Orkut
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Orkut's login screen
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Type of site
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Social networking service |
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| Available in | Multilingual (45) |
| Founded | January 24, 2004 |
| Dissolved | September 30, 2014 |
| Area served | Worldwide |
| Owner | |
| Founder(s) | Orkut Büyükkökten |
| Industry | Internet |
| Slogan(s) | Orkut you can sign in! |
| Website | orkut |
| Alexa rank |
 7,018 (September 2014[update]) |
| Advertising | AdSense |
| Commercial | Yes |
| Registration | Required |
Orkut was a social networking website owned and operated by Google. The service was designed to help users meet new and old friends and maintain existing relationships. The website was named after its creator, Google employee Orkut Büyükkökten.
On June 30, 2014, Google announced it would be closing Orkut on September 30, 2014. No new accounts could be created starting from July 2014. Users can download their profile archive by Google Takeout.
Orkut was one of the most visited websites in India and Brazil in 2008. In 2008 Google announced that Orkut would be fully managed and operated in Brazil, by Google Brazil, in the city of Belo Horizonte. This was decided due to the large Brazilian user base and growth of legal issues.
Orkut had a feature that allowed users choose and change Themes. Users could change their interface from a wide range of colorful themes in the library. Themes were only available in Brazil and India.
Each member can become a fan of any of the friends in their list and can also evaluate whether their friend is "Trustworthy", "Cool", "Sexy" on a scale of 1 to 3 (marked by icons) and this is aggregated in terms of a percentage. Unlike Facebook, where a member can view profile details of people only on their network, Orkut allows anyone to visit anyone's profile, unless a potential visitor is on your "Ignore List" (this feature has been recently changed so that users can choose between showing their profile to all networks or specified ones). Importantly, each member can also customize their profile preferences and can restrict information that appears on their profile from their friends and/or others (not on the friends list). Another feature is that any member can add any other member on Orkut to his/her "Crush List" and both of them will be informed only when both parties have added each other to their "Crush List".
When a user logs in, they see the people in their friends list in the order of their logging into the site, the first person being the latest one to do so. Orkut's competitors are other social networking sites including Myspace and Facebook. Ning is a more direct competitor, as they allow creation of social networks which are similar to Orkut's communities.
An Orkut user can also add videos to their profile from either YouTube or Google Video with the additional option of creating either restricted or unrestricted polls for polling a community of users. There is an option to integrate GTalk (An instant messenger from Google) with Orkut enabling chatting and file sharing. Currently GTalk has been integrated in Orkut – users can directly chat from their Orkut page. Similar to Facebook, users may also use a "like" button to share interests with friends.
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