Orkut

Website
Name:	Orkut
Owner/Maintainer:	Orkut Büyükkökten/Google
Dates:	January 24, 2004 - September 30, 2014
Type:	Social network
Fandom:
URL:	https://www.orkut.com/ Archived by Google at http://orkut.google.com/ following its closure, though this URL now appears to be offline
The Orkut homepage on February 5, 2004, just weeks after the site was founded.
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Orkut was a social network founded in 2004 by Orkut Büyükkökten, an engineer at Google, after whom the website was also named. Büyükkökten created Orkut with the goal of "connect[ing] all the internet users so they can relate to each other". Orkut's design was reportedly inspired by Friendster, as its creation predated Facebook.

Orkut became extremely popular among users living in Brazil and India, and by 2008 was the top most visited site in Brazil and the fourth most visited site in India (for orkut.co.in) as gauged by Alexa.com rankings. In the same year, Google transferred management and operation of Orkut to Google Brazil in Belo Horizonte, capital of the state of Minas Gerais, due to the rapid growth of the site's Brazilian userbase.

Orkut was not designed for fandom, but like many internet spaces over the years, was adapted by fans to suit their varied needs. One Brazilian user recalls their experience of fandom on Orkut:

There were specific band pages or book or movie pages, and those community pages allowed you to interact as much or as little as you wanted, including polls, forum posts, moderator teams. It was an easy and accessible way of having yr own fandom page, and it was very easy to use. It was a bit of a mix of facebook’s Page and Group functions, but it was easier to find what you wanted through the internal organization of each community. You’d find roleplayers and fanfic and discussion topics and it was just really fun ... to get to know fandom through it.

Google shut down Orkut in September 2014 even though it was still popular with many users, citing the fact that Orkut's growth had been "outpaced" by the likes of Blogger, Google+ and Youtube. The Orkut URL now plays host to a site called Hello, founded in 2016 by Büyükkökten as a spiritual successor to Orkut (but not owned by Google).

Fan Comments

My first fandom experiences were marked by Orkut, a social media website that was very much /not for that/, but that had this function called Community, in which u could create a page for a specific topic (it went from wide topics like Soccer to very oddly specific things like I Open the Fridge to Think - seriously) and that’s when lil pre teen me had her first taste of fandom. There were specific band pages or book or movie pages, and those community pages allowed you to interact as much or as little as you wanted, including polls, forum posts, moderator teams. It was an easy and accessible way of having yr own fandom page, and it was very easy to use. It was a bit of a mix of facebook’s Page and Group functions, but it was easier to find what you wanted through the internal organization of each community. You’d find roleplayers and fanfic and discussion topics and it was just really fun ... to get to know fandom through it.

[...] the website died, which was a sad day for all because it was also a very very very popular social media website in Brazil and everyone - from the young to the old, the fandoms to the conspiracy theorists - used it), but sometimes I feel that wave of nostalgia for a website that was just so okay with being whatever it was all those different groups needed from it.

I even used to be the admin of [Shahrukh Khan's] fan club in orkut.com that had half a million members in it.

Back around that time [the period between the release of books 3 and 4 of The Inheritance Cycle] there was this social media thing called Orkut (not sure how popular that one was outside of brazil) and back then I was part of dozens of Inheritance Cycle communities. Making predictions, sharing stories and created silly content for a book series that we thought was half dead

This was also my first experience with fanfiction as several people got really fucking tired of waiting and just decided to write their own takes on what the fuck would happen next. Back then I didn't know what a fanfic was, but I was still waiting every day for new updates on some of my favorite stories....stories that I unfortunately forgot with time

So that was my first time directly interacting with a fandom.

Orkut was kind of wild because there was a community system (which was gr9 btw, & I never saw it replicated in any other website, even though it kind of had forums too), & there was fandom activity without no one even knowing that word.

Like, there would be "communities" that were fanclubs, & they would make projects & such (I remember one fanclub I was in sent a gift-box to Miley Cyrus 84 years ago), but fanfiction was kind of rare? There were some but they were not the norm

Also freaking ridiculous but tbh not so strange a concept as online fanclub rivalry, there were "communities" created around hating something - shows, actors, singers, etc. And they often clashed/were rivals with their fan-communities.

Funnily, I never took to Orkut or Facebook, which everyone I knew was deeply into, but I never had any interest in either because I'm only ever into fandom spaces, and neither Orkut nor Facebook were fandom-y enough for me.

External Links

• Orkut Livejournal community - last active in September 2006. Although the community was created for the purposes of discussion and not giving out invitations, the comm nevertheless received numerous requests from people seeking invites. A dedicated community, Orkut Invite, was set up for requesting and receiving invites (last active in 2007).