It's not surprising that Google will soon shut down its first social network, Orkut. It used to be popular in India and Brazil, but it's no longer used by many people.



"Ten years ago, Orkut was Google's first foray into social networking. Built as a '20 percent' project, Orkut communities started conversations, and forged connections, that had never existed before. 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," informs Orkut's blog.

Google will shut down Orkut on September 30, 2014. Users will be able to export data using Google Takeout until September 2016.

Google will preserve an archive of orkut's online communities, which will be available online after Orkut shuts down. If you don't want your posts to be included in the archive, you can delete them or remove Orkut from your Google account.

This Google Trends chart illustrates the rise and fall of Orkut:


{ Thanks, Luiz Fernando. }

Orkut, Google's social network that has a lot of users in Brazil and India, has received a major update. Groups of friends are more visible and you can send messages to the members of a group directly from Orkut's homepage. Orkut also updated search results pages and application pages, while testing a new platform for communities.


There are a lot of changes and it will be interesting to see if Google tests these features in Orkut before launching Google Me, a social network that will compete with Facebook.

One of the major changes in Orkut is the focus on groups. "You love your grandma and you're friends with your boss, but that doesn't mean you want them both seeing the conversation you're having with your friends the day after a party. With orkut, you can now build separate groups of your friends reflecting how you interact with them in real life." This is one of the ideas from "The Real Life Social Network", a presentation by Paul Adams, Senior User Experience Researcher at Google.



Google's Rahul Kulkarni mentioned last year that Orkut will change a lot. "The new Orkut adopts the latest Google Web Toolkit platform and includes features such as built-in simultaneous chat, photo tagging with automatic face detection and private sharing of photo albums including new safety features. This is the beginning of a new direction for Orkut, where users will be able to increasingly share and communicate with groups of friends from their lives."

One of the few features that are available in Google Talk's desktop client, but couldn't be used in the web-based gadgets from Gmail, iGoogle and orkut, is file sharing. The missing feature is now available in iGoogle and orkut, but not yet in Gmail.

"Starting today, you can share photos, documents, and other files while chatting in iGoogle and orkut. To give it a try, just click Send a file... in the Actions menu while chatting with a friend (no download required). This feature is also compatible with the file transfer functionality in the Google Talk downloadable software, so you can share files directly from the web with folks who use the desktop version," explains Google.

You can send multiple files at the same time, but you can't select multiple files from the file picker dialog. Google Chat doesn't support transferring files larger than 100 MB.


Google Talk's desktop client is no longer updated, as Google focused on improving the chat feature from Gmail and adding similar features to iGoogle and orkut. Google Talk's homepage still links to the Windows client, but the first option is a plug-in for video chat.

{ Thanks, Niranjan. }

Google Chrome's homepage for Brazil has a screenshot that shows a new orkut interface. Google decided to use some ideas from services like Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook and make it easy to post messages and to see the messages posted by your friends.


Google's social network is popular in Brazil and India, but other social networks are trying to steal the crown. A ComScore report shows that "in August, Orkut's unique visitors in India dipped by 800,000 within a month, from 16 million visitors in July to 15.2 million visitors in August. On the other hand, Facebook grew its unique visitors in India by 700,000, from 7.5 million visitors in July to 8.2 million visitors in August."

orkut has never been an innovative service: many of its features were copied from other social networks. orkut's popularity in Brazil and India is probably the only reason why Google didn't discontinue the service.

Update (October 29): The new version of orkut, built using Google Web Toolkit, is now available via invitation. "We've concentrated orkut's principal actions onto your homepage, making it a one-stop-shop for nearly everything that you'd like to do. Now you can chat, watch videos, and browse and search within your full friends and communities lists without ever having to open a new page." Check orkut's blog for more information.

