17 ms·

Orkut shutting down September 30

355 points by raldi 12y ago

mathattack 12y 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 12y 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 12y ago
I think this was a very well written sunset post.
- timmclean 12y ago
  Google has plenty of experience in that department.
  - antidaily 12y ago
    Too soon.
publicfig 12y 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 12y 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.
  - andybak 12y ago
    Brazil isn't exactly Luxembourg. Surely a population of 200 million isn't to be sniffed at.
    - brianbreslin 12y ago
      but to google, 200M means their possible market size is really a fraction of that. Imagine 30M MAX users, assuming super high penetration. Google wants to focus on BILLIONS of users, not tens of millions.
    - drzaiusapelord 12y ago
      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 12y ago
        As a counterpoint, I don't think China will ever migrate en masse to Facebook.
        Scoundreller 12y ago
        And possibly Russia? Can anyone comment on how VKontakte is doing?
        itsuart 12y ago
        VK is the social network in Russia and probably in whole ex-USSR.
soupboy 12y ago
In case anyone from Google is reading this, the link to Google Takeout is taking me to your internal 'moma' sign-in page.
- soupboy 12y ago
  Fixed now.
  - jayzalowitz 12y ago
    Oh wow.. thats a bug... glad they fixed.
scrapcode 12y 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_Fegg 12y ago
  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 12y 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.
    - nostrademons 12y ago
      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.
pseingatl 12y ago
This proves again that you cannot trust any Google service in the long term. Is Gmail next?
- scrollaway 12y 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 12y ago
    Gmail is definitely not next. But google+ users should take notice.
    - scrollaway 12y ago
      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 12y ago
        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.
        magicalist 12y ago
        > There is something to be said for companies doing one thing. The only real difference is instead of shuttering they pivot. The name sticks around but they still delete all your old stuff[1], so the effect is the same. [1] http://techcrunch.com/2013/06/12/bring-the-blogs-back/ http://techcrunch.com/2013/06/12/bring-the-blogs-back/
bkamapantula 12y ago
Strange: FF 30 throws a warning [1] [1] http://imgur.com/zziDXJt http://imgur.com/zziDXJt
- rndgermandude 12y ago
  That's not Firefox throwing a warning. That's bitly having blacklisted a link.
  - bkamapantula 12y ago
    yes, my bad. realized it later.
4k 12y 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.
- scholia 12y 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_ 12y ago
Did Google start Orkut themselves or was this acquired? Second, wouldn't they rather put it up for sale?
- brianbreslin 12y 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 12y ago
    You are correct, it's even named after the engineer that started it.
- ithkuil 12y ago
  Started as 20% project from a Google employee. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orkut_B%C3%BCy%C3%BCkk%C3%B6kten 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?
  - judk 12y ago
    Legally, it was created at Google. Technically, Orkut software was copied from the startup that Orkut the person was hired from.
    - masters3d 12y ago
      They should open source it.
      - icebraining 12y ago
        It probably would take too much effort to make it usable without Google's internal APIs (storage, search, etc).
redmaverick 12y 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 12y ago
  Facebook created a personal bubble/universe centered around you. That seems like a compelling game plan in general.
- flyrain 12y ago
  OK, that's the same problem of QQ space.
  - justicezyx 12y 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 12y ago
    The only difference is Tencent doesn't have the impulse to shut things down periodically.
thebouv 12y ago
Orkwhut?
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
- JeremyBanks 12y ago
  How did you tell that it was a profile for you, and not for an actual 25-year-old woman from American Samoa who shared your name?
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
- jamesbritt 12y ago
  I discovered that Orkut had helpfully created one for me. How do you know Orkut crreated it? I've had accounts created "for me" on all sorts of sites. Turns out I'm not the only person named James Britt. But I just happen to have a particular gmail account with that name, and there are some number of other people who mistakenly use that email address when signing up for things. (This is one reason I'm a fan of Web sites sending out E-mail verification notices.)
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - richardmjohn 12y ago
    I have about 5 Richard Johns using my Gmail address. No matter how many times I email their contacts back asking them to update their details, I still get a few emails a day for the wrong person! I'm currently getting spammed by match.com for one of them.
smackfu 12y ago
Wasn't Orkut invite-only at the start? I wonder how much that affected growth.
- tesseract 12y 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.
  - scholia 12y 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.
    - tesseract 12y ago
      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.
- saraid216 12y ago
  I don't recall being invited to Orkut, though I could be wrong about that.
  - smackfu 12y 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-require-invitation_20.html http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2006/10/orkut-doesnt-requir...
bratsche 12y ago
I will miss all the lasers.
munimkazia 12y 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 12y 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 http://archive.wired.com/techbiz/media/news/2004/06/64046
- judk 12y 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 12y 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 12y ago
Why not open source it?
- masters3d 12y ago
  I know. They should.
- imperialdrive 12y ago
  agreed, there must be some licensed code tied up in it all
- acoster 12y ago
  It probably relies too much on internal technology that is not open source.
Zigurd 12y 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 12y 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.
  - Zigurd 12y 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 12y 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 12y ago
  Default settings of blogging software.
thescrewdriver 12y ago
Another product for the Google chopping block...
Thiz 12y ago
Orkut could have been facebook if it wasn't for the stupid name.
dalek2point3 12y 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 https://www.linkedin.com/in/orkutb
pinkskip 12y ago
I thought it was big in Brazil and India?
- sumedh 12y ago
  It was but then FB took over at least in India.
krisgenre 12y ago
..but what took them so long?
dennisgorelik 12y ago
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".

