Google announced in June that it would shut down its original social networking service Orkut after ten years of existence. At the time, they set the death date as September 30th, and that day has come.
Orkut never quite caught on in our neck of the woods, but was pretty popular in Brazil at one point, with Facebook finally overtaking it in that country two years ago. Apparently there’s not even enough of an active user base left to justify keeping it around (although if Google Reader is any indication, an active user base isn’t even enough sometimes).
The company says its other products like Blogger, YouTube, and Google+ have taken off, and outpaced Orkut’s growth, so it’s just going to stick with them (another indication that Google+ isn’t really going away anytime soon).
Orkut, like many other Google products, was originally conceived as a “20 percent” project. According to Google, it “helped shape life online before people really knew what ‘social networking’ was.”
Google will refocus its Orkut resources on its remaining social properties. Users can export their data, posts, and photos using Google Takeout until September 2016.
Google will leave up an archive of all public communities, but has given users the ability to opt out of having their posts included.
“It’s been a great 10 years, and we apologize to those still actively using the service,” sayid engineering director Paulo Golgher when the closure was first announced. “We hope people will find other online communities to spark more conversations and build even more connections for the next decade and beyond.”
Google talks more about “preserving Orkut’s history” here.
Google announced on Monday that it is shutting down is original social networking service Orkut after ten years of existence.
Orkut never quite caught on in our neck of the woods, but was pretty popular in Brazil at one point, with Facebook finally overtaking it in that country two years ago. Apparently there’s not even enough of an active user base left to justify keeping it around (although if Google Reader is any indication, an active user base isn’t even enough sometimes).
The company says its other products like Blogger, YouTube, and Google+ have taken off, and outpaced Orkut’s growth, so it’s just going to stick with them (another indication that Google+ isn’t really going away anytime soon).
Orkut, like many other Google products, was originally conceived as a “20 percent” project. According to Google, it “helped shape life online before people really knew what ‘social networking’ was.”
Google will refocus its Orkut resources on its remaining social properties. Orkut will be shut down on September 30th. Users can export their data, posts, and photos using Google Takeout until September 2016. As of now, it’s no longer possible to create a new Orkut account.
Google will leave up an archive of all public communities starting on September 30th, but users can opt out of having their posts included if they want to.
“It’s been a great 10 years, and we apologize to those still actively using the service,” says engineering director Paulo Golgher. “We hope people will find other online communities to spark more conversations and build even more connections for the next decade and beyond.”
More info about the site’s demise can be found here.
The Brazilian version of Experian Hitwise has reported that Facebook has passed Google Brazil as the most visited site in that country, five times since April 1st. While it isn’t clear if April Fool’s Day is celebrated in Brazil, the next two days Facebook beat out Google also fell on holidays in that country – Good Friday, (April 6th), and Easter (April 8th). It’s no surprise that users were accessing social networks more during these holidays.
The numbers are indicative of Facebook chipping away of Google’s general dominance outside of the U.S., and the social network comprised 10.86% of website visits in Brazil on April 14th, and 10.98% on April 15th, as compared to Google Brazil at 10.85% and 10.55% respectively. Since November, Facebook has seen growth of 5.3%, and also surpassed Google-owned social network Orkut in January, which has 59.1% of its users coming from Brazil.
Comscore reported in March that Brazil has grown into the world’s 7th largest internet market, with Facebook seeing a relative increase of of 86.73% in the past six months. The general trend mapped out in the above chart shows Facebook’s gradual ascent to dominance in the Brazilian market, though there’s no mention if the numbers account for Google’s Orkut as well. Either way, Facebook beat out Google sites for the first time on April Fools day in Brazil.
Google seems to be taking a page out of the Facebook playbook and giving its social network a more musical experience. Unfortunately for many of you, we’re not talking about Google+, but Google’s other social network, Orkut.
“What could be better than listening to your favorite favorite music? Sharing the experience with your friends!” writes Google engineer Eduardo Ferreira. “Now you can do this directly from your Orkut page: just type in the artist or band name on the YouTube search bar while we select a playlist for you to enjoy. You can watch your favorite video clips while using Orkut, or you can minimize and leave them as background music.”
Songs users listen to will be posted as activities on their homepage, and friends can listen, he says.
Google, of course, does have the YouTube playlist feature on Google+:
It’s not quite the same social listening experience they’re offering with Orkut, however.
