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Google Kills Orkut To Focus On YouTube, Blogger and Google+
An anonymous reader writes "Bad news for Brazillians. Google's first social network, Orkut, will be shut down at the end of September. A farewell message on the Orkut blog reads in part: "Ten years ago, Orkut was Google's first foray into social networking. Built as a '20 percent' project, Orkut communities started conversations, and forged connections, that had never existed before. Orkut helped shape life online before people really knew what "social networking" was. Over the past decade, YouTube, Blogger and Google+ have taken off, with communities springing up in every corner of the world. Because the growth of these communities has outpaced Orkut's growth, we've decided to bid Orkut farewell (or, tchau). We'll be focusing our energy and resources on making these other social platforms as amazing as possible for everyone who uses them."
I thought Orkut was already scrapped a couple of years ago in the normal progression of Google abandoning old stuff. This is like hearing about a celebrity dying and your first thought is "he was still alive?"
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
They're into it until they get bored. So long, suckers.
Orkut already was a wasteland 2~3 years ago as everyone in Brazil moved to Facebook. Not much will be lost.
They're there in their room. You're on your own.
I had exactly the same reaction when I read that Peter O'Toole died.
Google kills Youtube, Blogger and Google+ to focus on Orkut.
That's a lot of people facing bad news :(
It's been very active lately with the world cup being here this year. not surprising they are scraping it, but still, if they think people will go to google plus over facebook, they're nuts...
and found that the nannyware at my office blocks Orkut. FB and Twitter work fine, so it looks like Orkut was sabotaged by the nannyware clowns at WatchGuard.
I get why Google is getting rid of the service, but two months notice is the best that they can do?
For the random people that use Orkut like others use Facebook, it really is not a lot of time to figure out what to do with potentially gigabytes of information. That holds particularly true for anyone that is not technically savvy.
Seeing as they own Google+, it would seem like it would make more sense to have a single click to transition accounts over to Google+ rather than simply kill this for the people that use it. It's no wonder that people cannot trust Google to properly host their content.
How long before Blogger gets replaced and then defuncted?
Really? Google+ has taken off? That is news to me and anyone working outside of Google.
Yeah, ok.
Google announced today that it is killing Google+ in order to have more time to kill other products. Integrating Google+ into things was actually taking engineers away from their primary task of killing products.
Larry Page says to Sergey Brin: "Hey Sergey, did you know that Orkut has ten million Brazillian users?"
Sergey looks puzzled, then says "Larry, remind me again how many is a brazillion..."
Paid Q&A/Research
Orkut is dead a long time ago but it was not always this cesspool of spam, chain letters and filth. Once upon a time it was a cool project.....
In the best of my recollection, once upon a time, in 2004, Orkut (the site) was nothing but a 20% project of some Orkut Buyukkokten dude on Google. It had a simple goal: to connect Orkut (the dude) with his close friend and to map the whole six degrees of separation thing. In an era of the web development when breadcrumbs where not in vogue Orkut (the site) had it, even two: one with the degrees of separation between you and whoever profile you were viewing (through your common friends network) and the other with the degrees of separation between you and Orkut (the dude).
And in the very beginning it worked because it was invite only and that made the invitees to be more or less part of the same socioeconomic and cultural background (even among countries). Orkut (the dude) invited his pals on Google Campus and on Stanford. Some Stanford dude invited some Brazilian dude on a federal university (UFRGS), who invited his pals on campus, who invited some pals on other federal universities (UTMG, UFV, UFRJ) and, in the invite only degrees of separation phase, everything was good and beautiful.
Everybody knew everybody else, connections were forged, Adam Rifkin gamed the system, some robot put people in jail, baby animals got lasers and everybody partied hard.
The it died, the cool kids moved away either to Facebook or completely away from public social networks. Now get off my lawn!
Google suspending Orkut is but a tiny example of why you better communicate with people by using e-mail directly. Or, if you must, go the old fashioned way (*cough* Usenet *cough*). But rely on a specific social network run by a single company, and you're sure that it will be shut down sometimes down the road. Even Facebook, not to mention Google+ will someday go the way of Geocities.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
Focusing on blogger would be excellent. This is one of few places an activist can write something, get DDoSed, and Google will treat the activist who's publishing something others don't like as the victim of the DDoS rather than the perpetrator like every other ISP. They will take a multi-gigabit syn flood for you for $0. It's an amazing position to start from.
It's also an important thing for the Internet. Writing long screeds of text seems like a great idea in this short-attention-span world. For geeks, it's also a useful way to document technical things, better than Stack Overflow and stupid chatty videos. I don't have a learning disability, thanks, and would like my information in searchable, organized written form.
but the product has become boring, limited compared to competing blogs to start out with and no new features have been added aside from pestering you to join G+, and all the noticeable changes they've made are worse than nothing: fancy glitzy Javascript crappo and trendy design-fascist scrollbars that don't work. If they hype it up as something they're "focusing" on, maybe some senior programmers will get to work on it and mentor the guys doing all this pointless tinkering.
I keep wondering when the world will wake up and realize that 'social networking' is a scam. How many times in how many ways does Facebook have to ream its user base before people realize that they are being abused there? How many times in how many ways do people's personal information (posts, contacts, emails, etc) have to be mined, analyzed and resold/abused before people realize that they are the 'product' with these free 'social' services? What do you think happens with everything you do with Gmail (your contacts, the emails, etc)? Using Google Docs for business documents, really?
