Today is the last day when you will find 1 of the earliest social networks, Orkut, Online. Owned by Google, Sept. 30 is farewell day for Orkut.

Born in 2004, the death of Orkut represents a milestone in the nascent world of Online social networking. Even while competitor Facebook continued to climb the global chart of popularity, Orkut had loyal followers largely in India & Brazil, but once FB & even Twitter took off, lost its lead there, too.

Google, as all of us know, went on to launch another social network, Google+. In a blog post, Google said, “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”.

Orkut was launched in the same year when FB was founded. The latter now is the world`s largest social network with 1.28 billion users. Orkut, on the other hand, had about 23 million users, though the number as of June this year is not known. It was on June 30, 2014, that Google had announced it would be closing Orkut on September 30, 2014. No new accounts could be created starting July 2014. Users can download their profile archive by Google Takeout.

It was in 2010, Facebook overtook Orkut as the top social networking site in India with 20.9 million visitors in July that year compared to Orkut`s 16% growth with 19.9 million visitors, according to research firm comScore. In 2008, Google had announced that Orkut would be fully managed & operated in Brazil, by Google Brazil, in the city of Belo Horizonte. This was decided due to the large Brazilian user base & growth of legal issues.

Google said it would preserve an archive of all Orkut communities that will be available from September 30.

Not many know that the social site was named after its creator, Google employee Orkut Büyükkökten.

Image Credit: Orkut

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