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Dead End: Orkut

Abstract

Google launched a social network on January 22, 2004, two weeks before Facebook opened at Harvard. It was called Orkut, after the engineer who built it in his 20% time, and for a few years it was one of the most-used websites on earth, in the two countries almost nobody at Google had been aiming for: Brazil and India. It never caught on in the United States. It filled with fake profiles, spam, hate communities, and criminal activity faster than Google moderated them, and it dragged the company into court in Brazil and India over content it could not control. Facebook passed it in Brazil at the end of 2011. Google shut Orkut down on September 30, 2014, ten years after launch. Google had reached the social-networking future first and could not hold it.

The 20% Project That Arrived Early

Orkut Büyükkökten, a Turkish software engineer at Google, built the site as a personal project during the company’s “20% time,” the policy that let engineers spend a fifth of their hours on work outside their assignment. He named it after himself. Google launched it, invite-only, on January 22, 2004.

The timing is the part worth holding onto. Orkut went live two weeks before Facebook launched at Harvard in February 2004, and while Friendster and MySpace were the names people knew. Google, the company that would spend the next decade failing at social networking through Buzz and Google+, had a working social network before Facebook existed. It simply did not understand what it had.

Brazil and India

Orkut’s growth went sideways from where Google expected it. The product barely registered in the United States. In Brazil and India it became a phenomenon. By 2008 it was among the most-visited websites in both countries, and Portuguese, not English, was the dominant language on the platform. Traffic figures from Orkut’s final day in 2014 still showed Brazil at 55.5% of visits and India at 18.4%.

The Brazilian userbase was large enough, and generated enough legal exposure, that in 2008 Google moved Orkut’s operation to Google Brazil in Belo Horizonte. A Google social product was being run out of Brazil for Brazilian users. For a company whose center of gravity was Mountain View, this was an unusual admission of where the users actually were.

The Moderation It Could Not Do

Scale without moderation turned into the problem that defined Orkut’s second half. The open community structure, groups anyone could create around any topic, filled with fake profiles, spam, and impersonation. Worse, it hosted hate groups, racist content, and communities used for criminal coordination, including child abuse material.

Brazilian prosecutors pursued Google repeatedly over content on Orkut, and Indian authorities did the same. Google was ordered to hand over user data and remove material, and spent years negotiating between its policies and two national legal systems that held it responsible for what users posted. The company was learning, on Orkut, the content-moderation problem that would later consume every social platform. See Content Moderation.

Dead End: First Is Not the Same as Kept

Orkut lost to Facebook where it was strongest. Facebook translated into Portuguese, cleaned up its interface, and offered a network without Orkut’s spam and fake-profile reputation. Through 2011 the two ran close in Brazil; in December 2011 Facebook passed Orkut there, the last major market Orkut had held. India had already tipped the same way.

Google announced the shutdown on June 30, 2014, and closed the site on September 30. Users could export their data through Google Takeout, but the communities, the group histories that had been the point of Orkut for a decade, did not transfer anywhere. Büyükkökten went on to launch another social network, Hello, in 2016; it also folded.

The lesson Orkut left is narrower and more uncomfortable than the ones Buzz and Google+ taught about privacy and network effects. Google did not fail to reach social networking. It got there first, a decade early, in markets that would become some of the largest internet populations in the world, and treated the result as a side project run on 20% time and outsourced to a branch office. Being early bought Google nothing, because it never decided that the thing it had built was worth defending.

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