What was Orkut?
Social networking website.
Quietly launched in Jan 2004 by Google.
Built by Orkut Büyükkökten - a software engineer at Google.
Büyükkökten developed it as an independent project while working at Google.
Shut in Sep 2014.
What's so special about it?
Orkut was one of most visited websites in India & Brazil in 2008.
How did it rise?
Orkut started off with a good seed of users. Just like FB that started of with Ivy League students, Orkut started out with internal Googlers and their Valley friends. At that time when other networks were not around (or sites like Friendster which were always down) Orkut provided a good place to network with Googlers and Valley stalwarts. This led to some initial growth in the US. When it spread into India and Brazil these same seed users were again responsible for making the networking site lucrative for users to join. But it was selective and you needed an invite to join, so there was an intrigue around the site.
Why did it fall?
1.
The first version of the site was more of a hack and it had rather one too many outages. Even after the site was ported to a more robust platform the rather infamous 'No donut for you' error page would turn up more often than one wanted it to.
2.
It was not considered to be cool to work on the Orkut team, within Google. Everything about the site starting from the fact that the site was branded around a person made it quite quirky. So it was difficult to get the best engineers to work on it. Eventually, teams in India and Brazil took over the entire product. However, there was a fair amount of support from the top management.
3.
Orkut was not designed to linguistically walled. So when Brazilians took on the challenge of wanting to be the top country on Orkut, suddenly the rest of the world started to see Portuguese messages everywhere. This led to a decline in interest for English speaking users in the US.
4.
Orkut had very basic privacy settings and did not really envisage an environment where people wanted different privacy settings for different user groups.
5.1
While Orkut was on the decline in the US, it gained a strong foothold in India and Brazil and saw a lot of growth in these two countries. Soon the team started focusing on this market mainly. There was one redesign, which was mostly visual and did not do much to improve all the usability flaws that the site had.
5.2
By this time Facebook had caught on in the US and a lot of the features on Orkut seemed like catchup features. Once Facebook had established itself in the US, users in India slowly began noticing that their friends in the US had been moving to Facebook. This put a lot of pressure on the Indians to be on Facebook as well, since the US based Indians were the influencers and the mavens.
5.3
Meanwhile, as Orkut began spreading to smaller cities in India, people in India started realizing the shortcomings of Orkut's privacy settings.
5.4
Add to that there were a number of things like defamatory comments about politicians and one high profile kidnapping+murder that had an Orkut angle to it. This gave the site some bad press in India.
5.5
Also given the fact that it was difficult to maintain a presence in two networks, users in India started migrating to Facebook in droves. Around the same time, Orkut fixed its privacy and came up with a redesign. The redesign did not address a lot of what users were asking for. Over a period of time, Orkut lost its footing in India and a little later in Brazil as well.
6.
Google's vision has been to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful - Google's vision was never to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected. And, Google has a very strong culture; to which each employee adheres to; and mission which is why they succeed in doing what they do. With that vision/mission, how can a team at Google built a world-class product like Orkut? Because of the lack of founders' focus the level of innovation & zeal was low for Orkut.
7.
Orkut also spent years dealing with a Brasilian lawsuit. (In Aug 2006, Brazilian Federal Judge ordered Google to release Orkut user’s information; by Sep-end 2006; of a list of about 25 Brazilian nationals, believed to be using Orkut to sell drugs and to be involved in child pornography. The judge ordered Google to pay $23,000 per day in fines until the information is turned over to the Brazilian government. Google declined to release the information, on the grounds that the requested information was on Google servers in the U.S. and not on Google servers in Brazil, and is therefore not subject to Brazilian laws).
8.
Ads were introduced in Orkut for monetization.
9.
Apps introduced by Orkut, led to heavy spamming (spamming was done by App-makers to ensure virality & monetization)
Orkut Büyükkökten
Source:
https://wikipedia.org/
http://logos.wikia.com/
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