Orkut:

A failed Social Platform

A Google failure, Orkut.com was a social platform allowing users to reconnect with old friends and find new ones.

Once the most visited site in Brazil (2008) , Google announced it’s closure for September 2014 earlier in the year. Just a decade after it’s founding by Orkut Büyükkökten, former product manager at Google.

Orkut started out as an open social platform where anyone could join and connect with anyone. This created two types of users on the site. One where a user would add anyone they are remotely interested in, and another type who just connected with known friends.

User’s could sign up for free to the website unlike many of it’s earlier competitors such as Friends Reunited. This allowed Orkut to rapidly grow as people wanted a free service to socialise online. As a result it was one of the most sucessful websites and had millions of active users.

Issues with it’s privacy eventually caused the website to close with some countries even banning the domain entirely. Online privacy is a huge deal nowadays, and the fact that Orkut had no protection towards outsiders and non-members viewing all your pictures and contacting you caused real problems. Some countries such as India and Brazil even sued Google/Orkut for this!

There was also a huge issue with the moderation of the community. What was once the most popular site in Brazil and a huge player in online social communities, had become place full of trolling, racism and sexism through the large amount of hatred groups and fake profiles. The failure to maintain and manage a community to ensure users are abiding by the rules resulted in the community to be unpleasent and most likely a huge factor to it’s closure.

Tom.

Web Media Level 1. Ravensbourne.

WEB14105

Tom Sharman.