355 points by raldi 12y 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 12y 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 12y ago

I think this was a very well written sunset post.

timmclean 12y ago
Google has plenty of experience in that department.
- antidaily 12y ago
  Too soon.

publicfig 12y 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 12y 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.
- andybak 12y ago
  Brazil isn't exactly Luxembourg. Surely a population of 200 million isn't to be sniffed at.
  - brianbreslin 12y ago
    but to google, 200M means their possible market size is really a fraction of that. Imagine 30M MAX users, assuming super high penetration. Google wants to focus on BILLIONS of users, not tens of millions.
  - drzaiusapelord 12y ago
    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 12y ago
      As a counterpoint, I don't think China will ever migrate en masse to Facebook.
      - Scoundreller 12y ago
        And possibly Russia? Can anyone comment on how VKontakte is doing?
        itsuart 12y ago
        VK is the social network in Russia and probably in whole ex-USSR.

soupboy 12y ago

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

soupboy 12y ago
Fixed now.
- jayzalowitz 12y ago
  Oh wow.. thats a bug... glad they fixed.

scrapcode 12y 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_Fegg 12y ago
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 12y 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.
  - nostrademons 12y ago
    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.

pseingatl 12y ago

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

scrollaway 12y 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 12y ago
  Gmail is definitely not next. But google+ users should take notice.
  - scrollaway 12y ago
    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 12y ago
      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.
      - magicalist 12y ago
        > There is something to be said for companies doing one thing. The only real difference is instead of shuttering they pivot. The name sticks around but they still delete all your old stuff[1], so the effect is the same. [1] http://techcrunch.com/2013/06/12/bring-the-blogs-back/ http://techcrunch.com/2013/06/12/bring-the-blogs-back/

bkamapantula 12y ago

Strange: FF 30 throws a warning [1] [1] http://imgur.com/zziDXJt http://imgur.com/zziDXJt

rndgermandude 12y ago
That's not Firefox throwing a warning. That's bitly having blacklisted a link.
- bkamapantula 12y ago
  yes, my bad. realized it later.

4k 12y 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.

scholia 12y 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_ 12y ago

Did Google start Orkut themselves or was this acquired? Second, wouldn't they rather put it up for sale?

brianbreslin 12y 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 12y ago
  You are correct, it's even named after the engineer that started it.
ithkuil 12y ago
Started as 20% project from a Google employee. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orkut_B%C3%BCy%C3%BCkk%C3%B6kten 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?
- judk 12y ago
  Legally, it was created at Google. Technically, Orkut software was copied from the startup that Orkut the person was hired from.
  - masters3d 12y ago
    They should open source it.
    - icebraining 12y ago
      It probably would take too much effort to make it usable without Google's internal APIs (storage, search, etc).

redmaverick 12y 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 12y ago
Facebook created a personal bubble/universe centered around you. That seems like a compelling game plan in general.
flyrain 12y ago
OK, that's the same problem of QQ space.
- justicezyx 12y 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 12y ago
  The only difference is Tencent doesn't have the impulse to shut things down periodically.

thebouv 12y ago

Orkwhut?

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

JeremyBanks 12y ago
How did you tell that it was a profile for you, and not for an actual 25-year-old woman from American Samoa who shared your name?
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
jamesbritt 12y ago
I discovered that Orkut had helpfully created one for me. How do you know Orkut crreated it? I've had accounts created "for me" on all sorts of sites. Turns out I'm not the only person named James Britt. But I just happen to have a particular gmail account with that name, and there are some number of other people who mistakenly use that email address when signing up for things. (This is one reason I'm a fan of Web sites sending out E-mail verification notices.)
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- richardmjohn 12y ago
  I have about 5 Richard Johns using my Gmail address. No matter how many times I email their contacts back asking them to update their details, I still get a few emails a day for the wrong person! I'm currently getting spammed by match.com for one of them.

smackfu 12y ago

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

tesseract 12y 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.
- scholia 12y 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.
  - tesseract 12y ago
    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.
saraid216 12y ago
I don't recall being invited to Orkut, though I could be wrong about that.
- smackfu 12y 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-require-invitation_20.html http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2006/10/orkut-doesnt-requir...

bratsche 12y ago

I will miss all the lasers.

munimkazia 12y 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 12y 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 http://archive.wired.com/techbiz/media/news/2004/06/64046

judk 12y 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 12y 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 12y ago

Why not open source it?

masters3d 12y ago
I know. They should.
imperialdrive 12y ago
agreed, there must be some licensed code tied up in it all
acoster 12y ago
It probably relies too much on internal technology that is not open source.

Zigurd 12y 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 12y 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.
- Zigurd 12y 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 12y 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 12y ago
Default settings of blogging software.

thescrewdriver 12y ago

Another product for the Google chopping block...

Thiz 12y ago

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

dalek2point3 12y 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 https://www.linkedin.com/in/orkutb

pinkskip 12y ago

I thought it was big in Brazil and India?

sumedh 12y ago
It was but then FB took over at least in India.

krisgenre 12y ago

..but what took them so long?

dennisgorelik 12y ago

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".