Though it was recently surpassed by Facebook (it’s quite noteworthy that it was only recently), Orkut is pretty popular in Brazil and India, even though it did not have the same level of success in other countries, like here in the U.S.
Brazil is fast becoming one of the world’s largest internet markets and Facebook is capitalizing on the country’s growing user base. According to a study from comScore, Brazil now ranks as the 7th largest internet market globally and Latin America’s online population grew the fastest of any global region in 2011.
The study, which will be presented in a webinar later this month (in Portuguese), shows how Facebook surged ahead of Orkut to become the top social networking site in Brazil. Facebook took the lead in December 2011 with 36.1 million visitors, which is a whopping 192% increase over December 2010. Users in Brazil spend an average of 4.8 hours on the site. To put Facebook’s Brazilian growth spurt in perspective, that average was just 37 minutes one year ago.
“2011 saw digital media rise to a new level in Brazil fueled by activities such as social networking, online video, search and online shopping, as more consumers turned to the web and spent an increasing share of their daily time connecting with digital content,” said Alex Banks, comScore managing director for Brazil. “For brands and publishers looking to capitalize on the latest digital consumer trends, it’s important to understand what’s coming around the corner.”
Other facts from the study highlight the Brazilian internet market’s rise. Brazilians spent an average of 26.7 hours online in December 2011, with social networking accounting for 23% of those hours. comScore claims online retail visitation went up 30% during the last holiday season and that 1 in 3 users accessed comparison shopping websites. Online advertising grew along with the internet population, with 62.9 billion display ad impressions delivered 50.8 million users in Brazil. Unsurprisingly, Facebook was the top display ad publisher in the country last year.
If you speak Portuguese, you can listen to Banks tell you all of these statistics himself in comScore’s webinar on March 21.
Yesterday, comScore put out a report on Facebook growth in Brazil, as the king of social networks finally surpassed Google’s Orkut in Brazil.
Interestingly enough, Google just announced a new iPhone (and iPod Touch) app for Orkut. On the Orkut Blog, Google engineer Ralf Botchen writes:
With this version, you can access your friends’ profiles, scraps, updates, birthdays, and even take pictures and send it directly to your Orkut albums. As always, your feedback is very important so please send us your comments and help us make an even better Orkut for you.
Download the new Orkut app today and stay connected with your friends and family anytime, anywhere – and get an exclusive badge to personalize your Orkut profile!
Orkut doesn’t get a lot of attention here in the U.S., especially in light of Google’s later social offerings (of course Google+ these days), but while Google has shut down things like Google Wave and Google Buzz, Orkut has remained, with a strong user base in Brazil.
It will be interesting to see if Facebook makes Orkut irrelevant in that country .
There’s no doubting the popularity and Facebook, nor the incredible rate at which Facebook members consume their various status updates. However, Facebook’s dominance is not on a worldwide scale, as some regions of the globe — for instance, China’s territory — have a preference for other social media platforms.
While such facts are well known by people who follow the social media industry, actually seeing such use mapped out provides an entirely new perspective. Thanks to the efforts of Ian Wojtowicz, a visual arts student, we now know what the lack of Facebook use looks like on a global scale. Wojtowicz’ work was featured at FlowingData.com, and it’s an ingenious method of extrapolating and visualizing data about Facebook’s use.
The map, which leads this article, was developed by mashing up NASA’s earth at night map with Facebook’s friendship map. The results are not only nice to look at, but they are also quite revealing as well. Before that, however, here’s a description of Wojtowicz’ legend.
Quite simply, the darker regions are active with Facebook use, while the yellow dots represent non-Facebook use. Feel free to enlarge the map by clicking on it, but, be warned, the larger map is almost four megabytes in size. Keep that in mind if you have a slow Internet connection:
Remember, the yellow dots represent non-Facebook use.
What did we learn from Wojtowicz’ map? China, among other regions, is not a Facebook-friendly area. The social media network of choice for China’s citizens is RenRen.com. The lack of Facebook use in China only makes sense when you consider the iron-clad grip with which the flow of information is controlled. Not only does China eschew Facebook, but so does a large portion of the Asian continent.
