After ten years, Google’s first attempt at creating a social network is finally coming to an end. Google announced on Monday that Orkut would be officially shut down on September 30th, 2014 to make room for the thriving social communities on YouTube, Blogger and Google+, all of which have handily outpaced Orkut’s growth over the past decade.
With Orkut out of the way, Google will only have one true social network to manage. Whether or not this will be beneficial to Google+ remains to be seen, but when every additional shoehorned integration of your social network causes a massive uproar, there’s nowhere to go but up.
If you have an Orkut account, you’ll still be able to log in, interact with your friends and play games until September 30th. You can also export any photo albums you’d like to keep to your Google+ profile, and your entire profile can be downloaded using Google Takeout until September 2016.
If you want to delete any individual posts, you’ll need to hop on to Orkut before Google archives your profile in September, but you can also simply remove Orkut from your Google profile any time before or after the shut down in order to delete all your posts.
For more information on death of Orkut, check out the farewell blog post as well as Google’s extensive FAQ.
