R.I.P. Orkut

After 10 years of service, it’s setting time for Orkut. Google announced that it plans to shut down Orkut on Sept.30, 2014. Orkut was Google’s first attempt at creating a social networking website in 2004. It attained a raising popularity in Brazil and India & it is being run by Google’s Brazil branch.

Orkut has a large number of features much needed for the youth of its time

•  Simple inbox for short messages.
•  Friend requests and comments to your Gmail inbox.
• Scraps which includes YouTube links, photos, widgets and many more which can only be seen by your   friends.
•  Like many social sites you can block users, report spams and abuses,
• You can rate the level of your friendship from ‘never met’ to ‘best friends’.
• You can rate your friends with smiley faces for trustworthiness, ice cubes for coolness and hearts for  sexiness (best way to flirt). The number of smileys, ice cubes and hearts someone has, are visible on their profile; which seems to be pretty funny but a little silly.
•  In addition, users can send each other ‘testimony’, which appear under user’s profile.
• Each user also has an album, where they can upload photos much like a Facebook wall.
•  Communities are a great feature of Orkut where you can gather and find people of similar interests. Anyone can create a community and they can specify a category whether joining is open to everyone or moderated. The community can also maintain a group calendar, so that members can add events.

Orkut interface is more pleasant and cleanly designed than Friendster or MySpace. The large populations of Brazil and India gave it an international feel.

Then why did it fail???

Orkut is mainly confined to Brazil, India and a few Latin American countries; but it never became successful in the US.

It even failed to manage the growing traffic and to fix the bugs.

Over the past decade; Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Blogger, LinkedIn and Google+ have taken off the run in every corner of the world. Facebook with over 2 billion users around the globe is still leading the social networking race and emerged as a biggest rivalry to Orkut.

The search giant ‘Google’ focused on Google+, which recently celebrated its third birthday. Google is the major reason for the failure of Orkut.

To cope up with the growing era of social communities, Google decided to bid farewell to the Orkut. They’ll be focusing their resources on making a social platform as amazing as possible for everyone who uses them.

But Orkut will always be remembered as the foremost social network mainly in Brazil and India.

                                                                                                                                         R.I.P. ORKUT

#AllAroundTheWorld #9D