Google will shut down Orkut this September to focus on Google+, YouTube and Blogger

Before the existence of Facebook, Twitter, and many others, Google launched its own social networking website called Orkut. Functional since January 2004, Orkut is no longer part of Google’s future plans, so the Mountain View giant announced that the service would be phased out come September 30.

Although it was somewhat popular at some point, Orkut never really took off on a global scale. Instead, YouTube, Blogger and Google+ did. So Google is shutting down Orkut not just because this is in decline, but also because it wants to focus its “energy and resources on making these other social platforms as amazing as possible for everyone who uses them.”

As of now, Orkut no longer accepts new users. However, current users will still have fully functional profiles (and everything else) until September 30. Orkut profiles, community posts, scraps and testimonials can be downloaded to users’ computers using Google Takeout (this will work until 2016).

For more on why Google is shutting down Orkut, and what will happen to current accounts and data, check out Google’s own words on the matter at the source links below.

sources: Google (1), (2)