
Orkut shutting down September 30 - raldi
http://en.blog.orkut.com/2014/06/tchau-orkut.html
======
redmaverick
I used Orkut in the early days (from 2004 - 2008). The growth trajectory was
similar to facebook. All the elite colleges in India were using it in the
beginning and then it rapidly spread across other colleges.

But the thing was:

1\. There was no News feed. You had to actually visit your friend's wall to
make a comment/see what they were up-to.

2\. That other person would know the next day that you visited their profile.
This discourages people from taking interest in the lives of others. You
didn't want to come across as a creep or having nothing better to do with your
time.

3\. Communities/Forums were a big thing. There wasn't too much to do so you
visited "communities". It became a turf war between Indians, Brazilians and a
few other countries over content. So if you were from another country, you
would get the feeling of not belonging here. I always thought that it drove
people from other countries away.

4\. Facebook created a personal bubble/universe centered around you.
Discussions on forums/pages were not a high priority. News feed was the game
changer. I remember people moving away en masse from Orkut to Facebook around
2007 - 08.

~~~
swang
It's funny about #1, since when the NewsFeed appeared on Facebook most people
were mad about the change. It was a weird thing going from assuming that only
people who viewed your profile (e.g. enough to care) would see your goofy
pics, and then now they were splashed in front of anyone you added as a
'friend'.

~~~
spacecadet
I unfollow all old/new friends and likes. I have no news feed.

~~~
rtx
Ads?

~~~
spacecadet
Adblocker.

~~~
giancarlostoro
A combination of NoScript and / or RequestPolicy works best for this. No need
to rely on software that sometimes doesn't truly block all advertisements.

------
4k
This could have been something. First social network I joined was Orkut in
2004. Back in 2006, it was all rage not only in Brazil, but also in lots of
other countries where facebook was virtually unknown (iirc the MAU was over
100 million). In fact, facebook didn't overtake orkut in India and Brazil
until 2010 and 2011 respectively.

If google had nurtured this social network instead of ignoring it for years,
it might have become credible rival to facebook in markets outside US/EU.
Instead, years of negligence and atrocious design decisions turned it into a
ghost town since around 2011 or so. One has only to blame oneself.

~~~
scholia
I was told (source who used work for Google) that Orkut required massive
amounts of resources that made it hard to run at scale. And there was no money
in it.

This is why I'm a bit surprised that G+ is so bloated, as there is no money in
that either....

------
publicfig
"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)."

I really kind of find this odd. I'm sure that other services have popped up to
take it's place and that it's popularity is dropping, but I really find it
hard to believe that they are Youtube (completely different service), Blogger
(Which up until now I was under the impression that Google had forgotten that
it even owned) and Google+ (More recent and less established than Orkut, and
still a small amount of active users). I'm thinking more that non-Google
services are the real threats, and that Google just has no benefit anymore in
having users in any other service than Google+.

I don't find it odd, however, that another social network owned and operated
by Google is shutting down though. While I think it's smart for them to try to
consolidate their social strategy, I feel like they're engraining themselves
in a service deeper and deeper that will, at some point, work more towards
holding them back than allowing them to branch out into new products. That is
all an incredible amount of opinion though, so we'll see.

~~~
eps
From what I understand Orkut adoption at the moment is limited pretty much to
just Brazil. Orkut simply had it coming for a looong time.

~~~
andybak
Brazil isn't exactly Luxembourg. Surely a population of 200 million isn't to
be sniffed at.

~~~
drzaiusapelord
They're migrating to facebook. Social networks don't make sense if they're
nation limited, be it de facto or by design. People will migrate to the
biggest most popular one eventually. I suspect facebook is just the best (by
some people's standards) social network and social networking eventually falls
into a natural monopoly.

~~~
derwiki
As a counterpoint, I don't think China will ever migrate en masse to Facebook.

~~~
neolefty
If Facebook were de-blocked today, you might very well see a mass migration.
All my students (Chinese high schoolers and college transfers) going abroad
immediately send me friend requests as soon as they get out from behind the
Great Firewall.

~~~
derwiki
Couldn't that be because once abroad, everyone they interact with are on
Facebook?

------
bjano
Similar but less high-profile news: the once biggest hungarian social network
site, iwiw.hu is shutting down tomorrow.

Launched in 2002, by 2006 it had pretty much every hungarian internet users
signed up who could be bothered by such sites. T-Mobile/Deutsche Telecom
acquired it for 4 million euros in 2006 and at the time it seemed unthinkable
that it would lose its momentum.

As a result, Hungary was one of the very last countries for Facebook to
overtake the local competition, but eventually people with international
friends started to sign up for Facebook too and the network effect kicked in:
for the past 1-2 years iwiw.hu was in a free fall and one month ago they
announced that they would pull the plug completely.

