Google Kills Orkut To Focus On YouTube, Blogger and Google+ 71
An anonymous reader writes "Bad news for Brazillians. Google's first social network, Orkut, will be shut down at the end of September. A farewell message on the Orkut blog reads in part: "Ten years ago, Orkut was Google's first foray into social networking. Built as a '20 percent' project, Orkut communities started conversations, and forged connections, that had never existed before. Orkut helped shape life online before people really knew what "social networking" was. 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."
But I thought it was already dead? (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Not as long as Facebook is getting some of peoples' personal information, and their data mines aren't fully loaded.
Re: (Score:2)
The 20-to-50-odd daily (non-spam) posts from various parties I get on Google+ tells me it is not dead.
Just because your friend and your mom doesn't use it, and therefore it is useless to you, doesn't mean it is dead.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
I think in general it's best to assume any Google service is dead: you're probably right, or else you will be in a few years (except possibly for mail, maps, and google.com).
Re: (Score:2)
(except possibly for mail, maps, and google.com).
Don't jinx it!
Re: (Score:1)
Why not? The only thing that Google really does better than anyone else is search (and maybe free machine translation). For everything else, there's a better or at least equivalent option.
Re: (Score:3)
Gmail is actually doing quite a good job as well. What other mail provider does probably BCC every mail you receive and send to the NSA cloud for safekeeping and backup?
Re: (Score:2)
The interface in Gmail has been getting more and more obnoxious. In the name of simplicity if I write a reply it does not even bother showing me the subject field anymore. WTF.
Re: (Score:2)
Why not?
Spreading a new email address would be total PITA. Street view of Google Maps is kinda unique and useful. Bing sucks compared to Google.
Re: (Score:3)
Not dead, it was actually pretty big in Brazil (therefore the tchau reference, which is how they say "ciao" in Brazilian Portuguese). Big in Brazil, not so much anywhere else.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
I guess this is why it's going away... if even Brasil is not using Orkut anymore, then no one is.
A side conversation.... and Apple really isn't even in the conversation at this point. At least Google has a social network or two to shut down. Apple had what, Ping? Because of lawsuits iMessage isn't going to spread much past iOS/MacOSX. Though I don't like the explosion of places im supposed to lose my privacy to... it's like Oprah Winfrey "You get a social network! You get a social network!..." the big gu
Re: (Score:2)
If Google kills unpopular services, why is Google+ not dead yet?
Because Google tends to spam you to set up an account if you use any of their other services. If you define active as making more than 3 posts a month then over 99% of Google+ account's aren't active.*
* I made those numbers up, but they're probably reasonably close to true.
Re: (Score:3)
Part of the reason for Orkut's decline in the US was that it was overrun by Portuguese speakers (mostly Brazilian) who posted (in Portuguese) in every English-language discussion, making the system unusable by anyone who didn't speak Portuguese. For the same reason, it remained popular where Portuguese was the national language or commonly spoken.
Anyway, you've got to love the message from Google: Use social networks, you're giving a third party the ability to kill your online presence and the identity
Re: (Score:2)
Anyway, you've got to love the message from Google: Use social networks, you're giving a third party the ability to kill your online presence and the identity that you use for communicating with your friends on a whim!
It's not the first time they send out this message. Didn't you hear about them dropping gtalk, and with it, XMPP support?
Re: (Score:2)
Google Talk was fine. Sure I use the service most often from inside a browser but if I wanted to use it all the time, as I do on occasion, a standalone client is a lot more energy efficient and convenient to use than running something inside a browser.
Re: (Score:2)
I fail to see the correlation between dropping XMPP support and standalone clients being more efficient. There's plenty of standalone clients for XMPP, and there have been for many years.
Nobody used it anymore (Score:3)
Alternate universe. (Score:1)
Google kills Youtube, Blogger and Google+ to focus on Orkut.
I went to check this blog post (Score:2)
Come on Google (Score:1)
I get why Google is getting rid of the service, but two months notice is the best that they can do?
For the random people that use Orkut like others use Facebook, it really is not a lot of time to figure out what to do with potentially gigabytes of information. That holds particularly true for anyone that is not technically savvy.
Seeing as they own Google+, it would seem like it would make more sense to have a single click to transition accounts over to Google+ rather than simply kill this for the people tha
Re: (Score:2)
it really is not a lot of time to figure out what to do with potentially gigabytes of information.
Anybody who stores (instead of just sharing, with actual storage elsewhere) gigabytes of information at any social service deserves what's coming to them.
Re: (Score:2)
How long does it take to slide over to Google Takeout [google.com] and download all of your data?
A few minutes? An hour?
When Goog crushed Wave, I downloaded all my stuff in a matter of minutes. Couldn't really do much with it, but it lowered my White Hot Rage down to Red.
