Orkut

Orkut Büyükkökten built Orkut in 2004 as a side project inside Google, using the company’s 20%-time policy — and Google let him name it after himself. It never took hold in the United States. It took hold everywhere else that mattered to it: by 2008 it was one of the most-visited sites in Brazil and India, and by August 2010 comScore counted more than 36 million monthly unique visitors in Brazil alone, roughly four times Facebook’s audience there that same month. For years, Orkut was simply what “the internet” meant to a generation of Brazilian and Indian teenagers — communities, scraps (public wall posts), testimonials, all of it.

Facebook did to Orkut abroad what it had already done everywhere else, just later. It overtook Orkut in India in 2010 and in Brazil in 2012. By mid-2014, half of Orkut’s remaining users were in Brazil, a fifth in India, and under a fifth in the US — a service that had shrunk to almost exactly the two markets that had made it. On June 30, 2014, Google announced it was shutting Orkut down, citing growth that had shifted to YouTube, Blogger, and Google+; new accounts stopped in July, and the service closed for good on September 30, 2014. Google kept a permanent, read-only archive of public communities, and gave users until September 2016 to pull their data out through Google Takeout.

Büyükkökten didn’t stop. In 2016 he launched Hello, a mobile-first app built on the same community logic — it lasted until 2022. The orkut.com domain went dark, then flickered back to life in April 2022 with nothing on it but a letter from him promising something new. As of 2025 that something is a Brazil-focused social network in closed testing, aimed at a 2026 public launch — built by the same person, explicitly pitched as a fresh start, not a resurrection of what Google buried. Dominance is not eternal, and neither, it turns out, is the willingness to let it stay dead.