On June 30, 2014 Google announced to shutdown Orkut. Launched about ten years ago, orkut was the first social networking venture of Google. It was built as a 20 percent project in which, the googlers spent a fifth of their time on new ideas apart from their jobs.
The highest percentage of its users came from Brazil which makes 50.6 percent. Another 20.44 per cent came from India, while the US and Pakistan made 17.78 per cent and 0.86 per cent, respectively.
“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,” Google said in a post on the Orkut blog.
Orkut was known for its ‘scrapes’ and ‘testimonials’ between friends. It introduced people to the world of social networking when the term ‘social networking’ was unknown to them. Those were not the days of laptop and people used to drain their pocket-money on internet cafes. In its blog post, Google apologized to those who still actively use the service. Evidently, Google tends to focus its resource and energy of Google+ now which they have been weaving gradually, since its inception in 2011.
Making new accounts on orkut has been disabled. However, the data will remain available till September 30 for the users to preserve using Google Takeout.
Good Bye Orkut!