As good as I remember Orkut being, I feel like something fundamental has changed about people, socializing and the internet, to the point where we can't have the kinds of online social spaces we had back then anymore. I don't think it's primarily an AI problem, although it is aggravating it considerably in recent times. Will be interesting to see what they come up with, but I don't have big hopes for whatever it is.
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along, it was clear that Google was not doing as many updates as they needed to compete, so Orkut felt more and more "outdated".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.
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.
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!)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Even if I cosign the spirit of the letter, this has big 90s viral email energy to the benefit of… another company/service/etc that I have no connection to.
Sounds like his vision is to be a better version of Reddit. Could be good if done well. Not sure how doing his viral marketing for him plays into that. If I'm gonna send a friend a thing, I want it to be a thing I endorse.
In India, Orkut was a massive success back in the day. We've had testimonials, and we used to spend a lot of time writing them. We used to spend hours hacking the corporate firewall to access Orkut during office hours!
>Do you remember when the internet was human? When a message from a stranger on another continent felt like magic?
I remember the time when the only people on the internet were people who could pay for an expensive toy (a computer) with a keyboard, which they used in the evenings after their education-intensive jobs. Ah, and also naive kids of the same people.
This age is not coming back, because the reason it disappeared is smartphones.
I arrived well after Eternal September began, but even that looks very rosy-tinted compared to the slop-filled internet of today. An Eternal Sloptember, if you will.
If this were built atop something that let me own my own posts (ATProto?) it would be interesting. You'd think that maybe Bluesky would be talking to people like Orkut Büyükkökten, the Friendster guy Jonathan Abrams and the Birches who founded Bebo, since it's a technically sound(ish?) and interesting platform and a somewhat-established social-media presence which is searching for a broader (and more agreeable) userbase, while a number of those old founders seem to have a continued interest in taking a run at having a social media platform.
The original Orkut site was written in C# - it was very slow and couldn't handle the growth. Orkut was only a big success in countries like Brazil and India where internet connections were already so poor that nobody noticed how slow the site was.
What if [positive noun] instead of [negative noun]? Have you ever thought about that? [Nefarious proper noun] tries to feed us [negative noun] but using [url] we're going to change the [collective noun]! [Collective noun in which the reader self-includes] has always been at the forefront of [positive adjective] innovation, and that has inspired me [artisanal synonym for "to make"] with love for you all.
I'm there, I feel it, it's 2011 and I'm being pitched facebook for dog walkers or twitter for the uzbec equestrian community unironically except this is taking the bold step of making the niche "all of humanity".
You really need more than "new time bad... remember old time?" to pitch a general-purpose social media product that avoids the obvious, well-documented foibles of social media.
Is the platform or network really the issue? Digg tried this same kind of reboot, but the same dynamics of Reddit (plus AI bots) emerged practically overnight. This is how social networks are now.
I'm David Jeske, the ex-Google acquiree who served as technical architect and engineering director for orkut.com (among other projects) from shortly after the Brazil popularity explosion through the service decline.
I have a few key points to add to this discussion (to the best of my recollection):
1. orkut.com was not acquired. It was developed in-house, the initial version almost entirely written by Orkut Büyükkökten as a 20% time project. It was written in C# .NET as that was what he was most familiar with and efficient in. The actual product launch was championed internally by Marissa Mayer, and encouraged as an experiement in-part because of the external pressure for Google to do "something" in social networking.
2. We believe a huge part of why it became popular in Brazil, was becuase the homepage contained a ranking of users by country and Brazil's national competitive spirit. Brazil made up the largest initial seed network, and once they were #1 on the leaderboards, it became a major viral spread factor in Brazil to "stay on top" of the leaderboard. It was unfortuantly much later in the service that we realized a good portion of why it remained popular only in Brazil was because the service tended to surface the largest sources of activity to users, which meant most users saw significant amounts of Portuguese content. Once we segtregated the service by language, we saw it experience it's second cultural explosion in India.
