Orkut shutting down September 30

http://en.blog.orkut.com/2014/06/tchau-orkut.html

by raldi • 12 years ago

355 163 12 years ago

en.blog.orkut.com

mathattack• 12 years ago

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• 12 years ago

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.

lewisflude• 12 years ago

I think this was a very well written sunset post.

timmclean• 12 years ago

Google has plenty of experience in that department.

antidaily• 12 years ago

Too soon.

publicfig• 12 years ago

"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• 12 years ago

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.

andybak2• 12 years ago

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

thiagoharry• 12 years ago

Not anymore. Even in Brazil, Orkut in dying and almost nobody use it anymore. Nowadays Facebook is the main social network in Brazil.

dredmorbius8• 12 years ago

The issue isn't whether or not Orkut had it coming.

It's that YouTube, G+, and Blogger are what did it in.

Look, let me tell you a little secret.

Just, don't tell anyone, OK?

I mean, between you and me.

I think it might have been Facebook.

sentenza• 12 years ago

I'm with you there. I still fondly remember Google Buzz and haven't really found an alternative that has the same feel to it yet.

I hope there is some post facto analysis a few months from now. IMO Google is risking that this shutdown effectively causes the migration of a few hundred thousand Brazilian Google users to Facebook.

tracker1• 12 years ago

For me, if I were a Blogger user, I'd take it as a sign that it's time to migrate. Honestly, beyond some of the core stuff (gmail, contacts for android and keep), I don't think Google has much vested interest in maintaining most of the services that were once offered out of their 20% program. It's funny, but I now trust Google to keep supporting niche products far less than even Microsoft.

Then again, for me the catalyst was when they killed reader and iGoogle. The Old Reader, and others have largely taken it's place, but that integration into my home page was truly useful to me. Now, I'm far less likely to catch an article on any given day, I check HN almost daily, and a few others not quite as often, but it isn't the same... and it isn't my typical blogroll anymore.

dragonwriter2• 12 years ago

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).

Google didn't say that YouTube, Blogger, or Google+ have taken Orkut's place. Google said that YouTube, Blogger, and Google+ have outpaced Orkut's growth and are, largely as a result of that, more appropriate focuses of Google's resources.

I'm thinking more that non-Google services are the real threats

This isn't about "threats", its about opportunities -- more specifically, its about where Google effort has the best returns for Google.

skaplun• 12 years ago

I'm not sure you can call google+ a failure. Activity may not be so high but accounts are being created - and that matters.

To me, google+ is a great name for a comprehensive future password service.

tomkarlo3• 12 years ago

While much of YouTube is a desert wasteland in terms of community, there are definitely areas (like music and fitness) where it has a great deal of social / community activity. Just given how huge YT is, it wouldn't suprise me if just those niches outgrew Orkut a long time ago. Plus the growth trajectory is probably much better - if you were going to invest in YT community or Orkut, the former probably makes more sense.

vincentleeuwen• 12 years ago

I never noticed Google+ took off...

thescrewdriver2• 12 years ago

Neither did anyone else. Forcing people into creating g+ accounts via youtube etc. hardly counts as "took off"...

JohnTHaller• 12 years ago

Google+ is much larger than Orkut and has far more active users. Orkut never caught on outside of Brazil. Even in Brazil, its userbase is shrinking as users adopt Facebook and Google+.

iopq• 12 years ago

People adopt Google+? The only thing I've seen on Google+ is Google employee posts.

scholia8• 12 years ago

Orkut did take off when it was launched in 2004. It just wasn't as good as Facebook. When Facebook opened up to users outside the education market, Orkut users switched.

dredmorbius8• 12 years ago

It's odd because it's a bullshit rationalization that pretends to explain the decision while avoiding the all-to-obvious fact that Facebook won the present round of social networking.

And I say that as someone who's never had a personal Facebook account and doesn't care much for social networking in general.