------
mathattack
Unless you hang out with Brazilians, you would think this had already happened
5 years ago. Even the Brazilians have largely given up, which makes the
announcement timed to the World Cup a little less ironic.

~~~
facorreia
Indeed, and the post hints to that Brazilian user base by using the word
"Tchau" and talking about communities that have sprung up "in every corner of
the world" in other services.

Anyway, this should get the last stragglers on to Facebook.

------
dalek2point3
Interesting to see that this happened around when Orkut Buyukkokten, the
site's founder recently quit Google for Hello Networks.

[https://www.linkedin.com/in/orkutb](https://www.linkedin.com/in/orkutb)

------
soupboy
In case anyone from Google is reading this, the link to Google Takeout is
taking me to your internal 'moma' sign-in page.

~~~
soupboy
Fixed now.

~~~
jayzalowitz
Oh wow.. thats a bug... glad they fixed.

------
scrapcode
What happens to the developers that are on the individual teams what maintain
these projects? Are they all dispersed to different areas? Do certain groups
that work well together get to stay together? Are some let go?

Google products remind me of HBO's Game of Thrones series. They have so much
going on at any given times, they can kill plenty off and still have their
head high above water with plenty of forward momentum. What would Vegas bet is
next to go?

~~~
Doctor_Fegg
[http://www.gwern.net/Google%20shutdowns](http://www.gwern.net/Google%20shutdowns)
is the famous post about divining what Google will shut down next, and seems
to have proved accurate in its predictions.

Personally I suspect Groups isn't long for this G+-enabled world.

~~~
yebyen
Groups is a terrible service.

Strike that. It works well on the groups I use, but the group that I founded
and abandoned (Rochester Arabic Discussion Group) is quite literally now
unrecoverable. I can ban spammers from my group, but I can't delete their
whole post history with prejudice. Had I taken timely action against all
spammers as they arrived, it is possible the community would have survived,
but now it's in "Warning - Blocked for Adult Content" mode and the actions
required to prepare for a review in order to be reopened for posting would
take at least a month of nonstop clicking to clean it up. I guess it's my
fault for trying to start a community in a language I was studying at a time
when I was likely to be too busy with getting my degree to devote proper time
to fighting spam and helping to focus the discussions.

There is no way to perform bulk actions of any kind from the admin area. This
is my biggest gripe. Groups is a service that needs an overhaul, it does not
need to be killed, but only time will tell what Google does with this one.

~~~
nostrademons
Groups was an awesome service when it launched back in 2001. It was _the_
search engine to go to if you wanted to search UseNet, which (in the pre-
Friendster/MySpace/Facebook days) was the largest social network on the
Internet. Google slapped a much nicer UI on it than DejaNews ever had,
rivaling desktop Usenet readers but without the need to download anything or
run another program.

It started sucking when they took UseNet out of it - then it became just
another mailing-list site in an already crowded field. (Granted, UseNet itself
was nearly dead at this point.) And the field was shrinking, since more
affinity groups started moving to FaceBook, or MeetUp, or getting their own
individual sites on the Internet with stock forum software. And IMHO, it
really died when it went to the AJAX UI - there's no real reason for a content
site like Groups (or Blogger, for that matter) to go heavily AJAX, it just
makes it feel clunky.

~~~
yebyen
Seconded. The AJAX UI sucks the most of all. Try loading up 100 pages of
threads on one screen, selecting 19,850 spam threads to delete, and finding
out an hour and a half later that your request is too large and all your work
is lost.

~~~
Doctor_Fegg
Thirded. The AJAX UI is precisely when I stopped using Groups. It's not that
AJAX is bad (obviously), it's that this is a really poor implementation.

------
lewisflude
I think this was a very well written sunset post.

~~~
timmclean
Google has plenty of experience in that department.

~~~
antidaily
Too soon.

------
Zigurd
Google is cleaning up their slum properties. I bet Google Code will be next to
go. Blogger and Sites need either to be EOL'ed or upgraded.

~~~
Sami_Lehtinen
Yep. They had questionnaire about what things to improve with sites and which
features are used and which aren't. So hopefully they're upgrading it.

~~~
Zigurd
I did not see the questionnaire. I use Sites for some simple Web sites, and my
current blog is on Blogspot. There's a lot of potential to combine Sites,
Blogger, and Plus to create a short-form/long-form continuum. I hope Google
makes a good try at this.

