Orkut to shut down on Sept 30

NEW DELHI: Google on Monday announced it decision to shutdown Orkut, social networking site it started in 2004.

Orkut will go down on September 30 this year and would stop stop accepting new users.

Once one of the most visited websites in countries like India and Brazil, Orkut by 2010 had become so irrelevant that Google was forced to launch Google+ to take on Facebook.

Still millions of people continued to visit Orkut. According to the data available on the website, 50pc of Orkut users are based in Brazil while 20pc are from India.

"We will shut down Orkut on September 30, 2014. Until then, there will be no impact on current Orkut users, to give the community time to manage the transition," Paulo Golgher, engineering director of Orkut, wrote in a blog. "People can export their profile data, community posts and photos using Google Takeout (available until September 2016). Starting today, it will not be possible to create a new Orkut account."

"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)," explained Golgher.