Orkut.com
orkut.com
orkut.com
They killed it after a while to replace with "something better". That was Google+.
I still think that it was one of the most impressive fumbles of a social media "monopoly".
I remember it getting absolutely destroyed by Spam at some point. Then they tried some redesigns, and an integration with Google+ that caused more problems than it solved. Each one of these events drove people to other websites.
Interestingly, the first version used ASP.NET, visible in the .aspx domains, which really deviated from other Google tech.
Just before launch there was a attempt to hide that it was google.
They even made a Java-based framework that would generate Javascript, GWT. Orkut was rewritten to use in 2009.
- early social media really struggled to scale the social graph algorithms. Facebook made real technical innovations.
- early social media had serious problems with trust/safety and really nasty content. Many complex problems from deeply adversarial userbase.
Together, Orkut got bogged down and couldn't compete for resources with ads/search/maps/etc.
It doesn't feel like there is a great modern alternative to this.
We used it HEAVILY at work (IT), then all the sudden--boom! It was not going to be developed any more. I still don't get it. Google, with all their resources couldn't support this?
Ok, instead of getting upset (AGAIN!), I'm just going to go back to the initial post from 16 years ago. Perhaps reading the comments might calm me down.
...and before that they also fucked up by trying to leverage Gmail into Google Buzz.
"Use real name? Y/N - N. Okay, we'll ask you again later"
Still makes me mad that some of the games in Orkut are just lost media now too. Still looking for Cafe Mania... maybe one day someone will find a copy of the flash files.. Ugh.
Further, nowadays nobody wants to update the status or share their personal lives on the internet because it's cringy and also again we don't want to go back to the phase where we start to compare our lives with a carefully curated set of photos from other people's profiles because as the age old saying goes comparison is the theft of joy.
The social media experiment is over. Time to go back to meeting with real people.
I don’t need to connect with someone 5000km away with the same hobbies as me. I can do that in my town and have an actual, real connection. I don’t need to wonder if someone is a bot, and I don’t need to hand over an ID to prove I’m not.
Let’s go back outside.
Sounds like his vision is to be a better version of Reddit. Could be good if done well. Not sure how doing his viral marketing for him plays into that. If I'm gonna send a friend a thing, I want it to be a thing I endorse.
In the words of some people at Google at the time:
I remember the time when the only people on the internet were people who could pay for an expensive toy (a computer) with a keyboard, which they used in the evenings after their education-intensive jobs. Ah, and also naive kids of the same people.
This age is not coming back, because the reason it disappeared is smartphones.
What about making you social media desktop-optimized?
no adult has time to hug and kiss via virtual characters like we did when we were teens and we were experiencing for the first time the "internet/social-media" thing - with that typed, an ad-less social-network if gets popular is certainly better than the shit show of Instagram/Tiktok had created but people using social-media to connect to their friends aren't obligated to follow influencers, so maybe it's irrelevant? my deleted Instagram account which by joining the game quite late (2-3 years ago), rendered updates of all my school friends and i didn't saw any ad. after making it clear i wasn't interested in seeing ads. in-between my friends stories
I have a few key points to add to this discussion (to the best of my recollection):
1. orkut.com was not acquired. It was developed in-house, the initial version almost entirely written by Orkut Büyükkökten as a 20% time project. It was written in C# .NET as that was what he was most familiar with and efficient in. The actual product launch was championed internally by Marissa Mayer, and encouraged as an experiement in-part because of the external pressure for Google to do "something" in social networking.
2. We believe a huge part of why it became popular in Brazil, was becuase the homepage contained a ranking of users by country and Brazil's national competitive spirit. Brazil made up the largest initial seed network, and once they were #1 on the leaderboards, it became a major viral spread factor in Brazil to "stay on top" of the leaderboard. It was unfortuantly much later in the service that we realized a good portion of why it remained popular only in Brazil was because the service tended to surface the largest sources of activity to users, which meant most users saw significant amounts of Portuguese content. Once we segtregated the service by language, we saw it experience it's second cultural explosion in India.