In Russia, VKontakte is the social network of choice, and it apparently owes a great deal of credit to the Facebook designers, which it liberally borrows from, down to the almost the exact same shade of blue. According to a comScore report from 2009, VKontakte had 14 million users, a number that has undoubtedly increased in the two years since the report was published.
The preference for VKontakte also demonstrates why Facebook usage is so low in what was once known as the Soviet Union.
Are there an areas that surprise you by their lack of Facebook use? Can Facebook make in-roads to these areas, well, maybe not China, but what about Russia and Brazil? Let us know what you think.
Sometimes, Google pulls out all the figurative stops when making an announcement, calling news conferences, issuing press releases, and putting notices on Google.com. Today, there’s a blog post and a site-specific doodle to celebrate the seventh birthday of Orkut.
The post on the Orkut Blog stated, "Today marks orkut’s 7th birthday, so to celebrate, we released a new doodle in orkut. We’d like to thank our users, and to let you know we are here working hard on making orkut better for you."
It’s possible to interpret this development in at least a couple ways. First is to take the note at face value, accepting that Google remains pleased with and dedicated to its most successful social product yet. Which is fair enough.
A couple more speculative stances: the lack of hoopla and so much as a single tweak to announce means Google’s social people have been redirected to work on a new project. Or that they’ve just run out of ideas.
Anyway, we’d like to take a moment to point out the humorous use of a "beta" tag in the doodle.
Congrats to the Orkut team, as well, since to be fair, they have succeeded in attracting a much bigger audience in some countries than homegrown competitors.
For a long time, supporters of Google’s experiments in social media were able to point to Orkut’s success in Brazil and India. In those countries, at least, the social network was dominant. But Orkut fell behind in India last year, and new stats from Experian Hitwise show that Facebook’s made impressive gains since then.
With a share of 5.26 percent, Facebook now ranks as the third most popular site in India in terms of visits. Only Google India and Google command higher visits shares (11.13 percent and 7.61 percent, respectively), which is hardly anything for Mark Zuckerberg to feel bad about.
Orkut, meanwhile, just barely makes a top ten list with a visits share of 1.29 percent. That’s about one-fourth of Facebook’s figure.
So it’s safe to say that Facebook’s in pretty good shape. An Experian Hitwise representative observed in an email to WebProNews, "The site accounted for more than one third of all Indian visits to social networks . . . picking up over twice as many visits as second placed YouTube."
This represents a tough loss for Google, further calling its social media competence into question.
Orkut, Google’s social network that never caught on in America, looks set to cost the company some money in Brazil. Google’s lost a lawsuit brought against it by Formula One driver Rubens Barrichello.
The lawsuit revolved around several fake profiles set up in Barrichello’s name. They ridiculed him for being second driver (or more specifically, second fiddle) to Michael Schumacher, and Google wasn’t quick to take the profiles down, despite being notified.
As a result, "A Sao Paulo court ruled that Google took too long to remove fake profiles mocking Barrichello from its website," according to a Grandprix.com article.
Barrichello was awarded $118,000.
Google appears to be suffering something of a losing streak with Orkut. Consider that comScore recently indicated the network lost its popularity lead to Facebook in India. Now there’s this lawsuit in Brazil, the only other big country in which Orkut’s been on top.
These developments don’t set the stage for the best possible Google Me launch. On the bright side (from Google’s perspective), $118,000 isn’t too much to a company with a market cap of $196 billion, and fake profiles aren’t the worst problem a social network has ever had to deal with.
Google has launched some new features for its Orkut social network, which is popular in Brazil and India, though it has been trumped by Facebook in India according to new comScore data.
Some believe the new features may represent some general social media thinking on Google’s part, which could potentially make an appearance in Google’s rumored "Google Me" social media project. This is purely speculation, but certainly not outside the realm of possibility.
Orkut now lets users group friends, as seen in the following clip:
"To make it easier for you to interact with your groups of friends, now you can open them from your homepage. Your groups will always be a click away from you, on the top of the page," explains Orkut product management director Victor Ribeiro. "When you click a group (for example, ‘college friends’), you’ll see updates, photos, videos and activities only from people who are part of that group. If you want to write them something, the scrap editor will automatically select everyone in the group and the privacy will be set to "Private" so you can share information that is relevant to that group only. And, of course, you can change that privacy setting before sending the message."
