Social media is part of everyone’s life now. People of different age segments, adults, and teenagers have social media handles, and they utilized them for many purposes. Social media facilitates the creation and sharing of photos, information, ideas, videos, etc.
There are now plenty of social media platforms, and the introduction of advanced platforms led to the Orkut failure. Nowadays, social media platforms do not operate with just sharing with the public and meeting other users available on that platform. It is also for marketing, and it is evident that it is one of the best resources.
The use of social media has only been incremental since its introduction. Orkut was one of the earliest platforms. Orkut’s founder is an engineer from Turkey named Orkut Büyükkökten.
Orkut was launched in 2004 and had lots of competitive eyes like Yahoo messenger, skype, etc. Orkut was Google’s initial step towards social media platforms, and it was very successful. Even India and Brazil had many users in Orkut.
The differences
Orkut began just like any other social media platforms seen now but with some differences. These differences could have been the reason for the initial success because Orkut had an option for a ‘crush list’ and can modify themes on the platform. That was unavailable on any other platform. Keeping this aside, the operation of Orkut was similar to the rest of the social media platforms.
The fall
So why did Orkut fall, especially if it had an initial success? Orkut shut down in 2014. The reason was a lack of a good user base, and many users began shifting to other social media platforms from Orkut. That was because of the emergence of other platforms that were in many ways greater than Orkut.
People love sharing and maintaining a profile on social media. However, they also expect some privacy. That was one of the biggest reasons why Orkut shut down. Anyone could see everyone’s profile, their personal and contact details. Facebook, on the other hand, had a few privacy settings. The option to choose who viewed one’s profile was available. That made users jump to Facebook.
The website was fast and operated well initially, but a few redesigns later, it turned slow. The issue got significant with an increasing user base, and hence the users had to wait a long time to reach the landing page.
All the users preferred Facebook over Orkut because Facebook updated rapidly according to users’ needs. They were always keen to find out what the user wants and update the website accordingly; adding some privacy options put Facebook ahead. If Orkut took the same decision, they could have kept on for some more time.
Coupled with that, Orkut was restrained to personal interactions only, whereas Facebook was molded to be a platform for online marketing and advertisements and such. Orkut lacked features like games, sharing, and liking posts which are the crux for marketing, while Facebook packed those options.
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