3. Once we kept up with performance demand on the service, orkut.com fairly quickly grew to serve more daily pages than Google.com websearch (though obviously it was much less complicated as a service, and much less profitable!) However, over time the service became increasingly dominated by abusive usage such as adult images and fake user spamming. orkut.com was always a very small team within Google, as I recall at it's height we had only around 8 engineers on the project as this was very far from Google's core focus at the time. The service ultimately curtailed in popularity as Facebook continued to win markets, including India and Brazil.
4. I believe there was very little connection between orkut.com decline and Google+. By the time Google+ was launched in June 2011, orkut.com was losing ground to Facebook even in Brazil. Facebook overtook orkut.com in Brazil in December 2011, and orkut.com remained online until September 2014, three years after Google+ was launched.
For those curious about technical details:
A. When I became involved in the project, it was because the live service was serving mostly 400 errors and keeling over dead. At the time it was running on Windows and MS-SQL and .NET, the only project of it's kind inside Linux-focused Google. Most of my background is service scalability archicture, so I was asked to get involved to "fix it", I took the team of 5 mostly junior engineers and led the architecture changes to get it serving pages quickly and stop the errors. As I recall, my code-red to fixed the key performance issues took only about a week, after which the massive increase to page performance led to a massive increase in poplarity, causing orkut to shockingly eclipse Google websearch in page views per day not long after.
B. We initially kept the service on .NET technology, both as an experiement within Google, and because I strongly feel the dotnet CLR design (largely due to parametric instantiation and their open-standard model) is the best virtual machine and runtime of it's kind. However, running Windows machines within Google was "not at all straightforward", and it was problematic running on closed source dotnet of the era because we ran into several Microsoft dotnet runtime bugs at scale and had no ability to fix them. We transitioned to using the Mono dotnet runtime on Linux, which was ironically more reliable (and fixable!) and significantly less performant that the Microsoft dotnet runtime for our needs. Eventually the service was transitioned to a Java front-end and C++ backends.
C. Orkut.com images was the first example of Bigtable serving production traffic.
D. We transitioned presentation layer from ASP.NET to Clearsilver templating, developed at my startup Neotonic.com by Brandon Long, and used inside Google for Gmail and other projects. This was for performance, reliability, and to enable the cross platform and cross-language transitions from C# to Java and C++. (Clearsilver was heavily inspired by CS/HDF templating, designed at onelist.com by Scott Shambarger and Ethan Khan) Clearsilver was an unfair weapon in the server-side rendered mostly-static HTML era.
orkut.com is dead, long live orkut.com!
I was also working in MSSQL and .NET at the time. MySpace was a MSSQL shop as well. There was a real battle going on at the time between the LAMP stack and the MS stack. I can totally believe that running Windows inside Google was not straightforward - MS really was late on the DevOps trend and you can still see it. Running MS software at scale sucked.
As good as I remember Orkut being, I feel like something fundamental has changed about people, socializing and the internet, to the point where we can't have the kinds of online social spaces we had back then anymore. I don't think it's primarily an AI problem, although it is aggravating it considerably in recent times. Will be interesting to see what they come up with, but I don't have big hopes for whatever it is.
I personally think we should get rid of all photos/videos to begin with.
What if [positive noun] instead of [negative noun]? Have you ever thought about that? [Nefarious proper noun] tries to feed us [negative noun] but using [url] we're going to change the [collective noun]! [Collective noun in which the reader self-includes] has always been at the forefront of [positive adjective] innovation, and that has inspired me [artisanal synonym for "to make"] with love for you all.
You really need more than "new time bad... remember old time?" to pitch a general-purpose social media product that avoids the obvious, well-documented foibles of social media.
Fun times.
Given the engine logic behind search has this, it felt like no brainer.
You see, the original TinyMUD eventually had a "whisper" command where you could send a private message to someone in the same room. They also had a "page" command where you could summon someone remotely, and it did not originally send a message. People hacked this command by renaming their room so that the name of the room was the message.