"We know that sometimes we invite someone from work to a family party or we bring a gym friend to the office happy hour. That means: sometimes our groups of friends mix together. Thinking of this, you can easily add or remove as many people as you want from the recipients of a scrap," adds Ribeiro. "Oh, and yes, remember that the groups are yours only. Nobody else will know the names of your groups of friends. When you send something to the entire group, people will know who else can see the message, but they will not know the name you chose for the group within your orkut. Also, you can change and edit your groups whenever you want, the way you want it!"
Facebook lets you group friends, and Twitter has lists, but these are more designed for your intake of information, as opposed to your output. If you tweet or post a status update, it’s still going to all of your friends/followers.
For a long time, Orkut has been the one bright spot in Google’s social media stable; it’s been the sole product that became really popular in some markets, even as everything else struggled to gain users (and/or not get the axe). Only new stats indicate that Facebook’s beaten Orkut in India, which represented one of its two strongholds.
According to comScore, Orkut attracted around 19.9 million unique visitors in July. Facebook bested that by attracting closer to 20.9 million people, and that gave Facebook the top spot in the "Top Social Networking Sites in India" category for the first time ever.
Facebook doesn’t appear to be running out of steam, either. comScore said in a statement, "Facebook.com posted an especially strong month in July, growing 12 percent versus June, to capture the top spot in the category with 20.9 million visitors."
That’s very bad news for Google. India’s home to a whole lot of Internet users – comScore considers it "the seventh largest market worldwide for social networking" – and any loss of mindshare has the potential to translate into a lot of missed marketing opportunities.
Also, as Google (allegedly) builds a new social network meant to take on Facebook, this development undermines whatever small amount of social credibility the company had.
The one detail that might work in Google’s favor is comScore’s disclaimer about public computers (see the small print below the chart). Internet cafes are popular in India, so it’s possible Orkut has a lot of fans who just weren’t counted.
With the news confirmed that Facebook membership now exceeds 500 million people worldwide – that’s nearly 10 percent of the world’s total population – it’s a worthy reminder to note that, never mind its size or seeming monolithic ubiquity, there are other social networking places to complement Facebook.
The BBC has produced an attractive visual display on the rise and fall of social networks using metrics from market researcher Nielsen in June as its source.
As the chart here on the top five social networks by country shows, Facebook dominates in six of the seven countries the BBC highlights – USA, Australia, Germany, UK, Spain and Italy. The difference in Brazil, where Orkut is the leader with Facebook a distant second.
Yet even as Facebook is king, and not even well liked in some countries, look at the other social networks. In Germany, for instance, 8.5 million people are members of VZNet Netzwerke which includes StudiVZ, the big network for young people. In Spain, 6.6 million are with Tuenti. Brazil, too, where 5.9 million are in iG Comunidades. And let’s not forget MySpace (which recently underwent a facelift) – it’s in second place in the USA, UK, Australia and Italy and third in Spain.
My point is simply a reminder that, from a business perspective in particular – notably, if you’re planning any kind of outreach or engagement activity in these countries – recognize that the dominant social network isn’t necessarily the only place where your engagees spend their time and exercise their influence – sizeable niche communities are elsewhere too.
Even if the average American doesn’t think about Orkut on a regular basis (or ever), Google demonstrated today that it hasn’t forgotten about the social network. The option to automatically share YouTube activities with people on Orkut was introduced this morning.
A lot of folks in India and Brazil are likely to welcome this move, considering that Orkut is most popular in those two countries. And since India and Brazil are the second- and fifth-most populous countries in the world, respectively, that fact’s nothing to shrug at.
It is interesting to consider what this means for Orkut in other regions, though. After all, Google introduced a sharing feature involving Facebook, Twitter, and Google Reader a year ago tomorrow, and it’s hard to believe that some sort of engineering challenge delayed the Orkut rollout.
It’s possible, then, that Google’s getting ready to carry out a push to make Orkut more accepted. Or maybe an engineer just finally remembered he forgot something the first time around.
Anyway, with regards to the new sharing feature, a post on the Orkut Blog stated, "Auto-share is an easy way to tell your friends in real-time about the videos you’re liking, saving as favorites or commenting on; the channels you’re subscribing to; or even new videos you’re uploading to your own channel."
Earlier this year Google added a new product to the already overflowing social-space. Its name was Buzz and it instantly found itself in the same category (mainly for the built-in Gmail userbase) alongside both Twitter and Facebook. Based on all the hype surrounding Buzz, it seemed we were getting ready for the fight of social-space supremacy.
