Many of you may not remember Orkut, but it was sort of like social networking before social networking. In a sense at least. People met and shared thoughts and views and made connections online through Orkut much like people are doing now via YouTube, Blogger, and Google+, which are actually a big reason as to why Orkut is getting the boot. Those other three Google services continue to flourish and do well, or as Google puts it, they have “outpaced Orkut” and Google sees no need to continue it as one of their services. Google wants to take the time to focus their efforts on the three most valuable social services that they have, and sadly for those who were fans of Orkut, it was not one of those three.
If you’re currently using Orkut the site is still working and in operational form as of now and will remain that way until the end of September. Once September 30th hits Google will shut the site down and Orkut will be no more. There is still plenty of time to transition all your data and information from Orkut to other Google services, and there will be a way to presumably handle all of that pretty easily using Google Takeout. All of that information with Google Takeout will reportedly be available up until September of 2016 as we understand it from the mention on the Orkut Blogger post, which gives users a full two years to do something with all that data once it’s been pulled from Orkut. We think that’s more than enough time to get the job done, don’t you?
If you wanted to get your chance to see what Orkut was all about before they take things down for good, you’re too little too late as setting up new Orkut accounts as of today is no longer possible. The good news for those that are still active with the service besides the three more months to transfer your info, is that Google will be preserving all of the Orkut public communities in an archive starting the day that Orkut shuts down. They give users the option to completely remove Orkut from their Google accounts just in case they don’t want their names listed in the Orkut community archive. So long, Orkut, it’s been fun.