3. Once we kept up with performance demand on the service, orkut.com fairly quickly grew to serve more daily pages than Google.com websearch (though obviously it was much less complicated as a service, and much less profitable!) However, over time the service became increasingly dominated by abusive usage such as adult images and fake user spamming. orkut.com was always a very small team within Google, as I recall at it's height we had only around 8 engineers on the project as this was very far from Google's core focus at the time. The service ultimately curtailed in popularity as Facebook continued to win markets, including India and Brazil.
4. I believe there was very little connection between orkut.com decline and Google+. By the time Google+ was launched in June 2011, orkut.com was losing ground to Facebook even in Brazil. Facebook overtook orkut.com in Brazil in December 2011, and orkut.com remained online until September 2014, three years after Google+ was launched.
For those curious about technical details:
A. When I became involved in the project, it was because the live service was serving mostly 400 errors and keeling over dead. At the time it was running on Windows and MS-SQL and .NET, the only project of it's kind inside Linux-focused Google. Most of my background is service scalability archicture, so I was asked to get involved to "fix it", I took the team of 5 mostly junior engineers and led the architecture changes to get it serving pages quickly and stop the errors. As I recall, my code-red to fixed the key performance issues took only about a week, after which the massive increase to page performance led to a massive increase in poplarity, causing orkut to shockingly eclipse Google websearch in page views per day not long after.
B. We initially kept the service on .NET technology, both as an experiement within Google, and because I strongly feel the dotnet CLR design (largely due to parametric instantiation and their open-standard model) is the best virtual machine and runtime of it's kind. However, running Windows machines within Google was "not at all straightforward", and it was problematic running on closed source dotnet of the era because we ran into several Microsoft dotnet runtime bugs at scale and had no ability to fix them. We transitioned to using the Mono dotnet runtime on Linux, which was ironically more reliable (and fixable!) and significantly less performant that the Microsoft dotnet runtime for our needs. Eventually the service was transitioned to a Java front-end and C++ backends.
C. Orkut.com images was the first example of Bigtable serving production traffic.
D. We transitioned presentation layer from ASP.NET to Clearsilver templating, developed at my startup Neotonic.com by Brandon Long, and used inside Google for Gmail and other projects. This was for performance, reliability, and to enable the cross platform and cross-language transitions from C# to Java and C++. (Clearsilver was heavily inspired by CS/HDF templating, designed at onelist.com by Scott Shambarger and Ethan Khan) Clearsilver was an unfair weapon in the server-side rendered mostly-static HTML era.
My friends and I used Orkut back in the day for a hot minute. Then it was taken over by spam, and also Brazil. Looks like most of the interest in the new one is also from Brazil.
No matter how well-intentioned and good a new Orkut is, it’s an no-go. I’ve learned my lesson. For the rest of my life, I will not be joining any new platforms that are not under my control.
I had an account on orkut way back in 2006. It wasn't very active - I had IRL friends and none of them were there, so I had no reason to go there. The first social network that really caught on among us was LiveJournal.
I really do miss "old" forms of social media like forums and live journal, but unfortunately I think the era of people talking to each other on large public platforms is well and truly over. Even if _somehow_ it was possible to get everyone out of the claws of corporate social media, there is no fighting the onslaught of bots. There is simply no way to remake Orkut as a "good" form of social media because the world in which such a thing was possible doesn't exist anymore.
That seems too late for both of those, heh. :) I started on LJ in 2001 and quit in 2006. Orkut I think I signed up for in 2004, and only lasted maybe a year there. I seem to remember the Brazilian influence even as early as that.
Hard to take this seriously when the website is obviously vibe-coded without a single ounce of effort or taste.
Also, what exactly is the point of this petition? I guess Orkut (creator) wants to use it as validation for potential users, perhaps to show to potential investors about the possible interest for the platform.
