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"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 comm

"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.
      - drzaiusapelord 12y ago
        Censorship states will probably buck the trend due to the politics of migrating.
      - seanmcdirmid 12y ago
        Taiwan and Hong Kong have. If Facebook wasn't blocked in China, you would assume that trend would have continued.
      - neolefty 12y ago
        If Facebook were de-blocked today, you might very well see a mass migration. All my students (Chinese high schoolers and college transfers) going abroad immediately send me friend requests as soon as they get out from behind the Great Firewall.
  - personlurking 12y ago
    If you would have said Belgium, I would have been able to say this… "In the 1970s, economist Edmar Bacha popularised the term "Belindia" as a description of Brazil: a little bit of Belgium and a lot of India, the country was very rich for some and very poor for most." Speaking of rich and poor, data from the recent Brazil x Chile World Cup game shows that most Brazilian stadium attendees were white (67%), mid-high/high class (90%), and well-educated (86%). Ok, now I'm officially off-topic. Carry on.
    - lalos 12y ago
      How did you get the 67% white info of attendees?
      - bonchibuji 12y ago
        Third paragraph - http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/30/sports/worldcup/most-fans-attending-world-cup-games-are-white-and-wealthy-poll-suggests.html http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/30/sports/worldcup/most-fans-...
      - personlurking 12y ago
        It was from Datafolha, the data section of Folha, a large Brazilian newspaper.
- thiagoharry 12y ago
  Not anymore. Even in Brazil, Orkut in dying and almost nobody use it anymore. Nowadays Facebook is the main social network in Brazil.
- dredmorbius 12y 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. <looks around> Just, don't tell anyone, OK? I mean, between you and me. I think it might have been Facebook.
sentenza 12y 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 12y 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.
  - carrotleads 12y ago
    I still miss iGoogle. Gave me a bird's eye view of my interests like a business modal canvas. Monetization of such a platform is pain though and only wroks as a paid service IMO.
    - scholia 12y ago
      There are plenty of alternatives, including http://www.ighome.com/ http://www.ighome.com/ See for example http://www.theguardian.com/technology/askjack/2013/nov/07/igoogle-alternatives http://www.theguardian.com/technology/askjack/2013/nov/07/ig... and http://www.techsupportalert.com/content/6-great-alternatives-igoogle.htm http://www.techsupportalert.com/content/6-great-alternatives... etc
dragonwriter 12y 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 12y 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.
  - paulrov 12y ago
    Being created to post YouTube content and nothing more
  - lazerwalker 12y ago
    How many of those new users are actually actively aware they're creating a new account?
  - cubancigar11 12y ago
    paulrov: You are [dead].
    - cubancigar11 12y ago
      Ugh... overzealous modders!
vincentleeuwen 12y ago
I never noticed Google+ took off...
- thescrewdriver 12y ago
  Neither did anyone else. Forcing people into creating g+ accounts via youtube etc. hardly counts as "took off"...
  - giovannibajo1 12y ago
    ... and marking them as "active" as they scroll down from a YouTube video or browse to a page with a G+ button while logged in to Google (= always).
JohnTHaller 12y 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 12y ago
  People adopt Google+? The only thing I've seen on Google+ is Google employee posts.
  - seanmcdirmid 12y ago
    Well, G+ is popular in tech circles.
    - scholia 12y ago
      Or in some subsets of tech circles....
  - kibibu 12y ago
    And Linus Torvalds
- scholia 12y 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.
dredmorbius 12y 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.
- scholia 12y 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?
  - dredmorbius 12y ago
    The more I observe Google (and I've been doing that for 15+ years now), the more I come to the conclusion: • They're really good at search • They're fucking amazing at infrastructure. • They suck at pretty much anything at all human-factors related. I think that letting Microsoft execs into the tent was a tremendous cultural mistake. Microsoft's alliances were, from the mid-1980s onward, but especially through the 1990s, with its OEMs, VARs, and ISVs, not with its end-users, except secondarily. The name of the game was to build and defend a territory: OEM preloads, per-CPU licensing, Office, APIs, proprietary protocols (e.g., Exchange and Directory). The played the lock-in game to its ultimate and absurd conclusion: they don't understand and cannot fix their own software. Google started by offering tremendous value to end-users via search, and finding a minimally viable way to monetize that (relevant and non-intrusive advertising). It was recognized from the beginning as creepy, but so long as you didn't actually personally log in to the search engine, the personal association seemed sufficiently weak to be acceptable to most. That changed with Gmail. Suddenly you were logged in to your search provider all the fucking time. And that, frankly, weirded me out. I avoided Gmail for a long, long time, and still don't use it for my personal comms. I've made my own peace with Google in that I use Gmail, over IMAP, for a pseudonymous account, and transact my search transactions largely with a different provider who pledges no tracking (and I've been in arguments with various folk over the credibility of that, no it's not bulletproof), largely DDG and StartPage (both proxied non-tracking search providers). And yes, occasionally my work mail is served over Google depending on the gig. Then came Google Docs, which further freak me out, storage, and a host of other things. I basically never saw these as a good thing (from a privacy or data security viewpoint), even though I fully acknowledge the genius of using these to attack one of Microsoft's prime foundations (Office + Exchange). Evidence is strong that Google felt very strongly challenged by Facebook and felt it had to create its own social offering, whether to compete, head off Facebook, or ... just sheer competitive spirit. There was (and is) also an interest in offering "an identity service", which has been a holy grail of the tech world for at least a couple of decades, and a trope of the science fiction literature long before that. I can credit the latter with part of my own reluctance to buy into the concept: a world in which everything is specifically attributable and hence tracked to a specific identity is pretty close to my definition of totalitarian hell. I reacted just as viscerally when it was Microsoft's Passport, as well to Facebook sign-on (I don't use FB, I won't use services requiring it). Gundotra strongly evidenced a firm belief in the concept, as does Eric Schmidt. Page and Brin have been less outspoken on the concept, but it seems from what I've seen that they at the very least endorsed the concept. If they're driving it, then as I said, the rot goes to (and starts at) the very head. And if there's a single thing which would most likely destroy Google at this point, even above NSA and other snooping (which they could significantly engineer around, though by changing their entire present focus, see Bruce Schneier and Eben Moglen on this in the past year, particularly their joint Columbia University conversation and Schneier's Stanford Law School lecture), it's the snooper state. To backtrack a bit: I also think that advertising when first adopted by Google in the late 1990s snuck the camels' nose into the tent. Advertising is at its essence deceptive, and at odds with the interests of the recipient. By setting up this relationship, Google both created a dissonance within itself and a misalignment of interests with the end user. I don't know that this could have been avoided (figuring out how to tie revenues to Internet services outside of advertising has largely proved a wicked problem), but I think ultimately the camel ended up in, and in control of, the tent. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camel%27s_nose https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camel%27s_nose Another metaphor I like to invoke is of grabbing the tiger by the tail. The trick is more in the undoing than the doing. I've been hoping that Gundotra's leaving might see an unwinding of things. I'm not seeing services disaggregate from G+ (though my YouTube status seems to vary from associated to not associated periodically). I haven't fully made up my mind on whether to stay or go. Ironically, it was conversations over Gundotra's departure and "death of G+" discussions which sucked me back in. Irony, thy name is Vic.

