Orkut launched in January 2004 as Google’s first experiment in social networking: a “20 percent project” named after its creator, engineer Orkut Büyükkökten, running by invitation. In the United States it never mattered; MySpace and then Facebook crowded it out. Elsewhere it outgrew Google’s ambitions: by mid-2004 invitations were spreading through Brazil faster than any marketing campaign could.
The network Brazil and India took over
By June 2004 Brazilian profiles already outnumbered American ones. Two years later The New York Times put the scale in plain terms: roughly 11 million of Orkut’s 15 million users were registered as living in Brazil. In 2008 Orkut ranked among the most-visited sites in Brazil and India, and Google moved day-to-day operations to Google Brazil in Belo Horizonte. In India, it was many people’s first online social space and worked well on slow connections. By 2010, fully half of Orkut’s more than 100 million members were Brazilian and about a fifth were Indian.
Communities, scraps, and testimonials
The heart of the site was the community, not the profile. Members joined groups for their city, school, sports team, political party, or an inside joke, the largest reaching hundreds of thousands of members. On top of that sat the scrapbook, where anyone could leave a public message on a friend’s profile, alongside testimonials — short texts friends wrote about you that you approved to keep. These were the social signals of the day: how many scraps you had, and who had written a testimonial about you. At closure Orkut held some 51 million communities and 120 million discussion topics.
Closure and migration
Facebook overtook Orkut in India in 2010 and in Brazil by 2012, and Google had already begun directing users toward its new Google+. On June 30, 2014, engineering director Paulo Golgher posted a farewell: the service died on September 30, with profile and community posts downloadable through September 2016 and all public communities preserved in a Google archive. The departure meant different things in each country. In India it closed the era of “Orkutiyas” and scrapped the first friendships built online. In Brazil it made Orkut a national memory — a shared room where strangers became friends and cousins were found.
The second death
Google had promised the public community archive would let the network’s communities “live on.” It was deactivated in 2017 with about two weeks’ notice, a second death of the thing users actually cared about. Yet the community was not simply erased. The Wayback Machine and Archive Team saved profiles, communities, and threads, and researchers have recovered well over a hundred thousand community names from those captures. And today orkut.com opens on a letter from Büyükkökten himself, promising a new network built on the old idea that a friendship is more than a friend request.