{ Thanks, Carlos. }

orkut, Google's social network, lets you keep track of the birthdays of your friends. There's a birthday reminders section that can be enabled in the settings and you can add a gadget to Google's personalized homepage.

orkut's blog announced that there's another way to view the birthdays: in Google Calendar. "Now, in conjunction with Google Calendar, you can see all of your orkut friend's birthdays for the whole year. If you've already used Google Calendar before, you will shortly see a link (right below the "upcoming birthdays" section) where you can add your orkut friends' birthdays to your Google calendar."

If you don't see the promotional link, use this URL to subscribe to the calendar. Google uses a special kind of calendar that requires authentication and doesn't support notifications. That means you won't be able to receive email or SMS notifications that remind you of the birthdays.


{ via orkut blog and ToThePC. }

Google started to integrate a Gmail Chat widget in iGoogle's much-hated navigation sidebar. The page will load even slower and people will have one more reason to complain. If you don't like the chat box, Google recommends to sign out of chat, although you could also change your status to "invisible".

Another thing you'll notice in all versions of iGoogle is the integration of Google Suggest in the search box. As usually, this can be disabled in the preferences page by selecting "Do not provide query suggestions in the search box".

Preparing to become a full-fledged social site, iGoogle added a contact manager to the settings page so you can separate your contacts and view their profiles.


If these new features aren't yet enabled in your account, visit http://www.google.com/ig/v2invite to add them. For those who hate everything about the new iGoogle, from the unfinished Gmail gadget to the big sidebar and the annoying bug that displays the canvas view of the most recently opened gadget when you open iGoogle, there's an address that shows the old version of iGoogle: http://www.google.com/ig?gl=all.

orkut, the other social network owned by Google, continues to add last season's Facebook features, now cleverly integrating Gmail Chat. "To get you started, we've come up with a formula that automatically predicts which of your orkut friends you probably want to chat with, and only tells those people that you're signed into Google Talk. Our formula takes a bunch of things into consideration, giving preference to people who you've labeled as 'best friends' or written scraps to recently, and people who have friends in common with you."

In addition to showing Google Talk contacts, orkut will also add some friends you are likely to chat with. Like iGoogle's sidebar chat, orkut's chat boxes are persistent so you can visit different orkut pages while continuing to chat.

The new orkut feature will be rolled out in the next weeks to orkut's huge userbase, so it's likely that you won't see it right away.


{ Thanks, Edam. }

When orkut doesn't borrow features from Facebook, it gets inspired by other Google services. This time, orkut added themes, but not all the users can see the new option. The themes should be familiar, since most of them were created for iGoogle. When you select a theme, only you and your friends can see it in your profile page.

The unofficial Orkut Plus blog has some Greasemonkey scripts that could be used to see the new themes if the feature is not yet enabled in your account. If you notice a link in the header that lets you "change themes", then you have the new feature.

Since iGoogle's themes are really appreciated by users, maybe it makes sense to add themes to all Google services and change them from a central location.


{ Thanks, V-render Studio. }

orkut, Google's social network, added a lot of features in the past year to be more competitive and to become more popular outside Brazil and India. Google Trends shows that the interest for orkut is declining, but it's likely that some people no longer search for "orkut" since Google India and Google Brazil added the service to the navigational bar in December 2007. orkut has around 120 million users, up from 50 million users in April 2007, but Brazil (53.99% of orkut users) and India (16.91%) continue to be the countries where orkut is popular, followed by the US (15.13%).

orkut was one of the few Google services that didn't have a mobile interface, but now you can access orkut mobile at m.orkut.com. The simplified interface shows the most recent scraps, updates from your friends, a link to your profile and a search box for orkut users. The mobile interface lets you write scraps, get birthday reminders and respond to friend requests. You can also use shortcuts to access the most important sections of the page.


There's also a new version of orkut for low bandwidth that displays less pictures. orkut will automatically switch to this new version depending on your connection, but you can opt to use it in the settings.

{ Thank you, Darnell Clayton. }

Most of the data from Google's social network orkut wasn't included in search results because orkut requires authentications to see profile pages. Now Google intends to index the information from user profiles and show it in search results as an OneBox.

