Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOGL) announced its decision to shut down its first social network service called Orkut by the end of September this year.
Orkut was established by the search engine giant in 2004, the same year when Mark Zuckerberg co-founded Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) with his fellow Harvard University students Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes.
Orkut is popular in Brazil and India, but its user base is incomparable with Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) with 1.28 billion users. Google+, the other social network service of Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOGL) launched 3 years ago is more popular than Orkut. This is the primary reason behind the decision of the search engine giant’s decision to end the service.
“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,” according to Paulo Golgher, engineering director at Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOGL) in a blog post.
According to Golgher, Orkut users will be able to transfer their profile data, community posts and photos using Google Takeout—available until September 2016. Users will no longer be able to create a new account on Orkut starting today.
“Orkut, the service, may be going away, but all of those incredible communities Orkut users have created will live on. We are preserving an archive of all public communities…If you don’t want your posts or name to be included in the community archive, you can remove Orkut permanently from your Google account,” said Golgher.
Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOGL) is shutting down Orkut following the departure of Vic Gudran, the head of its social networking unit in April. The search engine giant is increasingly positioning Google+ as a way to establish a unified “user identity” system for its different web services including YouTube.
Last week, the social network giant announced that it will shutdown QuickOffice as it is already fully integrated into its new Docs, Sheets and Slideapps.