But honestly, just start. Give Brazilian MySpace another change
It's a way to collect emails and phone numbers, and gauge interest. Pretty common marketing tactic in the startup world, just rebranded to something else.
I don't understand what this is for? I mean, a petition? Addressed to whom? To what end?
I'm not really investing my time in centralized social media owned by surveillance capitalists (or likely to be owned by surveillance capitalists or a literal genocidal white nationalist), anymore. Mastodon and, to a lesser degree, Bluesky, are where I spend my attention for social media.
It'd be cool if facebook didn't suck and funnel bizarre AI propaganda into old people's noggins 24/7. It'd be great if the worst people on earth didn't have a monopoly on average folks' internet usage. But, I don't get what a new social network owned by one entity, without serious commitment to public benefit, can do to help. And, a petition is...less than even that?
I recently created a social media platform as a hobby project: https://nyhyl.app.
The main selling points are no ads, no algorithms, no infinite scroll, and no tracking.
I don't have any expectations from it of course, but it is amazing that I am able to create this on my own in just a few weeks. Maybe years of experience plus a few weeks, but nonetheless, I find it amazing.
Just a little heads-up: the tech is the fun part. Moderation is eternal, relentless and categorically unfun, especially if your site is disconnected communities
I don't understand why this was downvoted. While I agree it's very unlike this gets any traction, I praise the creator for trying something different. +1
Man, what I really want 2000s IRC back.
As good as I remember Orkut being, I feel like something fundamental has changed about people, socializing and the internet, to the point where we can't have the kinds of online social spaces we had back then anymore. I don't think it's primarily an AI problem, although it is aggravating it considerably in recent times. Will be interesting to see what they come up with, but I don't have big hopes for whatever it is.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
What is (and was) Google tech? I naively thought Google didn't have a praised stack.
Back then it was mostly Java, Python and C++.
They even made a Java-based framework that would generate Javascript, GWT. Orkut was rewritten to use in 2009.
Yeah, internally it was, uh, an issue.
Just before launch there was a attempt to hide that it was google.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
Even if I cosign the spirit of the letter, this has big 90s viral email energy to the benefit of… another company/service/etc that I have no connection to.
Sounds like his vision is to be a better version of Reddit. Could be good if done well. Not sure how doing his viral marketing for him plays into that. If I'm gonna send a friend a thing, I want it to be a thing I endorse.
In India, Orkut was a massive success back in the day. We've had testimonials, and we used to spend a lot of time writing them. We used to spend hours hacking the corporate firewall to access Orkut during office hours!
Similar in Brazil, orkut was the social network here
>Do you remember when the internet was human? When a message from a stranger on another continent felt like magic?
I remember the time when the only people on the internet were people who could pay for an expensive toy (a computer) with a keyboard, which they used in the evenings after their education-intensive jobs. Ah, and also naive kids of the same people.
This age is not coming back, because the reason it disappeared is smartphones.
> This age is not coming back, because the reason it disappeared is smartphones.
What about making you social media desktop-optimized?
I arrived well after Eternal September began, but even that looks very rosy-tinted compared to the slop-filled internet of today. An Eternal Sloptember, if you will.
If this were built atop something that let me own my own posts (ATProto?) it would be interesting. You'd think that maybe Bluesky would be talking to people like Orkut Büyükkökten, the Friendster guy Jonathan Abrams and the Birches who founded Bebo, since it's a technically sound(ish?) and interesting platform and a somewhat-established social-media presence which is searching for a broader (and more agreeable) userbase, while a number of those old founders seem to have a continued interest in taking a run at having a social media platform.
I don’t trust this guy after the hello.com debacle.
In the words of some people at Google at the time:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31809240
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41439540
The original Orkut site was written in C# - it was very slow and couldn't handle the growth. Orkut was only a big success in countries like Brazil and India where internet connections were already so poor that nobody noticed how slow the site was.
> The original Orkut site was written in C# - it was very slow and couldn't handle the growth.
