Before Facebook, there was Orkut by Google, dominating the social media space in India and Brazil. On Monday, however, Google announces its social networking site will finally fold on September 30.
Orkut started in 2004 as a 20 percent project of Google’s engineer, Orkut Büyükkökten. Google says before the concept of social networking was ever known, Okrut was already there, helping “shape life online.” In September 2006, Readwrite.com even declared Orkut as the second biggest social network online, following MySpace.
Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook was also founded ten years ago. Eventually, Facebook took over the social media space, now considered as the top social networking site in the world with over a billion users. Orkut, meanwhile, didn’t disclose its number of members.
Okrut was Google’s first initiative into the social networking industry. It says the move to close shop is an effort to push more successful initiatives it explored in the social media industry, such as Google+, Blogger and YouTube, which by far outpaced Orkut and continue to be a huge hit worldwide.
“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,” Orkut’s Engineering Director Paulo Golgher says in a blog post.
Before September 30, users can still log in to Orkut and use their accounts just like before—exporting photo album to Google+, saving profile, testimonials, scraps and community posts through Google Takeout.
After this, users can no longer log in and do anything with their accounts, save for public communities that are stored in the online Community Archive viewable by public starting September 30.
No new accounts in Orkut can be created as well after June 30. For more details on the shutdown, Orkut members can check out the Help page of Google.
Just like Facebook, Orkut also faced a few issues in the past regarding the extent people can use their freedom of speech online. For instance in February 2009, India’s Supreme Court refused to provide legal protection to a teenager who was then faced with a lawsuit for comments he made on said social media site.
