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."

Comments

But I thought it was already dead?

[Megane]

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?"

Re:But I thought it was already dead?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think in general it's best to assume any Google service is dead: you're probably right, or else you will be in a few years (except possibly for mail, maps, and google.com).

Re:But I thought it was already dead?

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

Not dead, it was actually pretty big in Brazil (therefore the tchau reference, which is how they say "ciao" in Brazilian Portuguese). Big in Brazil, not so much anywhere else.

Re:But I thought it was already dead?

[cpghost]

Why not? The only thing that Google really does better than anyone else is search (and maybe free machine translation). For everything else, there's a better or at least equivalent option.

Gmail is actually doing quite a good job as well. What other mail provider does probably BCC every mail you receive and send to the NSA cloud for safekeeping and backup?

Re:But I thought it was already dead?

[TheRaven64]

Part of the reason for Orkut's decline in the US was that it was overrun by Portuguese speakers (mostly Brazilian) who posted (in Portuguese) in every English-language discussion, making the system unusable by anyone who didn't speak Portuguese. For the same reason, it remained popular where Portuguese was the national language or commonly spoken.

Anyway, you've got to love the message from Google: Use social networks, you're giving a third party the ability to kill your online presence and the identity that you use for communicating with your friends on a whim!

Nobody used it anymore

[rbprbp]

Orkut already was a wasteland 2~3 years ago as everyone in Brazil moved to Facebook. Not much will be lost.

Re:Google+ has taken off?

[Grishnakh]

Really? Google+ has taken off? That is news to me and anyone working outside of Google.

It's their attempt at a Big Lie: a lie repeated over and over until everyone believes it's true.

Re:Google+ has taken off?

[Anonymous Coward]

G+ is awesome. The smart techy type people do use it. If you aren't on it, that says a lot more about you than about it.

Obligatory Orkut joke

[ribuck]

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..."

Re: Google+ has taken off?

[RobotRunAmok]

Marketing a special social network for smart people is like marketing a special vanilla-creme filled chocolate cheesecake to health fanatics.

Which is to say, the moment they take the bait is the moment they demonstrate they're not whom you thought they were...

Re:Google+ has taken off?

[Richard_at_work]

Not only that, but its tied into the search engine as well - you can only establish canonical authorship on your own website of something by linking it with your Google+ account. Which means that not having a Google+ account can affect your page rank.

Long and drawn-out death but will be missed

[vivaoporto]

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!

Re:Google+ has taken off?

[mythosaz]

It's easy to say when you're not using it.

It has a good number of active users, myself included, who use it to communicate with people in specialized niches (Android developers, Ingress players, brewers, poker players, blah blah blah).