Google+ has taken off? (Score:1)
Really? Google+ has taken off? That is news to me and anyone working outside of Google.
Re:Google+ has taken off? (Score:5, Informative)
Really? Google+ has taken off? That is news to me and anyone working outside of Google.
It's their attempt at a Big Lie: a lie repeated over and over until everyone believes it's true.
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
G+ is awesome. The smart techy type people do use it. If you aren't on it, that says a lot more about you than about it.
Re: Google+ has taken off? (Score:4, Insightful)
Marketing a special social network for smart people is like marketing a special vanilla-creme filled chocolate cheesecake to health fanatics.
Which is to say, the moment they take the bait is the moment they demonstrate they're not whom you thought they were...
Re: (Score:2)
G+ doesn't have to be your main social anything.
Re: (Score:3)
It's easy to say when you're not using it.
It has a good number of active users, myself included, who use it to communicate with people in specialized niches (Android developers, Ingress players, brewers, poker players, blah blah blah).
Re: (Score:2)
G+, yep lots and lots of smart techy types certainly are on it, how much they use it, is another question all together. It must be the social app with the greatest number of registered members who never use the social app.
Re: (Score:2)
Of all the Google+ accounts (basically all Google accounts), how many actually log into that specific service?
Re: (Score:3)
Not only that, but its tied into the search engine as well - you can only establish canonical authorship on your own website of something by linking it with your Google+ account. Which means that not having a Google+ account can affect your page rank.
Re: (Score:1)
Obligatory Orkut joke (Score:5, Funny)
Larry Page says to Sergey Brin: "Hey Sergey, did you know that Orkut has ten million Brazillian users?"
Sergey looks puzzled, then says "Larry, remind me again how many is a brazillion..."
Re: (Score:2)
how many is a brazillion...
= the number of Brazilians queued at passport control in Miami Airport?
Long and drawn-out death but will be missed (Score:4, Informative)
In the best of my recollection, once upon a time, in 2004, Orkut (the site) was nothing but a 20% project of some Orkut Buyukkokten dude on Google. It had a simple goal: to connect Orkut (the dude) with his close friend and to map the whole six degrees of separation thing. In an era of the web development when breadcrumbs where not in vogue Orkut (the site) had it, even two: one with the degrees of separation between you and whoever profile you were viewing (through your common friends network) and the other with the degrees of separation between you and Orkut (the dude).
And in the very beginning it worked because it was invite only and that made the invitees to be more or less part of the same socioeconomic and cultural background (even among countries). Orkut (the dude) invited his pals on Google Campus and on Stanford. Some Stanford dude invited some Brazilian dude on a federal university (UFRGS), who invited his pals on campus, who invited some pals on other federal universities (UTMG, UFV, UFRJ) and, in the invite only degrees of separation phase, everything was good and beautiful.
Everybody knew everybody else, connections were forged, Adam Rifkin gamed the system, some robot put people in jail, baby animals got lasers and everybody partied hard.
The it died, the cool kids moved away either to Facebook or completely away from public social networks. Now get off my lawn!
Don't depend on a social network (Score:2)
Now we just need to kill the rest of 'social' (Score:1)
I keep wondering when the world will wake up and realize that 'social networking' is a scam. How many times in how many ways does Facebook have to ream its user base before people realize that they are being abused there? How many times in how many ways do people's personal information (posts, contacts, emails, etc) have to be mined, analyzed and resold/abused before people realize that they are the 'product' with these free 'social' services? What do you think happens with everything you do with Gmail (
I like how they worked in a little humor (Score:2)
So Google+ has apparently taken off! I must have missed the memo!
Well, I suppose if the frame of reference was Orkut, then yes it has. Sure, Google+ has tens of millions of members... who aren't actually aware they are members of Google+.
Re: (Score:2)
And nothing of value was lost (Score:1)
XKCD: my turn to make the obligatory link (Score:2)
http://xkcd.com/1361/ [xkcd.com]
Brazil killed it (Score:2)
Page after page after page of retarded HEUAHEUAHEUA. When brazillians invade a service they crap on it to the point nobody else wants to use it.
Re: (Score:1)
True. We Brazilians even coined a term in Portuguese: "orkutizar" ("orkutize"), that is, invade and ruin with crappy stuff a service that was good once.
For the record, many of us are not proud of it though.
Little death (Score:2)
S--L--O--W (Score:1)
I abandoned Orkut well before the Brazilian invasion due to hideously slow performance. Back then it was because I thought that Google had simply badly under-provisioned a "20%" project. Then I remembered another early social network, Friendster, that also collapsed due to hideously slow performance. Basically, the first social networks failed to take into account the issue of scaling to massive numbers of users... and you *need* massive numbers of users to make the site interesting and to accommodate ev
Death of Orkut (Score:1)