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.
    - drzaiusapelord 12y ago
      Censorship states will probably buck the trend due to the politics of migrating.
    - seanmcdirmid 12y ago
      Taiwan and Hong Kong have. If Facebook wasn't blocked in China, you would assume that trend would have continued.
    - neolefty 12y ago
      If Facebook were de-blocked today, you might very well see a mass migration. All my students (Chinese high schoolers and college transfers) going abroad immediately send me friend requests as soon as they get out from behind the Great Firewall.
- personlurking 12y ago
  If you would have said Belgium, I would have been able to say this… "In the 1970s, economist Edmar Bacha popularised the term "Belindia" as a description of Brazil: a little bit of Belgium and a lot of India, the country was very rich for some and very poor for most." Speaking of rich and poor, data from the recent Brazil x Chile World Cup game shows that most Brazilian stadium attendees were white (67%), mid-high/high class (90%), and well-educated (86%). Ok, now I'm officially off-topic. Carry on.
  - lalos 12y ago
    How did you get the 67% white info of attendees?
    - bonchibuji 12y ago
      Third paragraph - http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/30/sports/worldcup/most-fans-attending-world-cup-games-are-white-and-wealthy-poll-suggests.html http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/30/sports/worldcup/most-fans-...
    - personlurking 12y ago
      It was from Datafolha, the data section of Folha, a large Brazilian newspaper.
thiagoharry 12y ago
Not anymore. Even in Brazil, Orkut in dying and almost nobody use it anymore. Nowadays Facebook is the main social network in Brazil.
dredmorbius 12y 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. <looks around> Just, don't tell anyone, OK? I mean, between you and me. I think it might have been Facebook.

sentenza 12y 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 12y 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.
- carrotleads 12y ago
  I still miss iGoogle. Gave me a bird's eye view of my interests like a business modal canvas. Monetization of such a platform is pain though and only wroks as a paid service IMO.
  - scholia 12y ago
    There are plenty of alternatives, including http://www.ighome.com/ http://www.ighome.com/ See for example http://www.theguardian.com/technology/askjack/2013/nov/07/igoogle-alternatives http://www.theguardian.com/technology/askjack/2013/nov/07/ig... and http://www.techsupportalert.com/content/6-great-alternatives-igoogle.htm http://www.techsupportalert.com/content/6-great-alternatives... etc

dragonwriter 12y 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 12y 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.
- paulrov 12y ago
  Being created to post YouTube content and nothing more
- lazerwalker 12y ago
  How many of those new users are actually actively aware they're creating a new account?
- cubancigar11 12y ago
  paulrov: You are [dead].
  - cubancigar11 12y ago
    Ugh... overzealous modders!

vincentleeuwen 12y ago

I never noticed Google+ took off...

thescrewdriver 12y ago
Neither did anyone else. Forcing people into creating g+ accounts via youtube etc. hardly counts as "took off"...
- giovannibajo1 12y ago
  ... and marking them as "active" as they scroll down from a YouTube video or browse to a page with a G+ button while logged in to Google (= always).

