“We will shut down Orkut on September 30, 2014. Until then, there will be no impact on current Orkut users, to give the community time to manage the transition,” Paulo Golgher, Engineering Director of Orkut, wrote in a blog.
The social networking website has now stopped accepting more users, as Google has minimized its expansion. Orkut was launched in 2004, the same year when Facebook was founded, never achieved the same number of users as Facebook did.
India had the second largest Orkut users constituting 20 per cent of the total population on Orkut, being the first famous social networking website here. Brazil has the largest user base constituted 50 per cent of the total users of Orkut.
“The main glitch which people found about Orkut was privacy, which was being upheld by the website time and again.” said Prateek Bhatt, a former Orkut user.
“When it comes to a social networking site, people also expect it to be user friendly, which Orkut wasn’t. The features provided at this time, are also outdated, whereas information technology has gone miles ahead. The interface provided by Orkut was very unique and different, but the updates provided were very slow and it got monotonous.” said Nancy Sharma.
Some users like Swati Kundra have fond memories of the site they stopped using years ago.
“Orkut was the stone which was laid when it comes to social networking websites, and Facebook took on to that idea and grew on it. It was the only medium through which I got in touch with a lot of my lost friends overseas. Hence, I still have few memories attached with it,” said Kundra.
Some people also said that they liked an aspect of Orkut which is not offered by any other social networking websites- Who visited your profile?
“I had this school time crush on this guy in my class. One day I saw that he visited my profile and that made my day. Also you have a feel good factor at times when you have a lot of visitors of your profile”, said Asbah Rashid.
