Orkut

» see orkut.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

orkut launched on 22 january 2004. it was built by a turkish-american google employee named orkut büyükkökten as a 20% time project. the name was just his first name. google ran it as a side product for the first few years, with a strange invite-only signup system that limited growth in the early days.

orkut never really took off in the US, where it competed with friendster and then myspace. but it found two specific audiences that nobody had predicted. brazil and india. by 2008, brazilian users were over 50 percent of orkut's total. indian users were another 20 percent. for a brief period orkut was the dominant social network in two of the largest countries on earth.

i saw orkut everywhere in turkey too. friends had profiles, classmates compared friend counts, the green logo was on every internet cafe screen for a stretch around 2005 to 2008. i never signed up. by the time i would have, the network had filled with low-effort accounts and the turkish kids who joined were mostly there for the game widgets, not the social part. i stayed on msn and missed nothing.

google launched google+ in june 2011. google+ was supposed to be the company's serious answer to facebook. orkut was old, unloved internally, and competing with the new product. google announced orkut's shutdown in june 2014. the site went dark on 30 september 2014. millions of brazilians and indians lost their main social network in a single afternoon. there is still resentment about it.

~ the record ~

~ why it was big in brazil ~

orkut hit brazil at exactly the right time. internet penetration in brazil was rising rapidly between 2004 and 2008. brazilian users were looking for a social network. friendster had not localized. myspace was english-only and US-coded. orkut, despite being made by google in california, somehow felt friendlier and easier to navigate. the early-adopter brazilian internet community embraced it.

once the network effect set in, brazil locked in fast. by 2007 essentially every brazilian internet user had an orkut profile. the platform's core features (profile, friend list, communities) mapped well to how brazilians used the internet for socializing. groups, called "communities" on orkut, became a particular cultural form. there were communities for every neighborhood, every bus line, every soap opera character, every shared experience.

when facebook eventually started growing in brazil around 2010, the migration from orkut took years and was painful. brazilian users actively resented being moved off orkut to facebook. there was a real cultural attachment that was visible in news coverage at the time.

~ india ~

the india story is similar. orkut was a major social network in india from about 2006 to 2010. for the first wave of indian internet users, orkut was the social platform they encountered first. the platform handled multi-language identities and indian friendship networks well enough that it grew without much localization effort from google.

facebook displaced orkut in india slightly faster than in brazil, but the cultural attachment was similar. there are still indian and brazilian users in their thirties and forties who name orkut as their first social network and have specific memories of its profile pages.

~ the final blow ~

google launched google+ in june 2011. internally there was a strong push to consolidate google's social products. orkut was old, did not integrate cleanly with the google+ identity system, and had a user base concentrated in markets google did not particularly prioritize.

google announced orkut's shutdown in june 2014. users were given three months to download their data. the site went offline on 30 september 2014. data was preserved in a read-only archive at google takeout for several more years.

google+ itself was shut down four years later in april 2019. so the product orkut was killed for had a shorter lifespan than orkut did. this is one of those situations where the strategic decision and the actual outcome did not match. google killed a working social network in two large markets to make room for a product that would not survive.

~ what we lost ~

the major social network of two large countries. orkut in brazil and india was not a niche product. it was the main social experience for tens of millions of users. when it shut down, those users had to migrate to facebook, but the migration lost a lot of social context. communities, friend networks, photo histories, message archives. some of it transferred. most of it did not.

the assumption that small things google ships are stable. before orkut died, there was a kind of trust that google projects would persist. after orkut, that trust was permanently weaker. by 2018 there was a meme that any google project not in the top three would eventually be killed. orkut is the original case study for what would later be called the google graveyard pattern.

the founder. orkut büyükkökten left google in 2014 and started a new social network called hello (now mostly defunct). he is still working on social tools but has not had another moment as big as orkut. the original product, named after him, is gone. his name lives on as a brand most google graveyard articles still reference.

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