Fast-forward a few months
After the initial hype-fest died down, and the dust settled, most of the positive buzz has dissipated. What we’re left with are privacy concerns, a rampant spam problem and copyright issues from users. In an effort not to be totally negative in regards to Buzz, it should be noted that Google has been very quick addressing / fixing certain aspects of the service.
This past week we asked the question, “Would you consider Google Buzz to be a flop?” on our WebProNews Facebook page. We were surprised by some of the answers left by our fans. My personal favorite comes from Steve Blaze; he states that Google Buzz is the biggest flop since the Edsel. (For those of unfamiliar with the Edsel, it was a brand of car from the Ford Motor Company with a disastrous history so therefore “Edsel” has become synonymous with failure).
One has to ask, why is Google having such a hard with social media? In many ways Google was a pioneer of social media, with their Orkut service (which is still immensely popular in both India and Brasil – but now the US where it counts).
Recently Chitika, an online advertising network, did some research within their network and found some interesting data pertaining to Buzz.
The report goes on to say… ”February 9th, 2010 – the day Buzz was launched – the search engines lit up with queries. The Chitika network saw about 1,500 searches that day for the term “Google Buzz,” approximately 15 times the number of searches for “Twitter.”
However, those searches dropped off quickly – on February 10th, there were 580 searches; on the 11th, 147. From the 12th on – only three days removed from Buzz’s much-hyped launch – searches for Google Buzz failed to break three digits, and in most cases elicited less than 10 searches per day. During the same time, searches for Twitter remained fairly stable, averaging about 87 searches per day.”
What are some possible fixes for Google Buzz?
Social media users want services that make there experience easier… not just another service that brings nothing new to the table. There are numerous things that Google could add / tweak to make Buzz more user friendly, specifically here are 5 things that I would like to see…
1.) Lists – Twitter has them and so should Buzz.
2.) Groups – Again, Twitter has them so should Buzz.
3.) Hide all comments – until I want to see comments" option.
4.) Comment moderation – block directly from the comments (like on FriendFeed).
5.) Content filter – Don’t show me any photos from Picasa or posts from a specific user.
Something else that would’ve made this list is Buzz not pulling tweets in real-time. It appears as though this issue maybe getting fixed, a recent message from Josh Wills, an engineer on the Buzz team, explained…
"Okay, change is out everywhere. Here’s the scoop: we’re doing an experiment where we’re going to trust the timestamps on tweets (and by "experiment," I mean rolling it out to everyone, everywhere, all at once.) The net effect of this should be to do away with "tweet dumping", where you’re buzzing along and a whole bunch of tweets show up all at once because we just crawled them and push your page all around. Now, if a tweet shows up at the top of the stream, it will be because it just happened, or because a buzzer commented on it.
Personally, I really like Twitter, and I want better integration between Twitter and Buzz. My hope is that this is a temporary change until we work out a way to play nicely together that is beneficial to everyone."
So Google Buzz might not be exactly what we expected when it first launched earlier this year… but only time will tell if it becomes a major player in the social-space.
Do you see Google Buzz becoming a major player? Or will it just fizzle out?Tell us what you think.
Sending someone a picture or document while chatting online can seem like the most natural thing in the world; it’s common enough for topics like children or school papers to be discussed. So Google’s upgraded one of its offerings by making it easier for people to trade files.
A post on the Google Talkabout Blog announced this afternoon, "Starting today, you can share photos, documents, and other files while chatting in iGoogle and orkut. To give it a try, just click Send a file… in the Actions menu while chatting with a friend (no download required):"
That should come in handy for a few folks. What’s more interesting, though, is that Lizhen Wang, a software engineer at Google, also stated, "We’re working on bringing it to Gmail as well, and we’ll keep you posted when that happens!"
That may happen soon, too. Gmail has millions and millions of users who depend on every component to work reliably, of course, but Orkut has millions and millions of users worldwide (it’s extremely popular in India and Brazil), meaning Wang and the other engineers Google’s assigned to this job have already scaled up the feature quite a lot.
We’ll be sure to report back when the implementation takes place.
Google appears to be suffering something of a losing streak with Orkut. Consider that comScore recently indicated the network 
