orkut | The Central Texas IT Guy

July 14, 2014

The giant social networking site Orkut, named after its creator a Google employee Orkut Büyükkökten, is officially set for its closure on September 30 this year. Orkut was Google’s first initiative to start a social networking website and was officially launched in 2004, gaining immediate popularity and users all over the world.

In the last few years however, with the upcoming of many other social platforms like Facebook, Google+, Youtube and Blogger, which were widely preferred social networking sites, it was becoming clear that Orkut was not having much of a future. Facebook with an estimated 1.28 billion users is quickly becoming the largest networking site on the net. Orkut however has chosen not to disclose its number of users but it seems Orkut is not fortunate enough to survive the enormous competition. More and more users have multiple accounts on different social networking sites and Orkut is losing popularity.

Google has now confirmed that they would focus their energy and resources on more innovative ideas and have decided to shut down Orkut. In order to help make the transition easier, Google Takeout will help the existing users to export their profile information, photos and community posts from Orkut before the site shuts down completely. The site will also stop registering any new users from July onwards and existing users will no longer be able to log in or export photos to Google+ and any APIs tools related to it after the site goes down. Google play and Apple App Store will remove the Orkut app from their stores as well.

To mark its legacy though, Google will create an archive of Orkut’s online communities. The users will have an option to opt out of it by removing their accounts from Google. Employees currently working on Orkut will most probably be shifted to projects on Google+.

Jan 5, 2010

Social networking is one of the latest trends over internet. Although it seems to be the most modern trend, its history goes back to 1985 when THE WELL was initiated. THE WELL is one of the oldest online communities which is known for its online forums. During the 1990’s technology was at a boom and sites like tripod.com and geocities .com started getting popular. These sites would let individuals create their homepage which was generally a personal profile. This was also the starting of the blogging culture within internet.

In 1997, SixDegrees.com was launched where you could create user profiles and send messages directly to friends. SixDegrees.com allowed you to search for people with similar interests and add them to your friends list. In spite of having all these features, SixDegrees.com was shut down as it could not gather profits, maybe because the site was ahead of its time. During 2002 and 2004 there were three such sites namely Friendster, Myspace and Linked in that emerged and changed the way people worked on internet. It started with Friendster in 2002 which Google tried to acquire in 2003, then Myspace which had more page views that Google at one time and then Linkedin. In 2004, Facebook started emerging and in just a few years Facebook became one of the fastest and the largest growing sites not limiting to geographical locations. Facebook opened gateways by allowing externally developed add on applications which allowed people to integrate their applications within the site. Facebook is not only used by individuals but also used by several businesses to promote their services and products as well.

After 2005, Social Networking began flourishing as a business component and many businesses started using sites like Facebook, Bebo and Myspace as a tool to promote their businesses. In 2006 came Twitter which although has comparatively lesser features became one of the most popular sites in 2008-09 because of the ease of use it allows.

Social networks are becoming increasingly popular amongst students, teachers, businessmen, non profit organizations, celebrities and others to interact with each other. It is easy to create profiles and get connected to people with your interests. Sites like Facebook , Myspace and Orkut have started using Collabarative techniques to give users a better experience while sites like Twitter are winning on the ease of use syndrome. With all this in action, there are more developments that are being done in order to make it easier for people to get connected.

Centex Technologies plans Social Networking campaigns for clients to market their products on major social networks.

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Google To Shut Down Orkut In September