Google is discontinuing its social media platform Orkut. Users can no longer make new accounts on the service and access to existing accounts will be cut off on September 30.
Orkut was launched in January 2004, shortly before Facebook. Although it didn't take off in the U.S., it was commonly used in Brazil and India. In fact, Orkut remained the most popular social media platform in Brazil until 2008, with 32.7 million users. The service was developed under Google's 20 percent initiative, where employees are permitted to spend up to 20 percent of office time on interesting projects unrelated to their jobs. However, with Google making a full push into the social media area with Google+ the time has come for Orkut to step down.
"Over the past decade, YouTube, Blogger and Google+ have taken off, with communities springing up in every corner of the world," Google says in a statement. "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."
Google has provided a tool called Google Takeout for users to export and save their profiles and photos. After the shutdown, all public pages will be archived. Users can delete pages or posts beforehand to prevent them from becoming a part of the archive. Google Takeout will still be able to retreive data from the archive and will be available September 2016.
Google did not specifically call out Google+ as an option for Orkut users to migrate to, likely because Google is not providing a way to transfer profiles to the new service. Orkut users would have to start from scratch on the website. The majority of Orkut users in Brazil and India are unlikely to switch to Google+ anyway as Facebook has taken over the dominant social media spot from Orkut in recent years. Google+ has not seen much use in those countries, partially due to the established popularity of Orkut.
"It's been a great 10 years, and we apologize to those still actively using the service," says the Google statement. "We hope people will find other online communities to spark more conversations and build even more connections for the next decade and beyond."
