First Ever Social Networking Site Orkut To Shutdown Today, A Look Into It's Journey All The Way From 2004

Orkut, Google’s social media platform is finally shutting down today, as announced by Google earlier. Google had forayed into social networking with Orkut in 2004 in the same year Facebook was also launched. In past few years, Orkut failed to take off due to tough competition from rival social media services such as Facebook and Twitter.

Later in 2011, Google launched another social network called Google+, which turned out to be far more popular than Orkut.

In a blog post, Google said

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.

Google had announced on June 30 this year, that it will be pulling down Orkut thus giving time to its users to manage transition. “People can export their profile data, community posts and photos using Google Takeout (available until September 2016)” said Google.

Google said it would preserve an archive of all Orkut communities that will be available from September 30 and has asked people to remove their Orkut account from Google permanently if they didn’t want their name or posts to be included in the community archive.

Here is a video by Culture Machine for Being Indian channel “Miss You Orkut – Misguided Bhramastra” a tribute to the social networking site.