If you go to Rio de Janeiro and have a coffee—or already a good caipirinha—with a millennial who went through puberty in the early 2000s, one word may come up that bothers you in the conversation: orkutização. Do not worry. The Portuguese are not slipping you. Don’t bother looking in the dictionary either, or just pull out the translator. orkutização It is one of the expressions that improvises, born at the same time with its concepts and gives a headache to language scholars. Same as “random”, “bug” or “stalk”.

Although not from any success, you can roughly translate it as “die by success”. when something happens orkutiza loses its sophistication and stop being “cool”. Linguistic considerations aside, the term was born connected to networks and helps to understand the drift of discredited platforms like Tuenti or MySpace. Why? Well, because the word itself comes from a network: Orkut, which was launched by Google in 2004 and was fired in 2014 after adding millions of users.

Orkut’s death is explained by him orkutização; at the same time, and in large part, because of Google’s faulty policy in the area of ​​networks and its inability to counter rivals such as Facebook, who know how to better position themselves and connect with the public on a global level.

This is his birth story, success, orkutização and bump.

“Connect internet users”

In the early 2000s, Google implemented a rule that may seem eccentric at first glance, but has proved hugely successful over time: it allowed employees to devote 20% of their time in the office to personal projects. The only condition, of course, was that they could benefit the company. Thanks to this initiative, AdSense, Google News… or a social networking seed proposed by engineer Orkut Büyükkökten, a newcomer to Google, emerged.

Büyükkökten did not turn 30, but he saved significant experience with online communities. In 2001, shortly after inCircle, he presented Club Nexus at Stanford University, focusing on alumni groups and even dared with his own company, Affinity Engines, in 2002. However, he found the place to shape his big project in Google: a network that could “connect all Internet users”.

Mountain View liked the offer, and in 2004 Orkut, named after its creator, was launched. His philosophy was as simple as his aesthetics. At first you were accessed by invitation, and the web allowed you to add friends, send messages, describe yourself, leave reflections, upload a handful of photos or categorize your contacts. Not much compared to existing networks but it was used to find old friends and there were even those who used it as a primitive Tinder.

It didn’t take long for the formula to gain supporters. yes, with very uneven distribution. In some countries Orkut has become a phenomenon, and in others it is at their fingertips. Brazil undoubtedly stands out among the first, and in the second half of 2004, even before the national domain was activated, it had around 700,000 users. His success there was so great that by 2011 orkutização, or perhaps precisely because of it, it outperformed Facebook in traffic. By the end of that year, the Google network had registered 34 million unique visitors, a growth of 10%.

It was also available in Spain, albeit in more conservative numbers. In March 2011, we added 2% of its users, even though there was a community active enough to flood their accounts with black ties on the day of the 11-M attacks. If we want to get an idea of ​​how segmented its app is, take a look at Google data for 2006. At that time, 73.2% of Orkut users were Brazilian, 10.1% American, 2.8% Iranian, 2.4% Pakistani. and 2.1% Indian. Spain was not even on the list.

Orkut’s limited appeal in Spain did not prevent it from being the gateway to social platforms for some, a new concept for many. Fotolog and MySpace were launched recently, Facebook and Flickr launched the same year as Orkut, and we would have to wait until 2006 for Tuenti or Twitter. As for Instagram, it wasn’t launched until 2010.

Although things didn’t go well for Orkut here, he managed to come together on the other side of the Atlantic. more than a respectable neighborhood and some improvements have been made over the years. In 2007, after resolving a dispute with Affinity Engines over the source of the code, Google redesigned its page; It presented an improved version in 2009 and released its logo and retouched its image in 2011. The first version, presented by Büyükkökten in 2002, was replaced by a more comfortable and functional version. to feed with friend updates, video chat and better navigation.

These tweaks did not prevent Orkut from disappearing. While it may have seemed like one of those “Gallic villages” that resisted Facebook’s pressure for a while, like Tuenti in Spain or V Kontakte in Russia, it didn’t take long for it to lose power in its own strongholds. In 2014—just 10 years after its creation—Google announced the shutdown of its old platform, giving its users a few months’ margin to recover their data. By that time, Mark Zuckerberg’s social network was already the main platform with 1.28 billion users.

Beyond this process orkutização The end of Orkut, which penetrated Brazil to the point of creating a school and sneaking into its vocabulary, is explained by a number of factors. The most important of these was probably Google’s lack of a clear strategy. As Genbeta explained in 2014, the network had grown too quickly, unpredictably, and without the Mountain View firm having a clear idea of ​​how to take advantage of it. They ran into problems when they started showing ads in 2007, monetization was not easy and maintenance was complicated.

To further complicate the scenario, there was the issue of how to expand the scenario to new markets. It worked well in Brazil, but its limited application in other regions has made it difficult for Facebook to take advantage of the networking effect that has encouraged it. As for his image inside and outside of Brazil, it didn’t help that some users used the platform to commit serious crimes.

Faced with such a scenario, Google open a clean slate. He chose Google+, a change of strategy and a move that ultimately wouldn’t work. This did not mean that Orkut disappeared overnight; but the network began to weaken. A good example of this is that the iPhone app didn’t come out until 2012, an announcement that didn’t get a lot of excitement.

Google confirmed a previously reported death when it reported it shutting down in 2014.

However, some 20 years after Orkut’s birth, part of his footprint survives.

If you apply to his domain (orkut.com), you will find a message from Büyükkökten explaining why he set up the network and inviting you. your new projectis another platform where Orkut wants to save its original philosophy. In its name, of course, there is very little goodbye: Hello.

Pictures | GPDOC (Flickr), Kailash Naik (Flickr), and Gaurav Mishra (Flickr)