Google Will Shut Down Its Orkut Social Network In September. How and Why?

Orkut Social network Shut Down 

Now it’s final, Google is going to shut down the Orkut Social Network on 30^th September of this year.Orkut is the 10 year old social network site of google. Orkut was introduced in the year 2004. Once upon a time, this service was very popular specifically in Brazil, India and Pakistan, but, by the year 2012, it was taken over by Facebook. It was also competing directly with Google’s another product Google+ which was launched during 2011. Google is planning to maintain the data of Orkut, till the year 2016. One cannot migrate data from Orkut to Google+.
The Orkut Social Network users can connect their data to Google+ and they can transfer their photos to Google+ Photos but, they cannot transfer other Orkut  data to Google+. The Orkut mobile app will be removed from Google play and from Apple’s app store. People, who have already downloaded the app, can use its service up to three months, till the service closes.

The initial concept ad growth of Orkut was very stunning.

Orkut never disclosed about the actual number of users world-wide, but published data suggests that about 50.6% of its users were from Brazil, 20.44% came from India, 17.78% were from the United States and 0.86% were from Pakistan.

The origin of Orkut was interesting. Google workers were needed to spend one fifth of their time on ideas which were not necessarily related to their job responsibilities.  Orkut was born as a result of “20 per cent project”. Everything was going well, unless Facebook took over Orkut in the year 2010, as the top social networking site in India with 20.9 million visitors in July that year as compared to Orkut’s 16 per cent growth with 19.9 million visitors according to the “ComScore” research firm. The following graph represents how Orkut fared in comparison to Facebook internationally. You can very well see the specific decline of Orkut from mid 2008.

In this context , it is interesting to note Google’s version of the story. According to a blogpost by the official Orkut blog , “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 (or, Tchau). We’ll be focusing our energy and resources on making these other social platforms as amazing as possible for everyone who usesthem.” Beyond data and history, which specifically suggest that Orkut was unable to compete with Facebook, there were many other concerns surrounding Orkut.

Controversies surrounding Orkut:

Fake profiles There were serious issues of Fake Profiles. Fake Profiles make a networking site dead and stagnant. Orkut failed to implement a firm strategy of profile management. People registered tons of fake profiles on Orkut, just like any other social networking site. The inactive jail system resulted in sudden removal/ re-appearance of the profiles. On top of that, many similar profiles were created repeatedly making it a complex and complicated system. Hate groups Initially there was no control over creation of groups. Google never intended to do that. But slowly t created associated legal issues.  During February 2011, many hate communities focusing on racism, Nazism and white supremacy have been deleted. People thought that too little has been done even if it was too late. Repeated incidents are reported worldwide in this context. On March 2006, the Brazilian Federal Justice subpoenaed Google, to explain about the crimes that had occurred in Orkut.Anti-ethnic and anti-national hate groups have also been spotted out. State censorship Orkut repeatedly remained in the center of the storm all long. The dating, match making and sex racketing groups landed Orkut into problems. These resulted in censorship in various States, including Iran, UAE, Saudi Arabia etc. Privacy Initially, it was possible for anybody to view any videos, pictures and scraps in Orkut. Gradually, people started misusing these and they started posting them on internet with false details and malafide intentions. Many of those photos and videos were vulgar, especially pictures of girls. Realizing the mistake, Orkut developers , through privacy update, restricted photos, videos and scraps viewing to a certain number of known people and selected e-mail contacts.  But the total incident dented the reputation of Orkut. Safety and security

Safety and security have been always an issue as there were  XSS vulnerability and susceptibility towards  worm. Using these loopholes , there were cases of rampant unauthorized community formation and joining along with impersonation of accounts.  

WORM ATTACKS

MW.Orc. Worm created havoc by stealing the banking details, usernames and password of the users by operating through Orkut. The users faced an attack as they launched an executable file disguised as a JPEG file. The malware also ran illegal P2P network in infected PCs using its bandwidth to distribute large, pirated movie files, causing the slow down the speed of the connection.   Then, there was W32/Kutwormer which made users join the virus related groups and in turn infect all their friend’s computer as well. The worm has further spread by Orkut’s later introduced a tool that allowed  users to write messages that contain HTML code. Session management & authentication Susam Pal & Vipul Agarwal published a security advisory on Orkut vulnerabilities, related to authentication issues on June 22, 2007. The vulnerabilities can be used for session hijacking and misuse of legitimate accounts. According to the authors, these vulnerabilities were ever fixed.  In extreme cases, these can lead to hijack Google and Gmail sessions and misuse the account of the user. Legal issues in various countries Usage of Orkut for drug distribution, arranging rave parties, managing child pornography, etc. repeatedly landed Orkut into problems and legal cases in India and Brazil. Then, there were several disclosure issues as most of the main servers were located at US rather than these countries.

TECHNICAL REASONS

Structure

Orkut is developed in  ASP for front-end and Javascript and Open Social at backhand. Application development on such platform is not easy. On top of that, Facebook used PHP based design which made Application development real easy.

Slow interface  

Orkut interface is real resource hogging both from the front end and server side. Somehow, Brazil adopted themselves with that slowness and India, being in an opposite time zone to US didn’t experience server side slowness.

Ease of Sharing

Social networks thrive on social sharing  which was virtually missing in Orkut. Plugins, which offer quick and easy sharing was missing from Orkut. Therefore, anyone who needs to share something should have Orkut opened in other tab.

Search

One cannot access Orkut profiles, without logging in. The in-built search engine does not show result with names of the persons.

Promotion

There is no facility of page creation (Like Facebook Page or Google Plus page) in Orkut. This frustrated the business promoters.  Ads are possible to be created on Orkut but there was no provision to generate a public link so that anybody can view it.

Entertainment

The heart of Social Networking is fun and entertainment before communication. Orkut, having very less entertainment provision soon faded in front of Facebook which focused on entertainment. Later, Facebook went miles ahead becoming a pioneer in social communication also.

Conclusion:

Apart from all the above, some of the external entities indirectly contributed to Orkut’s downfall. One such interesting proposition was MYORKUT application which could connect user’s Orkut Social Network profile to Facebook profile helping them to see their Orkut friends and read scraps from within  Facebook without logging in the Orkut account.