Orkut Büyükkökten, the creator of orkut.com, is seeking to revive the platform, which introduced many people to social networking.

“The internet should help us find our people. Friendship. Community. A place to belong,” Büyükkökten wrote on X, adding, “Help me bring Orkut back in that spirit.”

Büyükkökten has created four social networking platforms, the most recent of which was Hello.com. He is now hoping to revive Orkut.

The entrepreneur has invited people to add their names to the Orkut website, effectively signing a petition calling for a new social network “focused on authentic people, real connection, and genuine belonging.”

As of October 9, the website had received more than 2,70,000 signatures, most of them from Brazil. Portugal, Ireland and Paraguay were among the other countries represented.

Büyükkökten created Orkut as a side project while working at Google. The social network was launched in January 2004, about two weeks before Facebook's launch. Orkut was owned and operated by Google until its closure in September 2014.

In 2008, Büyükkökten left the Orkut team to take up a product manager role at Google. By this time, Facebook was expanding internationally, refining its design, privacy controls, and third-party application ecosystem. Orkut, meanwhile, grew to more than 300 million users worldwide and became a defining part of internet culture in Brazil, India and beyond. However, Facebook overtook Orkut in India in July 2010 and Brazil in December 2011, according to Comscore audience data.

Despite its strong following in India and Brazil, Orkut did not achieve comparable popularity in many Western markets, while Facebook continued to expand globally.

Source link