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along, it was clear that Google was not doing as many updates as they needed to compete, so Orkut felt more and more "outdated".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

I think we're past the social media era. I remember using facebook to connect with highschool friends and keep up with them when I was in college. We used to play barn buddy together, update status and used to chat for ages on fb chat. But everything got ruined when fb allowed re-posting and pages which allowed non-personal and unauthentic repetitive stuff to be on top of the feed instead of the updates from my friends, and then came the influencers.

Further, nowadays nobody wants to update the status or share their personal lives on the internet because it's cringy and also again we don't want to go back to the phase where we start to compare our lives with a carefully curated set of photos from other people's profiles because as the age old saying goes comparison is the theft of joy.

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 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

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'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!

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?

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.

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.

In Finnish, the name might not sound (or might, to some!) so tempting. Orkku, plural "orkut" is a colloquial word for orgasm, orgasms.

Why aren't they just doing it? The cost for developing, launching and hosting a new social network app is minimal compared to what it was 22 years ago.

Part of it is how cheap and easy cloud providers have made assembling all the services you would need to host and scale the app, the other part is that an AI coding agent can do literally all the development and sys-admin tasks that would be needed to get it done.

It would take an experienced full-stack developer about a week or two of effort to direct and manage the development of the entire web app, plus mobile, plus infrastructure, including everything needed to set it up and launch it online. Given a "social network" is a well known category of app? It might even take as little as a couple days.

There's almost no reason for signups given the name recognition already that I can see. Throw the app together, put a "donate" button on the sign up page to pay for the first few months of hosting until ad revenue kicks in and be done with it.

I met my wife on Orkut. Happily married for 11 years now :)

    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.

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.

Ah, a blast from the past! My wife and I met on Orkut in 2005. IIRC, there weren't any private messages for a long time, and it used to be a lot of fun reading everyone's messages to everyone else :-) :-) Used to be very large in India for quite a while.

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.

I was a big fan and heavy user at the time (Brazilian here!) but how does bringing Orkut back solve anything? Like or not people moved from mostly-text, friend-activity social media long ago

Social media is itself the problem, it's not another implementation or version that'll change it. You're online instead of actually interacting with real people. Anything online will be tracked, sold to advertisers or data lobbies. It's not Facebook or Google that's the problem

Orkut didn't gain any traction in the Netherlands and it's all about the "kut" part in the name...

Early stages, but it reminds me of the recent Digg revival attempt. I don't imagine this going anywhere either, unfortunately.

I'm sure we'll hear about MySpace attempting a relaunch soon enough, too.

This is bullshit:

> sign the petition

> Adding your name says you want Orkut to create a new social network focused on

> authentic people, real connection, and genuine belonging.

A petition is useful when in a certain nation, the rule of law says that if you reach a certain number of signatures, something will happen.

A private company, asking people to "sign a petition", is just a clever, and hideous, trick.

I have nothing against Orkut, or this new thing. But please, don't fool me with this BS.

You might try UpScrolled. 6M users, designed to resist Big Tech's control of our lives.

https://upscrolled.com

The JS-less view here looks amazing. Two thumbs up. I'm usually the one complaining about it being a blank page or otherwise unusable, so yeah.

History is repeating. I had heard while back myspace making comeback to I guess that is not happening. At the time it was real innovation to be able to stay connected to long lost friends who moved after college, etc. Then it got to extreme.

> Saudade reminds us of what was good — and what we’re still capable of building.

https://orkut.com/en/articles/saudade.html

I wrote to google asking to get basic boolean primitives in circles. So you could organise a secret birthday party for "@friends not josh" but got nothing back.

Given the engine logic behind search has this, it felt like no brainer.

I dearly miss this internet and want it back. But I don't understand the letter. Is he going to build a new social network that is similar to the old Orkut/Facebook?

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.

It was amazing back in the day. Wonder why Google really shut it down. I do thank Orkut for Orkut. It's where I met my wife.

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.

Almost every high school student in India used it back then. But I’m happy with Reddit now.

The story about stupid greedy G. managers is written by this: talk, orkut, plus, wave.

Cmon, there is more space for a better descriptive title than just putting the domain there.

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.

IRC and yahoo chat ("asl?") laid the foundations.

Orkut is back? Almost fell out of my chair.

Something similar at Qocial.com too

it's incredible how much brazilians love Orkut

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

Social media has died years ago when Meta decided to not give a fuck about people sharing their life with their friends as there isn't enough money to be made with that.

It's all mass media now. Influencers are the actors of today and everyone just watches them.

OG Facebook, Instagram... All dead

73% signers from Brazil, heh

The letter is nice and all, but "sign this petition" is beyond useless

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Another social media site owned by a giant corporation? Please no.

Why not build it as a non-profit foundation who's interests align with the users not the shareholders?

Is it just me or do others also find the page constantly shifting things around endlessly, when using with NoScript (site's script enabled) and uBlock Origin?

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?

[dead]

> When people tell me what they miss most about orkut.com, they always say the communities. The people who repaired the same motorcycle. The people who rode the same bus route. The people who hated Mondays. In a feed you’re an audience, in a community you’re a member. That was the whole point.

How is that not just Reddit? ELI5, please.