At noon on Sunday, the Windows Vista calendar date ends with “09”. Open Firefox and type “tuenti” in the browser bar. Autocomplete. Entrance. You get the opportunity to remove Legañas. AHA. You’ve been tagged in 86 photos, all from last night’s party, with two comments on the board, a friend request (“let it be Tania, let it be Tania…”), and an invitation to an event. MGMT’s ‘Pretend Play’ plays in the background. It’s a boring morning, but fifteen years from now, probably more, you don’t know that you’ll still remember it and talk about it. I even dedicate an article to him.

For anyone born between 1985 and 1995, Tuenti was the golden social network, a rite of passage for generations. Something much more complete than Fotolog, a safe space hidden from the view of the elderly (be sure not to index it on Google) and our first major meeting point on the internet. After being closed as a social network in X, it is now also closed as an operator. Telefónica, which has owned it since 2010, reserves the right to reuse its brand for future projects, as it thinks the Keteke project is dead and prefers to remove the checkbook, but the truth is that Tuenti has ceased to exist.

innocent originality

Long ago, they were called IRC, MSN, Terra chat, or MySpace reciprocating. Again, In Spain, Tuenti was the first person to wait for us in the scanner with our real name and surname, photos of our faces. and transferring our offline experiences there to discuss and share within 15 inches of our computer.

reporter It was he who made the first wave of online personal communication for several generations, but Tuenti from the offices of the Congress of Representatives was the one to take it a step further. A lot of people had barely uploaded a few of their photos online until they debuted on Tuenti, and within a few years they’ve already posted thousands of photos.

This is not a hyperbola. The latest trend on Instagram is to delete old photos and leave a short selection on our profile that highlights the best of our time there. YouTube Bergkamp’s. Five years of activity in Tuenti could turn into five thousand images, maybe more, because we did the opposite:

• We uploaded many group photos and very few individual photos.
• We uploaded photos of inside jokes that others don’t understand
• We uploaded photos without editing (except for the dreaded Picasa collages)
• We uploaded the photos without filters. Moral, not photo filter: It was acceptable to post images of drinkers, drunks, unconscious people, and people vomiting.

These publications also created an inspiring aura for those who followed suit, that is, those who are not yet old enough to go to the disco or brag about their university life. And the patterns were repeating. It has become chronic most summary online honesty: we’ve never been as original as on the blue blink social network. Then we’re back in the asshole.

The Tuenti sandunguero, who showed the L while holding a Steinburg in the other hand the day he got his license, is today the bane of LinkedIn, stirring up the deceptions of Colonel Sanders and the Kentucky brand. He hasn’t spoken to us since high school but now he’s giving us a unique opportunity to earn money by traveling as the CEO of his personal project.

Life in Tuenti was a rough spoiler, without losing the smile. It’s usual, almost tautological, to escape freely in a country with a collapsing economy. It was to bring out the college student’s diet uncomplicated: tuna pasta, not always tomato and climax gourmet, Thursday night kebab. In the photo, ten extra points if the cone protected by each shared circle appears in the background. Who describes their life on Instagram like this? Ana Iris Simon perfectly explained assistant: ‘In Tuenti we were ourselves, not the person we pretended to be’.

Tuenti was so involved that even the Episcopal Conference copied (and chopped up) her name and image to launch an anti-abortion campaign that resulted in cross-accusations and the footage being recalled.

The anti-abortion campaign launched by the Episcopal Conference in the spring of 2010 in imitation of Tuenti’s image is “You’re Inside”.

Dï$fRüTaa AL veERmEe, suFre x nö tënêRmeE

Technologically brilliant, Tuenti (this search engine couldn’t be more refined) resulted in a perverse indicator that was even worse than follower count: counter of visits to our profile. Because it is only exposed to our eyes, the mystic is all about anonymously revealing who is interested in us. A medal that you choose whether to show in the screenshot.

They were barbaric years. Architecture has a rough stage in Soviet brutality, and Tuenti Made in Spain glorified by a Californian caught in the midst of spooky stories, the harshest of the social media era. When the word “stance”, which is not sweetened, is told as it is, does not appear in the dictionary. We didn’t have vegan cachopos in 2009, but we did have a way of writing inherited from Messenger that terrified us.

As customers are directed to O2 with the disappearance of the brand, archeology dies from a happy memory for an entire generation. Like those who passed by the Ruta del Bakalao taking their children to the beach, and those who remember their happy years there, where now there are only craters; To see the ‘Tuenti’ brand was, in short, a return to the online chaos, the first emotional associations with people we knew only by sight. Taking a face photo without posing is not a pose. “Photo Tuenti!” to the friend who took the camera.

It’s a phase that will never come back, because we all feel we have a lot to lose, and every online presence is worth caring for, a personal brand is carefully watered day by day as if it were a plant, and what will future employers say? We can choose between being there or not, but being like in Tuenti is no longer an option..

It was also a tribute to canine aesthetics and a precursor to Internet misfit, but we already know that nostalgia sweetens everything. We’ll see if there’s anything that could sweeten up how unbearable Instagram is today in a decade. We will remember you fondly, Tuenti.