"Some orkut profiles will appear in Google search results as an orkut OneBox. A OneBox is a summary of your orkut profile, including key details like your name, photo and location. A OneBox appears only when someone who is logged in to orkut performs a search on Google.com for another orkut user. Keep in mind that this project is still in its experimental stage, so for now, only a small percentage of orkut users will see the OneBox in their search results," mentions Google in orkut's help center.

In the privacy sections of the settings page there's an option that lets you remove your profile from the orkut OneBox, but the description doesn't correspond to the one from orkut help center: "show my orkut information when my orkut friends search for me on Google.com".


As previously mentioned, orkut could be the base of a new people search service that integrates data from different sources.

{ Thanks, João. }

It's not clear whether the fact that Gmail automatically adds to the address book all the people you've ever sent messages makes it irrelevant or comprehensive. It's not clear whether orkut will ever become a respected social network in other places than Brazil and India. But one thing is for sure: orkut really wants to become a serious alternative to Facebook. After adding the news feed, third-party apps via OpenSocial (not yet live), more privacy controls, orkut lets you find your Gmail contacts on orkut and add some of them to yout friends list.

"Your Gmail address is already filled in, and since you've already logged into orkut, we don't have to ask for your Gmail password once again. We'll show you the contacts who are already on orkut, and let you choose which ones to add as friends. For contacts who aren't on orkut yet, we make it easy to choose the ones you want to invite to orkut. You can even add a personal message to send with the invite. Soon, we'll be adding support to import your contacts from other email accounts," promises Jude Britto from orkut.

Even if you don't use orkut, some of your Gmail contacts might have orkut profiles with juicy details.


I wonder if Google would have integrated orkut's data in search results if the service was more popular. orkut lets you find people using advanced filters, but unlike Facebook, you can visit any profile if you are logged in with a Google account. In Brazil and India, orkut is the fourth link in the navigation bar and it sends you to a universal search page with results grouped in three categories: users, communities and topics. orkut, the personals and people profiles categories from Google Base could be the foundation of a people search service.

{ Thank you, Pascal. }

OpenSocial, Google's API for social gadgets, has been launched to the public. The API is supported by many social networks, including MySpace and orkut, but it's still not ready for prime time (Plaxo is the first site that lets you add social gadgets to your profile).

orkut added something new: an application that lets you ask your friends questions. It wasn't developed using OpenSocial, but it's a perfect example of an useful social gadget. You can find it at the top of the feeds page.

Ask Friends (or Mobius, probably a reference to the Möbius strip) has two clever features that make it non-trivial. Based on your question, orkut automatically generates a list of labels, probably from an existing database. Using these labels and other labels entered by you, orkut determines what friends are most likely to have an answer for your question. "The system will choose Orkut friends who may have an interesting answer for you based on their answering history and interests." There's also an option to select the friends that can view and answer your question.

It's a pretty interesting way to target your question and it could be extended to a broader audience, like all orkut users from your country or all orkut users who like Radiohead, not just your friends.

Social networks are containers for web applications. They have details about you and your friends, but this data only becomes meaningful in an application. Your personal data is the input for social applications that aggregate it and derive useful outputs and make your life easier.

"Self expression and communication are often fun and entertaining alone, but OpenSocial is also a platform that can be leveraged to solve real world tasks where the social graph assists us in making decisions. For example, while some might be prone to grab a book at random off the shelf, there are many who appreciate a good recommendation from a friend. With a variety of possibilities in entertainment and interests, it can be useful to facilitate meetings, purchases, recommendations, information management and learning to create a richer, more lasting experience across your application," says Google in an article titled "Social Design Best Practices".


{ via labnol.org }

You probably remember the post about Socialstream, a Google-sponsored project that tried to "rethink and reinvent online social networking". The result was a meta-social network that aggregates data from other community sites using APIs and whose goal "is to present social information in a way that ties it to the person who posted the information, and not the site from which it came."

