Remember Orkut? Well, Google certainly does, and it looks like the social blast from the internet’s past is here to stay for the time being. According to a faceless Google rep, the company has no plans at the moment to either retire Orkut or to roll its functionality into Google+ (despite the immediate success of the younger project).
Nobody would blame you if you don’t remember Orkut. While it’s been around for over seven years, it never really took off to the extent that contemporaries like MySpace and Facebook did. At least, not in English-speaking countries, anyway. While the web-savvy social generation of Westerners has all but shunned Orkut as a social network, people in countries like India and Estonia have flocked to it year after year, bringing its home page to an Alexa rank of 102 (an extremely big ranking for something people tend to forget ever existed).
Meanwhile, feedback to Google’s Vic Gundotra Google+ post today detailed the lessons his company is learning from the Google+ rollout, along with their plans to change it in the immediate future. User feedback has apparently played an enormous role in the changes, which leads many to wonder why Orkut has been laying nearly stagnant for half a decade.
Among the desired plans for Google+ tweaks from users are revamps for Google Reader and Google Chat that would tie them into the new social network. There’s no mention of Orkut.
If you log into Orkut right now, you won’t see the new black “Google bar” across the top of your browser window. In fact, you won’t see anything remotely like any other Google product currently offered today. It hasn’t received the same attention from Google’s developers over the years that services like Gmail, YouTube, Google Chat, and Google Reader have. But despite the perceived neglect, Google seems intent on keeping Orkut in the mix–they just don’t want it mixing with anything else.
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