Comment by rafaelcosta
7 hours ago
Orkut was HUGE. Google acquired it and it basically had *the* social media platform in Brazil pre-Facebook. IIRC, it also had a big-ish market share in some other countries. When Facebook came along, it was clear that Google was not doing as many updates as they needed to compete, so Orkut felt more and more "outdated".
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".
It was built in-house at Google, not aquired. Orkut (the person) had been working at Google for several years before he built orkut.com. He'd done a similar site at Stanford pre-Google (and pre-Friendster!)
IIRC it was a 20% time project. Up to you to decide if that makes 20% time more or less of a good idea.
I was the Associate Product Manager assigned to Orkut as it prepared to launch. It was not 20% of his time ;-) Orkut was the backup name we had to go with because we couldn't reach a deal to get the name he wanted (eden.com) from a domain squatter.
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Today I learned! The aspx and the lack of branding really had me fooled. And when the Google branding came along, that’s when it started to go down in my circle, so I never knew that it was a Google (20%) project!
Google+ had some clever ideas: Circles, Hangouts, integration with Google's ecosystem, etc. But it was designed from a top-down product strategy. Google didn't necessarily make a mistake by trying Google+, but made a mistake by failing to recognize that social graphs are infrastructure; treating social networking as a new product to bolt onto Google, rather than recognizing that Orkut already contained the social graph and behavioral lessons Google needed.
I _really_ liked the "hangout" idea of Google+. Where you could just start a video call and whoever among your friends wanted to join, could, without having to accept or reject an actual invitation to them specifically. I could work on a project out in the garage and people could hop in and make small talk while I was doing stuff. It was great.
It doesn't feel like there is a great modern alternative to this.
Discord VC works like this
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TikTok Live, I guess? You can limit it to followers or just friends.
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Then they finally shut the thing down just in time to make sure that it couldn't attract any kind of exodus of unhappy users from Twitter or Facebook.
Google Wave was so cool prior to trying to make it a social network.
I don’t think we ever tried to make wave a social network.
So what's all this wave about Google Wave?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Z4RKRLaSug
Might’ve fared better if they didn’t alienate the entire company who could have helped them pre-launch, or come in to help after the release flopped.
I also think it would've been great if Google+ had leveraged Google Reader and its sharing functionality.
True. Google also had Youtube, but it managed to completely fumble the integration with Google+ and generate backlash in the process.
...and before that they also fucked up by trying to leverage Gmail into Google Buzz.
Other poster is correct, it was a 20% project, so it didn't even cost Google any money to acquire, which is crazy.
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.
Also, the implementation and infrastructure was a total shit show.
True, its downtimes predated the Twitter fail whale.
Interestingly, the first version used ASP.NET, visible in the .aspx domains, which really deviated from other Google tech.
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It was also a product of its time and its sunsetting was just a side effect of the consolidation of the economy of attention. It would fail today just as it ended up failing back then unless people change how they consume social media altogether.
Which honestly would be a very good thing
It was also huge in India. I remember most of my classmates were on Orkut and only a few were using Facebook. Apparently, Facebook felt a safer place for girls.
I think Google's biggest social media fumble was just letting gtalk fade away into irrelevance.
also:
- 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.
Technically Google never acquired Orkut (they owned it from the start).
From what I remember, it was developed more or less in secret by one person (or a small team) who managed to convince management to put it online. I was an early user of Orkut and I recall there being zero Google branding or style, aside from a link in the footer of the page.
Even at the time I thought it was crazy that google bought the best social media platform (being a brazilian) and tried to promote Google+ to everyone when google+ didn't have anywhere close to the feature set that orkut had.
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.
this never made sense to me, how can Google buy a growing/successful social network and essentially let it die?
When you have everything you could ever want, you spend a lot of time worried someone might take it from you.