The Google social networking service Orkut, which kicked off ten years ago, has been shuttered, according to the platform’s blog on Monday. The platform will officially close on Sept. 30, allowing users to phase out of the application over a transition period.
Between now and the site’s shutdown in a few months, users have the opportunity to save their data by exporting it.
As of today, it’s no longer possible to create a new Orkut account.
Google (GOOG) has no qualms about shuttering the site, especially with the emergence of YouTube, Blogger and Google+, a company blog post notes, because “the growth of these communities has outpaced Orkut’s growth,” and so the company has “decided to bid Orkut farewell (or, tchau).”
Google will now put in more resources into expanding its other social platforms to make them “as amazing as possible for everyone who uses them.”
A month after Google’s service launched in January 2004, so did Facebook. Orkut was mostly popular in Brazil and India, according to various media reports, but didn’t catch on in other countries.
The site was named after its founder, a former Google employee Orkut Büyükkökten.