Reasons for fall of Orkut

On June 30,2014 google announced that Orkut will be shutting down its operations.
There are a lot of reasons for the failure and eventual shutting down of the company
which was ranked first in social networking only a few years ago.
Some of the reasons of the failure of Orkut are described below:

1. Inability to scale:-
Inability to scale: The first version of the site was more of a hack and it had
rather one too many outages. Even after the site was ported to a more robust
platform the rather infamous 'No donut for you' error page would turn up more
often than one wanted it to.

2. Irrelevance within Google: It was not considered to be cool to work on the Orkut
team, within Google. Everything about the site starting from the fact that the site
was branded around a person made it quite quirky. So it was difficult to get the
best engineers to work on it. Eventually teams in India and Brazil took over the
entire product.

3. The Brazilian invasion: Orkut was not designed to linguistically walled. So when
Brazilians took on the challenge of wanting to be the top country on Orkut (yes it
was a game the whole of Brazil participated in,) suddenly the rest of the world
started to see Portuguese messages everywhere. This led a decline in interest for
English speaking users in the US.

4. Privacy: Orkut had very basic privacy settings and did not really envisage an
environment where people wanted different privacy setting for different user
groups.

5. Limited market strategy: While Orkut was on the decline in the US, it gained a strong foothold in
India and Brazil and saw a lot of growth in these two countries. Soon the team started
focusing for this market mainly. There was one redesign, which was mostly
visual and did not do much to improve all the usability flaws that the site had.
6. Technical problems: There were many technical issues also present with orkut which did not
hamper facebook like orkut was based on ASP and Javascript which was difficult to manage while
facebook used PHP , which is one the simplest languages.

7. Appealing news feed: Facebook’s news feed was also intelligently developed so that it provides
user with fresh content anytime while the user has to hunt for fresh content on orkut
everytime.

8. Anonymity absent: In facebook you can’t see who visited your profile but in orkut you can see
who visited your profile recently so there anonymity and privacy is lost in case of orkut.
Meanwhile as Orkut began spreading to smaller cities in India, people in India
started realizing the shortcomings of Orkut's privacy settings. Add to that there
were a number things like defamatory comments about politicians and one high
profile kidnapping and murder that had an Orkut angle to it. This gave the site
some bad press in India.

Also given that fact that it was difficult to maintain a presence on two networks,
users in India started migrating to Facebook in droves. Around the same time,
Orkut fixed its privacy and came up with a redesign. The redesign though did
not address a lot of what users were asking for. Over a period of time, Orkut lost
its footing in India and a little later in Brazil as well.

Learning outcomes
Orkut is no more, and at one time, it was the first social network to introduce
socializing online in India. So much so, that every college student and elders were
hooked on to it. Without Orkut, India would not have been introduced to social
networking and neither would they be so crazy for Facebook. Orkut was the
reason for introduction of social networking to India. So what marketing lessons
have we loved from the introduction the closure of Orkut?

1) First movers can lose the advantage:

Orkut had the first mover advantage. Hence the popularity of Orkut. At its
prime, the website would have earned more than was expected from it, hence it was purchased by
Google later on. But because of more innovative ideas and presentation, Facebook took over the
social networking world by storm. So first movers do have their advantage, but the advantage can be
lost by more effective competition.

2) Novelty does not last:

Excitement prevails when things are new, but then the novelty does not last long.
When Orkut was new, more and more users joined it every hour. However, the
novelty soon wore off. At such a time, re invention of the product is almost mandatory. People are
joining it because they are bored with the number of ads being shown on Facebook and they are
bored because the novelty of Facebook has worn off. Thus, novelty does
not last.

3) There will always be mischief makers:

Spam was one of the major problems which Orkut faced. And more problematic
was the fact that Orkut was not able to handle it much. Boys spamming girls,
spam posts coming up on the site, people misusing their profiles, and many such
issues led to the fall of the popularity of the site. The later social networks learnt
from Orkut and modified their privacy norms, as well as security levels to join
the social network. They also had antispam filters and teams from the start of
the social network.

4) If you have a website, your home page is important:

Orkut learned this the hard way. Their home page was about the user and on
logging in, the users profile was shown. But Facebook and Twitter both are
different, because the home page is about other people. As soon as you log in, you
see what others are doing. This small insight made a huge change. We do not log
in to look at our profile. We log in to look at others and probably shout out to
them and show your latest updates to them. Thus, on a website, the home page is most important.

5) Technology changes fast:

This adds on to the above point that novelty does not last. Technology is ever changing, and with
better coding, comes better and faster loading graphics, more
developer options and more usability. Facebook used better coding, more
scaleability, and grew much faster than Orkut because of its simplistic design, its
privacy features and fantastic speed. Thus, an upgraded technology did help
Facebook in making its mark.

6) Think of more audience:

Both Facebook and Twitter gave access to developers to make apps for the
website, and it made all the changes possible. Games and apps were the major
advantage of Facebook and the reason why Facebook expanded so fast. Twitter
on the other hand encouraged people to join conversations and retweet anyone’s
tweet within seconds. They soon became strong marketing tools, so much so that
there are companies targeted towards social marketing. This plays a key role in the
fast and changing online environment.