Published On : Tue, Jul 1st, 2014

It’s time to bid bye to Orkut as Google announces to shut it down by September

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Orkut

It was destined to happen sooner or later…As the advent of social networking site Facebook and microblogging site Twitter has completely eaten into the share of Orkut, Google’s first social networking site started 10 years back, the company has finally decided to call it a day for its social network arm. As the number of users took a huge toll with the rising of facebook and twitter, Google could not help much to save Orkut. Orkut was launched in 2004, the same year when Facebook was founded. Facebook is now the world’s largest social network with 1.28 billion users.

Google said it will shut down Orkut, which is very popular in India and Brazil, on September 30. “Over the past decade, YouTube, Blogger and Google+ have taken off,” Google engineering director Paul Golgher said in a blog post.

“Because the growth of these communities has outpaced Orkut’s growth, we’ve decided to bid Orkut farewell.”

Orkut proved particularly popular in Brazil, where two years ago it was eclipsed by social networking powerhouse Facebook. Google launched its Google+ social network in 2011 and has been slowly weaving it into other services.

Orkut, which popularised posts or “scraps” between friends, did not disclose the number of users on the website.

However, according to its website about 50.6 per cent of its users were from Brazil. Another 20.44 per cent came from India, while the US and Pakistan accounted for 17.78 per cent and 0.86 per cent, respectively.