Google has announced that it is shutting down its very first social networking site Orkut on September 30. The current users can export their profile data, community posts and photos using Google Takeout. Starting today, it will not be possible to create a new Orkut account. The closure news is not surprising rather was expected much before. Paulo Golgher, an engineering director at Google writes in a blog post that:
“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). We’ll be focusing our energy and resources on making these other social platforms as amazing as possible for everyone who uses them.”
Orkut was built as a 20 percent project, this means that Google employees use a fifth of their working week on side projects. The social network has now been replaced by Google+, which is a more ambitious service that integrates with other Google products. Google will preserve all of the site’s public communities in an archive and if you don’t want yourself to be included in the community archive, you can remove Orkut permanently from your Google account.
“It’s been a great 10 years, and we apologize to those still actively using the service,” says Golgher. “We hope people will find other online communities to spark more conversations and build even more connections for the next decade and beyond.”
SOURCE: Orkut Blog
