The story of Orkut: A deep insight!!!

Remember those times when you used to sit infront of your computer checking your scrapbook or testimonials eagerly? Or finding the silliest reasons to join a community? All these were a common phenomenon about half a decade earlier. But now, the scenario has completely changed. Social networking has emerged with a completely new face in the past half decade or so. And inevitably, the time has arrived for us to bid Orkut goodbye. On September 30 (coincidentally my birthday too :P ), Orkut will cease to exist except for the public communities out there whose archive will still be publicly available. And as it's end nears, let's take a deeper look at this social network which was one of the first popular social networking site.

Orkut founder 'Orkut Büyükkökten', the one-man army behind the creation of Orkut

In 2004, just a few weeks before the now in-trend Facebook(then TheFacebook) was launched, a Stanford Grad called Orkut Büyükkökten, sitting at the Google headquarters at California, had a great vision, which was

to connect all the Internet users so they can relate to each other which will make a difference to their lives.

 He was no stranger to social networks. He has been building and working on various social network projects since 2000. His project inCircle for Stanford Alumni became quite popular. After joining Google, he developed Orkut as a 20% project(where each Googler can denote 20% of their official work time to make something or do something of their own.). Thus, Google's first social networking site Orkut came up.

Marrisa Mayer and Sergey Brin

However, the inside story was not so smooth. Infact, when Orkut was first launched, it wasn't even launched as a Google product. The project had been built under the supervision of Marissa Mayer(now CEO of Yahoo). The project didn't become a part of Google Labs although it had immense potential. Despite it being developed as an experimental prototype, due to CEO Sergey Brin's insistence, Orkut was launched immediately without proper load testing, security reviews and privacy policy. And as a result, immediately after being launced, Orkut(which in Finish meant “multiple sexual climaxes”) was filled with spam and pornographic materials. This forced Google to take down the product immediately and relaunch it later. That was a big setback. Not only that, Brin and Mayer didn't even want the employees to publicly talk about Orkut. They gave very specific instructions to Googlers asking them to "neither confirm nor deny" a connection between Orkut and Google, if asked by reporters. Lastly, they agreed to use the phrase "in affiliation with Google" for Orkut.

All these factors resulted in a not-so-great start for Orkut. Surely, the social network were accepted by many but it didn't become a universal hit. For eg., it failed to make a mark in key market areas like US which was also the place of its origin. However it became quite popular in Brazil, India and in a few other states. A few weeks after Orkut was launced, in it's founder's Alma-mater dormitory, another social networking company named TheFacebook(which later became Facebook) was launched by a nerd (and later one of the youngest billionares) named Mark Zuckerberg. Although it's launch didn't provide any immediate threat to Orkut, but it was destined to be a great hit in the near future and to doom the prospects of many other social networks.

Fast forward 10 long years...

Orkut although has seen its popularity dwindling, sometimes linearly and sometimes exponentially, has successfully been able to hold on to a few local regions like Brazil and India for quite a long time. But, slowly Facebook overshadowed Orkut even in these traditional strongholds. Orkut's popularity rapidly started declining from 2009-2010 while Facebook's popularity continuously shot up.At the end of April 2010, Orkut had 19.7 million unique visitors compared to Facebook who had 18 million visitors worldwide. In India, Facebook grabbed the number one position for the first time in July 2010 with 20.9 million visitors, a growth of 179% in a year, whereas Orkut registered a paltry growth of only 16% in the same period.

Facebook Vs Orkut popularity in Brazil in the year 2012.

Today,social networking is not the same as it was a decade earlier. However, Google engineers were hardly enthusiastic about updating the features in Orkut nor was there any substantial innovation. One of the obnoxious reason was that Google engineers at first were not very pleased with the fact that Mr. Orkut had used Microsoft(non-google) tools to develop Orkut. Hardly did they bother to implement anything except for a few UI and Design changes. When they added one or two new features like photo tagging etc., it was already present on other sites like Facebook. And with the passage of time, the ever-increasing number of spam that the scrapbook was filled with made it all the more difficult and irritating to use Orkut.

Today, it is only a matter of time before Orkut ceases to exist. Now when you try to open Orkut, you might encounter a page like this(in case you are not signed in from a Google Account FROM WHICH AN ORKUT ACCOUNT ALREADY EXISTS.)

This is how a typical Orkut account's home page now looks

One quick glance through Orkut now is enough to give you a feel of it's present deplorable condition..One can very easily see the signs of negligence and that the product is simply "THERE" without any active development. The most striking one is the OLD Google bar on top corner which still remains in Orkut(perhaps the only Google product where it can still be seen.)There has been a slight effort though, to integrate some features of Google+ into it and now you can even post to both Orkut and Google+ simultaneously, provided you have an account in both from the same Google ID. Google has also decided to archive Orkut's public communities when the product as a whole ceases to exist. You can even create a personal archive of your Orkut profile before it ends, by following these steps.

As I try to pen down the last few lines for this post, my mind goes down the memory line. Orkut no wonder is a great social networking site and has touched the lives of many in different ways. But, when we compare Orkut to it's counterparts, it is certainly in a delusive, precarious situation. Perhaps the story could had been different, had it's parent company Google, been more enthusiastic about it and maintained it better. But unfortunately, reality says something else....

"ADIEU ORKUT...TIME TO BID YOU GOODBYE"