New Delhi: Internet giant Google on Tuesday confirmed it will shut down its Orkut, its first social networking site on September 30.
The social media platform is very popular in India and Brazil, but lost sheen to rivals like Facebook and Twitter in other parts of the world, leading to its closure.
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 2004, the same year when Facebook was founded. Facebook is now the world`s largest social network with 1.28 billion users.
Google launched its Google+ social network in 2011 and has been slowly weaving it into other services. While Google+ was positioned to compete with Facebook in the beginning, over the last few years, it has established Google+ as a unified "user identity" system.
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 percent growth with 19.9 million visitors, according to research firm comScore.
Google said it would preserve an archive of all Orkut communities that will be available from September 30.
(With Agency inputs)
