ‘catches’, though. What about those who never uploaded any pic on their profile? What about those who deleted their profiles? Did their numbers get ‘allotted’ to someone else? Well, I do not know, and have no clue how to find out. Maybe someone more knowledgable, or more ‘lukkha’, or working for Google, can help.

Meanwhile, here’s wishing all of you a very Happy Diwali! Enjoy yourself, but please try to do it with more light, than smoke and noise!