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along, it was clear that Google was not doing as many updates as they needed to compete, so Orkut felt more and more "outdated".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".

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.

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!)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Technically Google never acquired Orkut (they owned it from the start).

this never made sense to me, how can Google buy a growing/successful social network and essentially let it die?