Since last year, Google was busy developing plans for a set of APIs that would make it possible to communicate with other social networks. Brad Fitzpatrick, who moved to Google from Six Apart, wrote an interesting article "Thoughts on the Social Graph" that tackled this problem. "Unfortunately, there doesn't exist a single social graph (or even multiple which interoperate) that's comprehensive and decentralized. Rather, there exists hundreds of disperse social graphs, most of dubious quality and many of them walled gardens." His solution was to make this database of social connections a "a community asset, utilizing the data from all the different sites, but not depending on any company or organization as the central graph owner."

Even if this will not bring Brad's vision closer to reality, Google will launch tomorrow OpenSocial, "a set of common APIs for building social applications across the web". According to a still-unofficial press release, "OpenSocial gives developers of social applications a single set of APIs to learn for their application to run on any OpenSocial-enabled website. By providing these simple, standards-based technologies, OpenSocial will speed innovation and bring more social features to more places across the web." The APIs give access to a user's profile, their friends, and the activity streams.

The success of Facebook's platform, that has more than 5000 applications, made a lot of social networks consider the launch of similar platforms. But not many developers would develop different applications for each social network, so smaller sites will have less visibility. orkut, Google's social network, has more than 70 million users, but only 18% are in the US. While it would've been easier for Google to just open up orkut, this common set of APIs will make the social applications more valuable because they can run in many other places and can access data from other sites.

Google's social APIs should be available at code.google.com/apis/opensocial (the site is not live yet). The initial social networks and companies that support the APIs are orkut, hi5, Friendster, LinkedIn, Viadeo, Ning, Salesforce, and Oracle. It will be interesting to see if other social networks decide to join Google's efforts. MySpace announced that will open its platform in the next months, but it's unlikely to use Google's APIs.


"The timing of OpenSocial couldn't be better. Developers have been complaining non stop about the costs of learning yet another markup launguage for every new social network platform, and taking developer time in creating and maintaining the code. Someone had to build a system to streamline this (...). And Facebook-fear has clearly driven good partners to side with Google," writes TechCrunch.

"Open Social's API is based entirely on Javascript. If you know HTML and Javascript today, you will be able to immediately use Open Social to turn your web applications and web sites into Open Social apps. You can also use standard web development tools to build Open Social apps. This is obviously a much better way to operate than having to learn a proprietary [mark-up] language or query language," writes Marc Andreessen.

And Google also has a financial incentive to build this open platform. "A person familiar with Google's efforts said that those applications have been far more effective for advertisers on social networks than users' personal pages," reports the New York Times. Google tried to convince "third-party developers with applications on Facebook to run Adsense ads within applications pages".

Update: MySpace joins OpenSocial. "MySpace says they are abandoning their efforts to create their own markup language (which is what Facebook has done) and direct APIs will go exclusively with OpenSocial." Other social sites that join Google's efforts: Bebo and Six Apart. It seems that everybody except Facebook will be in this coalition.

Update 2: "As the most trafficked website in the country and the most popular social network in the world, MySpace is one of the leading forces in the global social Web. We're thrilled to grow our strategic relationship with MySpace by joining forces on this important initiative," said Eric Schmidt. Google's press release is mostly about MySpace and its "commitment to supporting standards that foster innovation in an increasingly social Web". That's a welcome change from MySpace.

TechCrunch has the news that Google plans to open "a new set of APIs on November 5 that will allow developers to leverage Google's social graph data. They'll start with Orkut and iGoogle (Google's personalized home page), and expand from there to include Gmail, Google Talk and other Google services over time. On November 5 we'll likely see third party iGoogle gadgets that leverage Orkut's social graph information - the most basic implementation of what Google is planning. From there we may see a lot more - such as the ability to pull Orkut data outside of Google and into third party applications via the APIs."

