Orkut

Orkut was a social network promoted by Google since January 2004 and was active until the end of June 2014. The network was designed to allow its Members maintain their existing relationships and make new friends, business contacts, or more intimate relationships.

It was possible to create and maintain communities, grouping people according to their likes and interests, in different categories, among others: activities, businesses, games, music, pets, religion, schools, food, sexual preferences, and some more.. Leave notepad as messages that were visible to all, as well as testimonials. The friend limit was 999.

While the service remained in beta phase, only those who received an invitation from someone who already belonged to it could access this community. Later it was opened to the whole world, being only necessary to have an email account.

The service was designed by Turkish Google employee Orkut Büyükkökten (from which the name of the social network is also derived) who, for his previous employer Affinity Engines, had already created a similar system called & #34;InCircle" aimed at communities of university students.

In June 2014 Affinity Engines sued Google, claiming that Orkut was based on InCircle's source code. The accusation was based on the fact that some errors present in InCircle were also in Orkut.

Most of its users came from Brazil and India, where the social network was very popular. It was also popular between 2006 and 2009 in Paraguay, Pakistan, and Iran, but the Iranian government decided to block access to the site in that country for security reasons.

In April 2022 the website was reactivated.

Closing

The announcement was made on June 30, 2014 by Paulo Golgher, Google's director of engineering, who announced that it would no longer be possible to create new accounts on the service, while existing users would have until September 30, 2014. closing year to recover your data and images so as not to lose them.

Statistics

Access from Brazil rose exponentially and reached 48% of all visits. From India, 39.2% was reached. It also highlighted a majority of users between the ages of 13-25 (over 50%), it was used to contact friends by a large 80% and single users were around 40%.

Data as of April 13, 2010 (by country):

• BrazilBrazil- 48.0%
• India-39.2%
• United States - 2.2%
• JapanJapan - 2.1%
• Paraguay Paraguay - 1.0%
• Argentina - 1.0%
• Other - 5.3%