JohnTHaller 12y 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 12y ago
People adopt Google+? The only thing I've seen on Google+ is Google employee posts.
- seanmcdirmid 12y ago
  Well, G+ is popular in tech circles.
  - scholia 12y ago
    Or in some subsets of tech circles....
- kibibu 12y ago
  And Linus Torvalds
scholia 12y 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.

dredmorbius 12y 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.

scholia 12y 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?
- dredmorbius 12y ago
  The more I observe Google (and I've been doing that for 15+ years now), the more I come to the conclusion: • They're really good at search • They're fucking amazing at infrastructure. • They suck at pretty much anything at all human-factors related. I think that letting Microsoft execs into the tent was a tremendous cultural mistake. Microsoft's alliances were, from the mid-1980s onward, but especially through the 1990s, with its OEMs, VARs, and ISVs, not with its end-users, except secondarily. The name of the game was to build and defend a territory: OEM preloads, per-CPU licensing, Office, APIs, proprietary protocols (e.g., Exchange and Directory). The played the lock-in game to its ultimate and absurd conclusion: they don't understand and cannot fix their own software. Google started by offering tremendous value to end-users via search, and finding a minimally viable way to monetize that (relevant and non-intrusive advertising). It was recognized from the beginning as creepy, but so long as you didn't actually personally log in to the search engine, the personal association seemed sufficiently weak to be acceptable to most. That changed with Gmail. Suddenly you were logged in to your search provider all the fucking time. And that, frankly, weirded me out. I avoided Gmail for a long, long time, and still don't use it for my personal comms. I've made my own peace with Google in that I use Gmail, over IMAP, for a pseudonymous account, and transact my search transactions largely with a different provider who pledges no tracking (and I've been in arguments with various folk over the credibility of that, no it's not bulletproof), largely DDG and StartPage (both proxied non-tracking search providers). And yes, occasionally my work mail is served over Google depending on the gig. Then came Google Docs, which further freak me out, storage, and a host of other things. I basically never saw these as a good thing (from a privacy or data security viewpoint), even though I fully acknowledge the genius of using these to attack one of Microsoft's prime foundations (Office + Exchange). Evidence is strong that Google felt very strongly challenged by Facebook and felt it had to create its own social offering, whether to compete, head off Facebook, or ... just sheer competitive spirit. There was (and is) also an interest in offering "an identity service", which has been a holy grail of the tech world for at least a couple of decades, and a trope of the science fiction literature long before that. I can credit the latter with part of my own reluctance to buy into the concept: a world in which everything is specifically attributable and hence tracked to a specific identity is pretty close to my definition of totalitarian hell. I reacted just as viscerally when it was Microsoft's Passport, as well to Facebook sign-on (I don't use FB, I won't use services requiring it). Gundotra strongly evidenced a firm belief in the concept, as does Eric Schmidt. Page and Brin have been less outspoken on the concept, but it seems from what I've seen that they at the very least endorsed the concept. If they're driving it, then as I said, the rot goes to (and starts at) the very head. And if there's a single thing which would most likely destroy Google at this point, even above NSA and other snooping (which they could significantly engineer around, though by changing their entire present focus, see Bruce Schneier and Eben Moglen on this in the past year, particularly their joint Columbia University conversation and Schneier's Stanford Law School lecture), it's the snooper state. To backtrack a bit: I also think that advertising when first adopted by Google in the late 1990s snuck the camels' nose into the tent. Advertising is at its essence deceptive, and at odds with the interests of the recipient. By setting up this relationship, Google both created a dissonance within itself and a misalignment of interests with the end user. I don't know that this could have been avoided (figuring out how to tie revenues to Internet services outside of advertising has largely proved a wicked problem), but I think ultimately the camel ended up in, and in control of, the tent. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camel%27s_nose https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camel%27s_nose Another metaphor I like to invoke is of grabbing the tiger by the tail. The trick is more in the undoing than the doing. I've been hoping that Gundotra's leaving might see an unwinding of things. I'm not seeing services disaggregate from G+ (though my YouTube status seems to vary from associated to not associated periodically). I haven't fully made up my mind on whether to stay or go. Ironically, it was conversations over Gundotra's departure and "death of G+" discussions which sucked me back in. Irony, thy name is Vic.