Zafri Mudasser Nofil
Ten years ago, Orkut helped shape life online in what were the nascent stages of “social networking”. From January 2004 to September 2014, millions of people from across the world came together to discuss common interests through a vast collection of Orkut communities, posting and exchanging scraps, photographs, music and videos.
Google pulled the plug on 10-year-old Orkut on September 30. The search engine giant’s first foray into social networking space failed to survive due to stiff competition from rival services like Facebook and Twitter.
In a blog post on September 30, Google’s engineering director Paulo Golgher said, “Today, we are bidding tchau to Orkut. But, as we announced at the end of June, while the service may be going away, its history of connections and conversations will live on.
For a decade now, millions of people, spread around the world, have been brought together by common interests and lively discussion to form a vast collection of vibrant communities. And, as of today, public content on those communities is being preserved in the Orkut Community Archive: 51 million communities, 120 million topics, and more than 1 billion interactions.”
The service may be going away but all of those communities Orkut users have created will live on. Google made a provision for saving photos, scraps, and testimonials using Google Takeout until September 2016.
Named after its creator Orkut Buyukkokten, Orkut, founded on January 24, 2004, provided a platform for one to connect with others who shared passions, whatever is the topic – from futebol to horror movies. Buyukkokten, a Turkish software engineer, utilised Google’s ‘20 per cent project’ time to create this social network. Google allows its employee to use 20 per cent of their office time in developing their own projects.
One had to get an invite from a user to create an Orkut account. Besides scraps there was also a provision for one-to-one private messaging. Later Orkut introduced a privacy control for scraps posted to the scrapbook.
Though it failed to make a mark across the globe, Orkut became quite in hit in India and Brazil. Seeing the popularity of its website, the then product manager of Orkut and now Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer had said in an interview in 2009, “Orkut is not very popular in the United States, really popular in a couple of other countries.
We’re the number one website in Brazil and India. In fact, if you go to those countries (India and Brazil), they often think that Orkut owns Google. And you talk to people in Brazil, they’re like, oh, Google, you mean the subsidiary of Orkut?
“ In that interview, asked about the reason of its popularity in India and Brazil, Mayer said, “When Orkut first launched, we did our launch early and often strategy. And it wasn’t ready to scale. So the network got really slow. But in Brazil, they were sort of used to the latency. So the fact that the site was slow didn’t slow them down. They just kept building momentum.
And India, I think because it was on the Indian opposite time zone, it also wasn’t competing for that same resource of scalability. Now we have a much more scalable system in Orkut, but there definitely is a first mover advantage in social networking. I think it’s really interesting that one of the most interesting things I’ve seen was this difference in the number of page views users do in a single session because we released Orkut.”
On November 8, 2007, Orkut greeted Indian users Happy Diwali by allowing them to change their Orkut look to a reddish Diwali theme. To cash in on the craze, Google in 2007 also rolled out Orkut in six Indian languages -Hindi, Bengali, Marathi,
Tamil, Kannada and Telugu. But gradually Orkut could not withstand the competition from Facebook and Twitter and its popularity dipped.
On June 30, 2014, Google announced that it is shutting down Orkut to focus on YouTube, Blogger, and Google+ services that have proven more popular.
“Ten years ago, Orkut was Google’s first foray into social networking. Built as a ‘20 per cent’ 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,” Golgher had said in a blog post on June30.
“We will shut down Orkut on September 30, 2014. Until then, there will be no impact on current Orkut users, to give the community time to manage the transition.
People can export their profile data, community posts and photos using Google Takeout (available until September 2016). Starting today, it will not be possible to create a new Orkut account,” he said.
“It’s been a great 10 years, and we apologise to those still actively using the service. We hope people will find other online communities to spark more conversations and build even more connections for the next decade and beyond,” Golgher wrote.
Over the years, controversy also hit Orkut.
Three countries – Iran, UAE and Saudi Arabia – banned Orkut claiming anti-national sentiments were shared across the social network.
In 2006, a lethal virus called MW. Orc worm hit Orkut. Once installed in the System 32 folder of the user, the virus used to collect private information like passwords and bank accounts details. Besides these, use of Orkut by antinational and anti-ethnic hate groups also came to the fore.
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