(NewsMaine) – In a Monday announcement, Google revealed that it is shuttering its early social networking service, Orkut. The ten-year-old service will be shut down on September 30, 2014; in a move which Google said will help the company focus on its other initiatives in the social networking arena.
Launched in early 2004, the Orkut social networking service never really picked up in the US, though it is widely used in Brazil and India. Though launched in the same year as the popular social network Facebook – which presently has nearly 1.28 billion users worldwide -, the Orkut social networking service never caught on broadly across the world. As such, Google has now decided to shut it down for good.
Despite the fact that Google has not officially divulged the number of Orkut users worldwide, it is apparent that Orkut’s usage has been on the decline, particularly as other services such as Google+, YouTube and Blogger have taken off more widely.