In memoriam
Orkut
Born 22 January 2004. Died 30 September 2014.
Orkut passed on 30 September 2014, having lived ten years as the social network that found its home where Facebook had not yet arrived. Born on 22 January 2004 as a twenty-percent project, it offered a profile and a scrapbook. In America it never caught on. In Brazil it held half of all users. In India it held twenty percent. Google built Google+. In June 2014 the company announced the shutdown. Orkut would close. Resources would shift to YouTube, Blogger, and Google+. Users could export their data. The communities were archived. On 30 September the servers went quiet. He is survived by the archive, which preserves what was built, and by the memory of a platform that was never global but was home to millions.
We have decided to focus on other products. Orkut will be shut down on September 30.
Discontinued by parent company
Mourned by Those who connected in Brazil and India, early adopters who found community before Facebook arrived, and anyone who remembers when a social network could still feel like a village.
Google+, which Google favoured instead; the archive, which preserves the communities; and the memory of a platform that was never big in America but was home elsewhere.