Eventually, "page" and "whisper" converged as providing the same functionality. And of course we had "say" and "pose" commands for public in-room communication. What we didn't have was a command for excluding one or more persons from the conversation.
So I invented the "mutter" command. If you typed "+mutter <player>=<message>" then everyone in the room would see your message, except for the player(s) named on the command-line.
It was extraordinarily rude and tacky, and therefore an unmitigated success, and became well-integrated and nearly well-known as "whisper" after awhile. Obviously, Facebook and other social media have merely followed my lead!
Look, I'm not proud of my legacy as a hacker, but sometimes you give people what they want...
On LambdaMOO (and LambdaCore) whisper was for in-room communication and "page" sent a message to someone privately anywhere on the MOO. In reality nobody used whisper. I never knew there was a form of page that didn't carry a message.
Things like your "mutter" were easy to code up in MOO, and I recall people doing things like this, but it being seriously seriously frowned upon.
BTW you might be interested in my project https://github.com/timbran-project/moor
I'm sure we'll hear about MySpace attempting a relaunch soon enough, too.
These are orthogonal facts presented as if they were related.
No matter how well-intentioned and good a new Orkut is, it’s an no-go. I’ve learned my lesson. For the rest of my life, I will not be joining any new platforms that are not under my control.
> sign the petition
> Adding your name says you want Orkut to create a new social network focused on
> authentic people, real connection, and genuine belonging.
A petition is useful when in a certain nation, the rule of law says that if you reach a certain number of signatures, something will happen.
A private company, asking people to "sign a petition", is just a clever, and hideous, trick.
I have nothing against Orkut, or this new thing. But please, don't fool me with this BS.
It's a smart way to acquire early users before committing time and money.
The main selling points are no ads, no algorithms, no infinite scroll, and no tracking.
I don't have any expectations from it of course, but it is amazing that I am able to create this on my own in just a few weeks. Maybe years of experience plus a few weeks, but nonetheless, I find it amazing.
Similar vibe back in 2022 https://web.archive.org/web/20220430215443/http://www.orkut....
Endlessly trying to reboot. This thing was super big in Brazil, is interest enough there to push this fwd?
If your social media platform is not sufficiently addictive, then it will die.
Part of it is how cheap and easy cloud providers have made assembling all the services you would need to host and scale the app, the other part is that an AI coding agent can do literally all the development and sys-admin tasks that would be needed to get it done.
It would take an experienced full-stack developer about a week or two of effort to direct and manage the development of the entire web app, plus mobile, plus infrastructure, including everything needed to set it up and launch it online. Given a "social network" is a well known category of app? It might even take as little as a couple days.
There's almost no reason for signups given the name recognition already that I can see. Throw the app together, put a "donate" button on the sign up page to pay for the first few months of hosting until ad revenue kicks in and be done with it.
Also, what exactly is the point of this petition? I guess Orkut (creator) wants to use it as validation for potential users, perhaps to show to potential investors about the possible interest for the platform.
But honestly, just start. Give Brazilian MySpace another change
I really do miss "old" forms of social media like forums and live journal, but unfortunately I think the era of people talking to each other on large public platforms is well and truly over. Even if _somehow_ it was possible to get everyone out of the claws of corporate social media, there is no fighting the onslaught of bots. There is simply no way to remake Orkut as a "good" form of social media because the world in which such a thing was possible doesn't exist anymore.
The Orkut timeline I might be misremembering but I'm fairly sure I was already at the university back then which would put it 2006 at the earliest.
The letter is nice and all, but "sign this petition" is beyond useless
I'm not really investing my time in centralized social media owned by surveillance capitalists (or likely to be owned by surveillance capitalists or a literal genocidal white nationalist), anymore. Mastodon and, to a lesser degree, Bluesky, are where I spend my attention for social media.
It'd be cool if facebook didn't suck and funnel bizarre AI propaganda into old people's noggins 24/7. It'd be great if the worst people on earth didn't have a monopoly on average folks' internet usage. But, I don't get what a new social network owned by one entity, without serious commitment to public benefit, can do to help. And, a petition is...less than even that?