Orkut, one of the popular social networking sites was founded in the year 2004, ten years ago in the same year when Facebook was launched.
Today, Facebook has grown in size and has more than 1.2 billion users while the user base of Orkut is continously on a decline. Due to the losing popularity of Orkut, Google has finally decided to shut down its service on September 30, 2014. It was recently announced by Paulo Golgher, Engineering Director in one of the Orkut’s blog post.
BYE- BYE Orkut
Orkut was the first social networking site that I had joined back in 2008. At that time, I was crazy for Orkut and participated in various communities. But, after the Facebook storm hit the world, I was too quickly absorbed into spending time on Facebook rather than Orkut.
Orkut was a popular social networking service in 2004 with more than half of its user base from USA. But as of May 1, 2014, only 5% of its user base remained from USA. This service is still popular in Brazil and India but due to the extreme focus on Google Plus, Orkut losed its value and presence.
Google is more focussed on promoting its newly launched social networking service, Google Plus which is growing steadily has become the second largest social networking site with over 540 million users. This is a great achievement and one of the reasons why Google decided to shut down its old service and concentrate on the new one instead. Needless to say but Orkut is 3rd such service to get retired after Google Google Buzz which was launched in 2010 and retired in 2011; Google Friend Connect which was launched in 2008 and retired by March 1, 2012.
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