The idea isn't surprising if you look at Google's renewed interest in orkut, a social network that didn't get too much traction in the US. orkut has recently added a new feature that shows updates from your friends and the new design leaves a lot of space for gadgets. Google didn't exploit the wealth of information from a social network and ignored that many of its other services could be even more valuable in the context of a trusted environment. For example, a news or a video recommended by many of your friends has an added value. Your search results could be better if you subscribe to recommendation feeds from orkut communities related to your interests.

An internal Google video showed that Google intends to integrate all of its communication apps and to create activity streams for each user. All the streams from your contacts could be aggregated in a single place that shows what's going on with the people you care about. A glimpse from this project is the recently launched Shared Stuff that lets you share web pages with your contacts and keep track of the shared items.


I think one of the problems that hinder Google's social plans is the distinction between Gmail contacts and orkut friends, which are two separate lists. Google tried to synchronize them with the Google Talk integration, that automatically added your orkut friends to the list of Gmail contacts. In the future, Google could create a special layer for "friends" in Gmail: those who get the list of broadcasted activities. The list of Gmail friends could include your orkut friends and the Google Talk contacts.

iGoogle, the personalized homepage, is another central point in Google's social plans. The homepage lets you create gadgets that can be shared with your friends, you can share tabs and customize the page using themes. The gadgets are similar to Facebook's applications, except that they don't have a social aspect.

Google intends to open this data to other developers and to other social networks. Brad Fitzpatrick, who now works at Google, wrote an interesting article last month that proposed the creation of a decentralized social graph that combines data from different social networks. "There doesn't exist a single social graph (or even multiple which interoperate) that's comprehensive and decentralized. Rather, there exists hundreds of disperse social graphs, most of dubious quality and many of them walled gardens." Google could support this project by sharing its data and providing search features for the graph.

All in all, the social component of web applications is increasingly important and a big differentiator. YouTube was more successful than Google Video because it had a stronger community and many loyal users. While search is an important way to find things online, a social filter could enable to discover more interesting things without having to actively search for them.

Google has finally realized that orkut is an important player in the social networking space and it could become more popular outside Brazil and India if Google invested more time and trust.

The latest orkut feature is similar to Facebook's mini-feed: a list of updates from your friends on the homepage.

The updates from your friends section on your homepage shows updates when your friends perform the following actions on orkut:

* make changes to their profile
* make changes to their photo album
* make changes to their video favorites
* accept new testimonials

When you make these changes to your own profile, your friends will see your updates on their homepages.

The feature is not available for everyone, but if you have it, this page should show updates from your friends. You can disable this feature from the settings, by clicking on the Privacy tab.

orkut will probably add many other missing features in the near feature. A simple addition that could provide similar value to Facebook's platform is the inclusion of iGoogle gadgets that could be shared with your friends. The gadget maker is also appropriate in orkut's social environment.

orkut's blog promises a new interface for Google's ugly social network. "The one comment we always hear is how orkut's simplicity keeps long-time users coming back and new people signing up. So as we work away planning improvements to the site, we always keep this in mind."

orkut has recently changed the homepage and will launch a revamped interface in the weeks to come. "The change isn't live yet, but starting soon, we will start rolling-out the new look. To start, we will roll it out to a small group of users randomly selected, and will continue to do so until everyone is on the new site."

If you don't see the new interface yet, here's how it looks like: colors are warmer, orkut has rounded corners, the new icons are lovely and there are even touches of AJAX. The conclusion: orkut is not ugly anymore.

Google already has a social network (orkut), but it's only popular in Brazil and India, it doesn't have a Googley interface and it had a lot of security problems in the past. That's why last year Google sponsored a project at the Carnegie Mellon University's Human-Computer Interaction Institute whose initial goal was to "rethink and reinvent online social networking".


"Directed to help improve the online community orkut, the project's scope was not to simply redesign the interface. Our team considered how online social networking could bring greater value to users, especially for ages above twenty. After initial brainstorming and research, we chose to focus on the effects of a new model for online social networking: a unified social network that, as a service, provides social data to many other applications."

