Google To Shutter Orkut Social Network

Launched in 2004, the same year as Facebook, Orkut only caught on in Brazil and India

Google is to shut down Orkut, a pioneering social networking service that gained a wide user base in Brazil and India, but was overtaken by rivals such as Facebook elsewhere.

Orkut was founded in 2004, the same year as Facebook, by Google engineer Orkut Büyükkökten, under a programme that allows Google staff to spend 20 percent of their time on independent projects. (Other widely successful products, such as Gmail, have emerged from this “20 percent” scheme over the years, although according to some ex-Google staff this policy, officially known as “Google Innovation Time Off,” is no longer very effective.)

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“Over the past decade, YouTube, Blogger and Google+ have taken off, with communities springing up in every corner of the world,” Google said in a blog post. “Because the growth of these communities has outpaced Orkut’s growth, we’ve decided to bid Orkut farewell.”

The site will close as of 30 September. Google declined to say how many users Orkut has. In a rather obvious sign that the company was scaling back its commitment to the service, the announcement of Orkut’s demise is first post on the Orkut blog in nearly two years.

Google has made multiple efforts in the social networking domain, with Google+ as its latest effort. However, Vic Gundotra, the head of the company’s social networking services, left the company in April, raising questions about Google’s current social offerings. Gundotra said in October that 300 million users visit the Google+ web page each month – but this still trails behind Facebook’s 1.28 billion users.

Google has increasingly positioned Google+ as a unified user identity across all its products, and last year began requiring YouTube users to sign in with the social service in order to post comments.

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