These are orthogonal facts presented as if they were related.
And facebook was written in frikkin PHP. That means it was not C# that made it slow, probably just bad programming.
PHP did make it slow. They eventually wrote a tool to transpile PHP to C and then compile down to native.
I met my wife on Orkut. Happily married for 11 years now :)
You really need more than "new time bad... remember old time?" to pitch a general-purpose social media product that avoids the obvious, well-documented foibles of social media.
Is the platform or network really the issue? Digg tried this same kind of reboot, but the same dynamics of Reddit (plus AI bots) emerged practically overnight. This is how social networks are now.
I'm David Jeske, the ex-Google acquiree who served as technical architect and engineering director for orkut.com (among other projects) from shortly after the Brazil popularity explosion through the service decline.
I have a few key points to add to this discussion (to the best of my recollection):
1. orkut.com was not acquired. It was developed in-house, the initial version almost entirely written by Orkut Büyükkökten as a 20% time project. It was written in C# .NET as that was what he was most familiar with and efficient in. The actual product launch was championed internally by Marissa Mayer, and encouraged as an experiement in-part because of the external pressure for Google to do "something" in social networking.
2. We believe a huge part of why it became popular in Brazil, was becuase the homepage contained a ranking of users by country and Brazil's national competitive spirit. Brazil made up the largest initial seed network, and once they were #1 on the leaderboards, it became a major viral spread factor in Brazil to "stay on top" of the leaderboard. It was unfortuantly much later in the service that we realized a good portion of why it remained popular only in Brazil was because the service tended to surface the largest sources of activity to users, which meant most users saw significant amounts of Portuguese content. Once we segtregated the service by language, we saw it experience it's second cultural explosion in India.
3. Once we kept up with performance demand on the service, orkut.com fairly quickly grew to serve more daily pages than Google.com websearch (though obviously it was much less complicated as a service, and much less profitable!) However, over time the service became increasingly dominated by abusive usage such as adult images and fake user spamming. orkut.com was always a very small team within Google, as I recall at it's height we had only around 8 engineers on the project as this was very far from Google's core focus at the time. The service ultimately curtailed in popularity as Facebook continued to win markets, including India and Brazil.
4. I believe there was very little connection between orkut.com decline and Google+. By the time Google+ was launched in June 2011, orkut.com was losing ground to Facebook even in Brazil. Facebook overtook orkut.com in Brazil in December 2011, and orkut.com remained online until September 2014, three years after Google+ was launched.
For those curious about technical details:
A. When I became involved in the project, it was because the live service was serving mostly 400 errors and keeling over dead. At the time it was running on Windows and MS-SQL and .NET, the only project of it's kind inside Linux-focused Google. Most of my background is service scalability archicture, so I was asked to get involved to "fix it", I took the team of 5 mostly junior engineers and led the architecture changes to get it serving pages quickly and stop the errors. As I recall, my code-red to fixed the key performance issues took only about a week, after which the massive increase to page performance led to a massive increase in poplarity, causing orkut to shockingly eclipse Google websearch in page views per day not long after.
B. We initially kept the service on .NET technology, both as an experiement within Google, and because I strongly feel the dotnet CLR design (largely due to parametric instantiation and their open-standard model) is the best virtual machine and runtime of it's kind. However, running Windows machines within Google was "not at all straightforward", and it was problematic running on closed source dotnet of the era because we ran into several Microsoft dotnet runtime bugs at scale and had no ability to fix them. We transitioned to using the Mono dotnet runtime on Linux, which was ironically more reliable (and fixable!) and significantly less performant that the Microsoft dotnet runtime for our needs. Eventually the service was transitioned to a Java front-end and C++ backends.