The problem, in other words, is that it's a lie by way of omission and dissembling. And that everybody knows it.

As someone who has used G+ fairly heavily for 3 years, and eventually came to sort of like parts of it: it's annoying, creaky, and creepy. The underlying infrastructure is robust and reliable. The platform built on top of it is a mish-mash. Complaints from the first days of public deployment over noise, a confusion of controls, and a lack of clear purpose remain valid. And as a tool to destroy trust and goodwill in Google it's been unparalleled.

scholia8• 12 years ago

And as a tool to destroy trust and goodwill in Google it's been unparalleled.

This is true, and Google must have noticed. Does that mean they just don't care, or was it partly why Gundotra hit the exit door?

soupboy2• 12 years ago

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

soupboy2• 12 years ago

Fixed now.

jayzalowitz• 12 years ago

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

scrapcode2• 12 years ago

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_Fegg2• 12 years ago

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.

yebyen2• 12 years ago

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.

scrapcode2• 12 years ago

I agree. I've never had a use for Groups other than stumbling upon a thread within Groups while researching a bug, or trying to get something new done on linux that I've never done before. I don't see this less-than-absolutely-massive userbase aligning with Google's current interests. Especially while trying to take over the social-discussion world with Plus.

gwern• 12 years ago

Orkut, however, is a rare misfire for the survival model: because Orkut is so old and almost everything from that bygone era of Google has survived indefinitely, it gave Orkut a 95% chance of surviving to 2018. Of course, everyone knew Orkut was a dead social network walking (even before Google+ was a gleam in Page's eye), but how do you tell the model that...?

Groups is in a similar situation, at 90%. I think that's also too high, but I'm not sure what I'd personally estimate the risk at. On the one hand, it feels like Google should be loathe to kill off dozens of thousands of mailing lists and its Usenet archive and decades of history & material; on the other hand, they sure act in every way like they want Groups to die and go away.

In general, the model seems to be accurate when it predicts something is very likely to die, but not so accurate when it's predicting something's very likely to survive. It'll be interesting to followup in 2018 and see how the overall set of predictions did and what an updated model looks like.

reinhardt• 12 years ago

http://xkcd.com/1361/

pseingatl• 12 years ago

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

scrollaway4• 12 years ago

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• 12 years ago

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

andybak2• 12 years ago

We were having a sweepstake at work to see how quickly this comment would appear. I had '20 minutes' down and lost by a whisker.

I'm hoping to win my money back the next time someone mentions an ORM.

bkamapantula2• 12 years ago

Strange: FF 30 throws a warning [1]

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

rndgermandude• 12 years ago

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

bkamapantula2• 12 years ago

yes, my bad. realized it later.

4k• 12 years ago

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.

scholia8• 12 years ago

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....

Cthulhu_• 12 years ago

Did Google start Orkut themselves or was this acquired?

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

brianbreslin2• 12 years ago

I think it was one of their engineer's 20% time project. I haven't logged into orkut in 6 years so I don't recall. I'm sure wikipedia has info on it.

itcmcgrath• 12 years ago

You are correct, it's even named after the engineer that started it.

ithkuil• 12 years ago

Started as 20% project from a Google employee.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orkut_B%C3%BCy%C3%BCkk%C3%B6kte...

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

judk2• 12 years ago

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

yellowapple• 12 years ago

It says in the second sentence of the announcement that it was a "20 percent project" - basically, it was started by one or more Google engineers as a side project and developed into a full-fledged attempt to create a Google-based social networking site.

redmaverick• 12 years ago

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.

jamesbritt• 12 years ago

Facebook created a personal bubble/universe centered around you.

That seems like a compelling game plan in general.

flyrain• 12 years ago

OK, that's the same problem of QQ space.

justicezyx• 12 years ago

Well, qq space is more like an half-heartened adventure from Tecent. By its nature, it is in conflict with QQ the IM. And with success on the IM side, there is no growing space for qq space. It's never being updated fundamentally since its introduction.