------
mojuba
On a slightly unrelated note, why do blog sub-sites always lack a link to the
main web site? It _always_ takes time to realize the blog site's logo links to
itself, that there is no obvious link to the main one anywhere on the page,
and that you will have to edit the URL by hand. Such a trivial usability
issue.

~~~
mnx
Default settings of blogging software.

------
munimkazia
Well, this was a long time coming. No surprises here. I'll fondly remember
Orkut though. It was the first social network I really used and participated
in. An interesting story: When I was in college, my friend and I figured out a
way to see hidden pictures from users using a simple URL "hack". It was quite
fun showing it off to friends, before they added an extra hash element to
their URLs (if I remember correctly) and stopped our tinkering.

------
dennisgorelik
From one of Orkut developers:

[http://ivan-gandhi.livejournal.com/2793482.html](http://ivan-
gandhi.livejournal.com/2793482.html)

    
    
      I was in that team from about 2006 to 2008.
      We grew the subscriber base, reaching about 40M,
      beating FB those days, but FB was catching up.
      Seems like FB was doing everything right,
      and we did what Larry told us - "improve latency".

------
jnazario
anyone remember this brouhaha a decade ago where Orkut was accused of stealing
source code to get off the ground? including bugs?

[http://archive.wired.com/techbiz/media/news/2004/06/64046](http://archive.wired.com/techbiz/media/news/2004/06/64046)

~~~
judk
It was more a copyright dispute than a theft. The coders took their own code
to a new company. Zuckerberg did the same thing to start Facebook.

------
Cthulhu_
Did Google start Orkut themselves or was this acquired?

Second, wouldn't they rather put it up for sale?

~~~
ithkuil
Started as 20% project from a Google employee.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orkut_B%C3%BCy%C3%BCkk%C3%B6kte...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orkut_B%C3%BCy%C3%BCkk%C3%B6kten)

Perhaps it depends on too much of the internal infrastructure they wouldn't
want to sell?

~~~
judk
Legally, it was created at Google. Technically, Orkut software was copied from
the startup that Orkut the person was hired from.

~~~
masters3d
They should open source it.

~~~
icebraining
It probably would take too much effort to make it usable without Google's
internal APIs (storage, search, etc).

~~~
masters3d
They could open source it and have other people use app engine if people want
to use it. Otherwise if its open source people could implement what ever they
want on the back end.

~~~
cbr
App Engine is very different from the internal APIs most production services
depend on.

------
smackfu
Wasn't Orkut invite-only at the start? I wonder how much that affected growth.

~~~
tesseract
It's anecdotal but I remember being intrigued, not being able to get an
invite, and then losing interest/forgetting about Orkut by the time it opened
up. I think in general with invite-based launches there's a fine line between
creating buzz and stifling it.

~~~
scholia
It worked well for Gmail, and it worked pretty well for Orkut at the start.
For technical reasons, they weren't able to handle the huge influx of users
that would have come from opening it up to everyone.

~~~
tesseract
There have been some invite-only success stories to be sure. (You could almost
count Facebook, too.) The usual way of handling it these days seems to be
allowing people to add themselves to a waiting list as an alternative to being
invited.

------
thescrewdriver
Another product for the Google chopping block...

------
pinkskip
I thought it was big in Brazil and India?

~~~
sumedh
It was but then FB took over at least in India.

------
bkamapantula
Strange: FF 30 throws a warning [1]

[1] [http://imgur.com/zziDXJt](http://imgur.com/zziDXJt)

~~~
rndgermandude
That's not Firefox throwing a warning. That's bitly having blacklisted a link.

~~~
bkamapantula
yes, my bad. realized it later.

------
krisgenre
..but what took them so long?

------
chenster
Why not open source it?

~~~
acoster
It probably relies too much on internal technology that is not open source.

------
pseingatl
This proves again that you cannot trust any Google service in the long term.
Is Gmail next?

~~~
scrollaway
Give me a break. People have been predicting Orkut shutting down for just
about half a decade. Hell, a lot of people ridiculed Google for having two
social networks.

Yeah, sure, gmail's next. Whatever you say.

~~~
jacquesm
Gmail is definitely not next. But google+ users should take notice.

~~~
scrollaway
Take notice of what, exactly? That social networks have a single point of
failure?

What makes Google any different in that respect? How are Facebook users any
safer than G+ users?

~~~
saalweachter
There is something to be said for companies doing one thing.

MySpace still exists. If MySpace (were still) part of a larger company, they
probably would have been shuttered by now as irrelevant. As long as Facebook
just has one thing, 'Facebook', it will also safely limp along long after it
is the backwater of the internet, a place you can't believe still exists.

~~~
scrollaway
> There is something to be said for companies doing one thing.

Facebook doesn't want to "do one thing". The problem is, Facebook keeps
failing at doing other things, so you never hear about them or remember them.

Hey, what do you think people remember best: The facebook phone or the iTunes
social network?

~~~
scholia
But social networking is the core of what Facebook does, and that includes the
failed phone. G+ is pretty much irrelevant to Google's core businesses, which
are search and advertising.

------
bratsche
I will miss all the lasers.

------
thebouv
Orkwhut?

------
Thiz
Orkut could have been facebook if it wasn't for the stupid name.