The network, titled Socialstream, is able to "draw content from a variety of sources. Socialstream would be based on a unified social network (USN), a single network that provides social data to other sites as a service. A service model allows many social networks to be linked together, letting them share both content and the nature of the relationships of the people who use them."

This core feature will allow you to have accounts on more social networks, but centralize the information about your contacts in a single place. This also assumes that other social networks have an API and don't act like walled gardens, which is not the case right now. Socialstream used data from blogging and photo-sharing sites like Blogger, Flickr and Picasa Web Albums.

"Socialstream emphasizes improving social connections by making it more efficient to communicate with, share with, and view the social content of all the people in a user's online social network. Socialstream provides a compelling user experience because it aggregates content across many different networks so a user has a single location to discover new content and communicate. The goal of Socialstream is to present social information in a way that ties it to the person who posted the information, and not the site from which it came."

Like with any feed reader, you'll be informed when there's new data for a contact. The site also includes a Google Talk-like sidebar with all your contacts. "The contact list is a structured method of viewing updates, so if a user is interested in a particular person they can navigate directly."

When you create new content, you can post it to Socialstream or to any other participating social network. "Socialstream lowers barriers to sharing with different levels of sharing. Posts can be marked as favorites, and users can read their friends' favorites as a way to keep up with them. 'Post about' supports the idea of post conversations and trackbacks. Posts can also be sent directly to a contact or commented on."


It will be interesting to see if this project ever becomes orkut 2.0, a unified social network that makes it easy for people to keep in touch, no matter if they use Blogger, Wordpress, LiveJournal, Twitter, Flickr, Picasa Web, YouTube, MySpace, Friendster, Facebook, Bebo or other social network.

Google Video's homepage added arrows for each category so you can browse more videos without leaving the homepage. This is a nice trick to fit more content in a limited space and could be used in Google Video's right sidebar, so you don't have to scroll too much to see related videos or the playlist.


If you use orkut, you have another way to discover videos: directly from your friends. orkut users can add favorite videos from Google Video and YouTube to their profiles. Unfortunately, the process is too complicated: you'll have to go to that video, copy the URL and paste it in orkut. Some integration with Google Video would've made this feature much more useful.

Google also recommends videos "based on your search history, ratings and viewing patterns". You'll get a daily-updated page of videos related to your preferences.


Of course, there's still no way to access your favorite videos, sorted by rating and number of views (search history is limited to videos found by performing a search), but the latest steps show that Google realized search is not always the best way to discover great content.

I told you in November that orkut will add scraps by SMS and photo tagging. Google Blog announces that orkut SMS is live, at least for Brazilian members who use Claro's services.

"With orkut's new SMS feature, you can scrap your friends, look up their contact information and receive scrap notifications." Scrapping is a way of messaging another orkut user, by leaving a public comment.

Google also owns dodgeball, a mobile social network acquired in 2005, that informs users when their friends are nearby. The service is available only in the US, and it's not integrated with orkut, which is mostly popular in Brazil.

As written before, orkut's plans to become available for everyone are closer to reality. Now everyone can join orkut. This information is confirmed in orkut's help.



orkut's integration with Google Talk is also live. You just have to go to settings and click on "enable Google Talk". You can automatically add your orkut friends or only some of them. You also gain new options in Google Talk for orkut contacts, like sending scraps.

Besides the integration with Google Talk, orkut is about to have other new features. Here's what I found:

orkut SMS

With orkut SMS you can send and receive scraps with your mobile phone as well as other cool stuff. But first you need to register your mobile phone to use orkut.

Photo Tagging

You can tag your friends in photos. To create a photo tag, click and drag the mouse to select a friend.

I don't use orkut, so maybe someone who does could make an educated guess about these new features. Photo tagging might be useful to train a face recognition program, like Riya does, as you can see here.