Social networking website Orkut was created ten years ago and represented Google’s first effort into social networking. And now, it seems that Google is going to shut down the service, as it has announced this is going to take place on September 30, this year. Here’s what Google said on its official blog:
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. People can export their profile data, community posts and photos using Google Takeout (available until September 2016). Starting today, it will not be possible to create a new Orkut account.
As Google says, an archive of all public communities will become available but starting from today, it will be impossible to create an Orkut account. Also, by removing Orkut permanently from your Google account, your posts or name won’t be included in the community archive.
Also, former Orkut users will be unable to log in or export their photo albums to Google+ once the service gets closed. This is an unexpected move, as it would’ve made more sense for Google to allow this, and it would’ve helped to increase the number of active Google Plus users, as well.
Orkut is one of those start-ups which appeared thanks to Google’s 20 percent initiative where employees were allowed to use a fifth of their working week on side projects. The name of the service is given after Google employee Orkut Büyükkökten, a Turkish software engineer.
The Orkut app will be removed from Google Play and the App Store later today, as well. Albeit Google hasn’t given an official reason for the closure, it doesn’t surprise anybody, and it might actually be perceived as something that should’ve happened long before.