Google has announced the closure of its first social networking website Orkut, on 30 September 2014. As per the official blogpost, Google is shutting it down, to focus more on its other ventures like YouTube, Blogger and Google Plus.
Before the official shutdown of Orkut the users can log in, play games, & use their account as normal. They can also export their photo albums to Google+, save their Orkut profile, scraps, testimonials, & community posts.
Paul Golgher, an engineering director at Google said in the blogpost “Over the past decade, YouTube, Blogger and Google+ have taken off”. Paul further added, “Because the growth of these communities has outpaced Orkut’s growth, we’ve decided to bid Orkut farewell.”
The social networking website, was launched in 2004 by a Google engineer Orkut Buyukkokten. Initially, the website was doing well but was eventually outdone by the other popular social networks. Orkut was quite popular in India and not much people know but Orkut was the leading social network in Brazil for quite long, but it never gained a popularity in the U.S. As per the statistics, Orkut had 32.7 million users in Brazil in 2011 which was three times as many as Facebook. But it didn’t last for long and Orkut was actually scrapped a couple of years ago. Showing its nice gesture, Google has planned to preserve all of the Orkut’s public communities in an archive.
The farewell message on official blog post states,
“It’s been a great 10 years, and we apologize to those still actively using the service. We hope people will find other online communities to spark more conversations and build even more connections for the next decade and beyond.”
Registrations are closed now and if by any chance you were a user there, you can export all your data and pictures using Google Takeout.
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