Google Bids Adieu to Its First Social Network, Orkut

On Monday, Google announced that it would be shutting down Orkut, one of the company’s first initiative in the field of social marketing at the end of September. The reason for this closure is that Google feels that Orkut has not achieved the expected level of popularity among the audience.

In addition, Google also wants to focus its attention on other aspects of services like YouTube, Blogger and Google+ which have proved to be much more popular and successful.

Orkut was launched in 2004, but after the rise of Facebook it was not able to sustain the competition in a successful manner especially in countries outside Brazil and India. The decline of Orkut as a social media platform is not a sudden occurrence and this was always something that would have happened sooner or later.

In March 2011, Google Chairman Eric Schmidt was still confident about Orkut’s prominence in Brazil as a tool for social networking and the fact that Google was still effective and powerful in that field as well. At that time, it had 32.7 million users in Brazil, almost three times as many as Facebook but this position did not last long. Six months later, Facebook took the lead, and since then Orkut has never recovered again.

By late 2012, Facebook dominated as a study proved without doubt that users spend maximum time on this website in Brazil as well. According to the report published by comScore study Facebook had a share of almost 92.8 percent while Orkut had less than 2 percent. So in short, a number of users have shifted their social lives from Orkut to Facebook for quite some time now.

“It’s been a great 10 years, and we apologize 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,” wrote Paulo Golgher, engineering director at Google, in a blog post.

Know more here: https://support.google.com/orkut/answer/6033100?p=orkut&hl=en&rd=1