Why Orkut failed : Assumptions and failures

In 2004, Google launched a social media platform called Orkut, whose primary purpose was to keep in touch with old friends and make new ones. Orkut’s market was India and Brazil and according to a Forbes report, by 2009, gathered 27 million users. In spite of its raring success, google shut it down in September of 2014.

Orkut was an introduction to social media platforms for many people and the shutting down had a nostalgic feel to it. While, the emergence of other social media applications like Facebook and twitter played a large part in the failure of Orkut, there were other factors that led to its downfall. Some of the features provided by Orkut included adding friends, sending public and personal messages, customizing themes and so on. These are all features provided by Facebook, which is very popular. So what went wrong?

1. It was difficult to provide easy feedback on Orkut. A “Like” button was a great feature that Facebook added early on.
2. Orkut had a feature of letting other people know that you visited their profile. This is not a desirable feature on a social media platform. On sites like LinkedIn, it is helpful to know who is viewing your profile so you can make professional connections, but users come to expect a certain level of privacy on social media
3. Speaking of privacy, there wasn’t a way to avoid other users from accessing at your profile. Again, users like having a degree of control over their information, even if it is superficial
4. Posts did not load as you scrolled. This feature was not available on Facebook when they launched either, but they have worked constantly on improving it
5. Orkut was not the most aesthetically pleasing platform. This is not a functional failure, but important for social media usage.

The lack of some of these features is not the only shortcoming Orkut had. Every platform starts with a few problems, bugs and mistakes. Where Facebook succeeded and Orkut failed, is Facebook listened to its users, did the research and implemented it. It doesn’t help that, when people think about google, search and acquiring information comes to mind. That is probably why Google plus has not being wildly popular either. Social media is a platform that caters to a vast number of users, which means, user input and research should take a front seat in developing these products.