Orkut, Google’s social network which once took the world by storm is marked for a total shut down on September 30 this year.
The Orkut team announced the decision on Monday in a blog post, and has also stopped accepting new users. The social network has also apologized to users who are still active on the network.
Orkut had a very warm reception, especially in Brazil and India, however, it lost its charm quickly when Facebook became popular. Interestingly, both social networks were launched in 2004 and while Facebook continued to get more popular, Orkut lost in the game paving way for Google to bring up Google Plus to take on Facebook.
Orkut lost many of its users by 2010, with managed to retain millions of users from India and Brazil. About 50 percent of its users are Brazilians while 20 percent of its user base is Indians.
The company said that the current users will not have any impact until September 30 and post shut down, the profile data of users will be archived by the team. Users who do not want their data to be archived can delete their profiles from the social network. There is also a provision to export their profile information using Google Takeouts.
The blog post by Paulo Golgher, engineering director of Orkut, stated that Google’s other services such as YouTube, Google Plus, Blogger, etc have created several small communities on the web and have outpaced Orkut, which is why Google has to see it off. Orkut’s resources will be used on Google’s other social networking initiatives.