I mean, really, people get into a tizzy over the NSA gathering phone numbers and then blithely post all sorts of confidential information on social networks that, in many cases explicitly, mine and resell that information (or simply republish that info the internet at large where everyone, including the NSA, can see it)?
Social networking is just playing a bunch of narcissists for stooges. Still mystified that it is taking people so long to realize it.
So Google+ has apparently taken off! I must have missed the memo!
Well, I suppose if the frame of reference was Orkut, then yes it has. Sure, Google+ has tens of millions of members... who aren't actually aware they are members of Google+.
#DeleteChrome
If it has taken off, it means that anoying everybody into pulp works.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Maybe next they'll pull the plug on google+ try giving a shit about search results sucking Malda's sweaty asshole.
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What, nobody make the XKCD reference yet? Too proud?
http://xkcd.com/1361/
Aberrations have appeared in my destiny prognostication engine!
Page after page after page of retarded HEUAHEUAHEUA. When brazillians invade a service they crap on it to the point nobody else wants to use it.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
"Orkut" is Finnish slang for orgasms (the singular is "orkku").
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Albeit from another company that Orkut the human worked at. Marvelous to time travel back to the days where Google was about to IPO, Friendster was in play, and Facebook had yet to flourish.
From: http://archive.wired.com/techbiz/media/news/2004/06/64046
Lawsuit: Google Stole Orkut Code
Daniel Terdiman Email 06.30.04
A small social-networking software company has filed suit against Google, claiming that much of the source code behind orkut.com, the search engine's popular social service, was stolen by a former engineer.
In its lawsuit, Affinity Engines, based in Palo Alto, California, said engineer Orkut Buyukkokten illegally took the code that he had written for the company -- which he co-founded -- with him when he joined Google. Affinity Engines also claimed that Buyukkokten promised Affinity Engines that he wouldn't develop a competing social-network service for Google. Affinity Engines, which filed the claim on May 25 in Santa Clara Superior Court, is seeking unspecified damages and royalties.
In addition to nearly identical text found in similar features in orkut.com and Affinity Engine's social-networking products, the suit cited several identical software problems in each company's service.
"In its initial investigation, AEI (Affinity Engines) uncovered a total of nine unique software bugs ... in AEI's inCircle product that were also present in orkut.com," according to the lawsuit. "The presence of these bugs in both products is highly indicative of a common source code.... orkut.com contains software and source code copied, developed or derived from AEI's inCircle software or source code."
After graduating from Stanford in 2001, Buyukkokten and fellow graduate Tyler Ziemann built a social-networking service called Club Nexus, which they sold to Stanford for use by the university's undergraduates, according to the lawsuit. Club Nexus was a success, and Buyukkokten and Ziemann subsequently decided to form Affinity Engines and design a product for the Stanford Alumni Association called inCircle.
As a developer of social-networking software for university students and alumni, Affinity Engines was among the first players in what has become a very crowded field. Today, social-networking services like Friendster, Tribe, LinkedIn and orkut attract millions of users by giving them a way to easily connect to friends and friends' networks of friends.
Meanwhile, for Google, the suit comes at an awkward time. The company is currently in the process of an initial public offering, which is expected to be one of the biggest ever. But Affinity Engines isn't the only company suing Google. Among others, the company faces a patent-infringement suit from Overture regarding auctioning placement in search-engine results.
For its part, Google shrugged off Affinity Engines' allegations. ... thoroughly and concluded that the allegations are without merit."
"Affinity Engines has not provided any evidence to Google that their source code was used in the development of orkut.com," wrote David Krane, the company's director of corporate communications, in a statement to Wired News. "We have repeatedly offered to allow a neutral expert to compare the codes in the two programs and evaluate Affinity's claims, but Affinity has rejected that offer. We have investigated the claims
The origins of the orkut code dispute arose, the lawsuit claimed, when Buyukkokten, a Turkish citizen, decided to take a job with Google to solve his visa problems. He continued to work on inCircle, however, and signed agreements in 2002 and 2003 stating that any social-networking technology he created belonged to Affinity Engines, the company said.
But, the suit alleged, Google soon became interested in owning a social-networking service. When its $30 million offer to buy Friendster was spurned, it turned to Buyukkokten.
"In July 2003, based on oral statements and written assurances from ... Buyukkokten, AEI was led to believe that Buyuk
I abandoned Orkut well before the Brazilian invasion due to hideously slow performance. Back then it was because I thought that Google had simply badly under-provisioned a "20%" project. Then I remembered another early social network, Friendster, that also collapsed due to hideously slow performance. Basically, the first social networks failed to take into account the issue of scaling to massive numbers of users... and you *need* massive numbers of users to make the site interesting and to accommodate everyone's six-degrees-of-friends. Facebook figured that out with its fuzzy updates and randomized newsfeeds that hide the fact that an individual's view of the database is almost never consistent.
I thought this was long gone. I tried using it early on but and it never gained any traction. I don't think folks in the US took it seriously. It was way early as a social media platform, but when Twitter came along, it blew it away.