So I guess the problem is that Tecent made the strategic decision to not pursue the social area in the same way as FB; and this is a good decision.

mimighost• 12 years ago

The only difference is Tencent doesn't have the impulse to shut things down periodically.

vishnugupta• 12 years ago

Don't forget FB Apps. The idea that social graph could be viewed as a data platform was revolutionary. I remember lot of young engineers around me going crazy about it and building silly apps. There were a lot of useful apps as well; book lending, used articles sales and so on.

fbuilesv• 12 years ago

Orkut, MySpace, Ning and other social networks had support for apps using OpenSocial around 2008. You had access to friends, FoFs, and several other social features.

For some time people ignored this platform, which meant that you could make a few million dollars per month porting successful FB games (Colheita Feliz, a FarmVille clone, comes to mind) since you faced virtually no competition.

swang• 12 years ago

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'.

spacecadet2• 12 years ago

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

thisisnotatest• 12 years ago

Maybe most people who were vocal about the change were mad, while the rest of us happily used it. I do remember how jarring the change felt, but it quickly become obvious what a new and useful experience it was.

the_ancient• 12 years ago

"This discourages people from taking interest in the lives of others."

This is a bad thing?

saucetenuto• 12 years ago

For user engagement, yeah.

chengiz2• 12 years ago

Indian here. One of the biggest problems with Orkut was spam. They did nothing to combat the countless unsolicited "fraandship" requests. A lot of women I know abandoned Orkut early due to the harrassment.

praneshp• 12 years ago

As someone whose social media life began after Orkut was pretty much dead, I've been wondering about the origins of the word 'fraandship' for a while now. So it goes back to Orkut, at least. Hmm..

kamaal• 12 years ago

That is a problem with Facebook too, I know a lot of women get many unsolicited friendship requests.

I guess it will be a problem with any social network for that matter. Unless you get a totally protected account, like you are invisible to everyone else, except those with whom you want to be friends.

But then for a such thing, email and Whatsapp groups work just fine.

bonobo2• 12 years ago

Another big factor for the communities' explosion was their misuse. The way communities were displayed in your profile page leaked enough metadata that people started using them as badges instead. Some time around 2006 people started creating communities with nonsense names, and it was not unusual to see people with hundreds of them on their profile. Things like "I cry everytime I see Mufasa die" or "Nobody expects the spanish inquisition" were the kinds of titles used in order to display your sense of humor.

In some sense this is akin to Tumblr's hashtags we see today, in which people abused the metadata channel to convey real meaning.

thebouv2• 12 years ago

Orkwhut?

smackfu2• 12 years ago

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

tesseract2• 12 years ago

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.

scholia8• 12 years ago

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.

saraid2162• 12 years ago

I don't recall being invited to Orkut, though I could be wrong about that.

smackfu2• 12 years ago

Looks like it changed in October 2006, and so was invite only for the first 2.5 years: http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2006/10/orkut-doesnt-requir...

bratsche• 12 years ago

I will miss all the lasers.

munimkazia• 12 years ago

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.

jnazario• 12 years ago

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

judk2• 12 years ago

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.

bjano• 12 years ago

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.

chenster• 12 years ago

Why not open source it?

masters3d3• 12 years ago

I know. They should.

acoster• 12 years ago

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

Zigurd2• 12 years ago

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• 12 years ago

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.

Zigurd2• 12 years ago

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• 12 years ago

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• 12 years ago

Default settings of blogging software.

thescrewdriver2• 12 years ago

Another product for the Google chopping block...

Thiz• 12 years ago

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

dalek2point3• 12 years ago

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

pinkskip• 12 years ago

I thought it was big in Brazil and India?

sumedh• 12 years ago

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

krisgenre2• 12 years ago

..but what took them so long?

dennisgorelik• 12 years ago

From one of Orkut developers:

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".

Orkut shutting down September 30

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