C. Orkut.com images was the first example of Bigtable serving production traffic.
D. We transitioned presentation layer from ASP.NET to Clearsilver templating, developed at my startup Neotonic.com by Brandon Long, and used inside Google for Gmail and other projects. This was for performance, reliability, and to enable the cross platform and cross-language transitions from C# to Java and C++. (Clearsilver was heavily inspired by CS/HDF templating, designed at onelist.com by Scott Shambarger and Ethan Khan) Clearsilver was an unfair weapon in the server-side rendered mostly-static HTML era.
orkut.com is dead, long live orkut.com!
Orkut didn't gain any traction in the Netherlands and it's all about the "kut" part in the name...
My friends and I used Orkut back in the day for a hot minute. Then it was taken over by spam, and also Brazil. Looks like most of the interest in the new one is also from Brazil.
No matter how well-intentioned and good a new Orkut is, it’s an no-go. I’ve learned my lesson. For the rest of my life, I will not be joining any new platforms that are not under my control.
I signed up for Orkut and my account was promptly blocked. It was the hot thing for a minute.
You might try UpScrolled. 6M users, designed to resist Big Tech's control of our lives.
https://upscrolled.com
Not the first time Orkut Büyükkökten has written a letter like this.
Similar vibe back in 2022 https://web.archive.org/web/20220430215443/http://www.orkut....
Endlessly trying to reboot. This thing was super big in Brazil, is interest enough there to push this fwd?
I just searched for him online, he looks like a Turkish Timothy Olyphant.
Fundamental law of the internet:
If your social media platform is not sufficiently addictive, then it will die.
Cmon, there is more space for a better descriptive title than just putting the domain there.
Sorry
I had an account on orkut way back in 2006. It wasn't very active - I had IRL friends and none of them were there, so I had no reason to go there. The first social network that really caught on among us was LiveJournal.
I really do miss "old" forms of social media like forums and live journal, but unfortunately I think the era of people talking to each other on large public platforms is well and truly over. Even if _somehow_ it was possible to get everyone out of the claws of corporate social media, there is no fighting the onslaught of bots. There is simply no way to remake Orkut as a "good" form of social media because the world in which such a thing was possible doesn't exist anymore.
That seems too late for both of those, heh. :) I started on LJ in 2001 and quit in 2006. Orkut I think I signed up for in 2004, and only lasted maybe a year there. I seem to remember the Brazilian influence even as early as that.
Hard to take this seriously when the website is obviously vibe-coded without a single ounce of effort or taste.
Also, what exactly is the point of this petition? I guess Orkut (creator) wants to use it as validation for potential users, perhaps to show to potential investors about the possible interest for the platform.
But honestly, just start. Give Brazilian MySpace another change
73% signers from Brazil, heh
The letter is nice and all, but "sign this petition" is beyond useless
It's a way to collect emails and phone numbers, and gauge interest. Pretty common marketing tactic in the startup world, just rebranded to something else.
I don't understand what this is for? I mean, a petition? Addressed to whom? To what end?
I'm not really investing my time in centralized social media owned by surveillance capitalists (or likely to be owned by surveillance capitalists or a literal genocidal white nationalist), anymore. Mastodon and, to a lesser degree, Bluesky, are where I spend my attention for social media.
It'd be cool if facebook didn't suck and funnel bizarre AI propaganda into old people's noggins 24/7. It'd be great if the worst people on earth didn't have a monopoly on average folks' internet usage. But, I don't get what a new social network owned by one entity, without serious commitment to public benefit, can do to help. And, a petition is...less than even that?
I recently created a social media platform as a hobby project: https://nyhyl.app.
The main selling points are no ads, no algorithms, no infinite scroll, and no tracking.
I don't have any expectations from it of course, but it is amazing that I am able to create this on my own in just a few weeks. Maybe years of experience plus a few weeks, but nonetheless, I find it amazing.
Just a little heads-up: the tech is the fun part. Moderation is eternal, relentless and categorically unfun, especially if your site is disconnected communities
I don't understand why this was downvoted. While I agree it's very unlike this gets any traction, I praise the creator for trying something different. +1