Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) announced on Monday, June 30th, its decision to end social networking service Orkut. Orkut would be closed by the end of September this year after being operative for more than 10 years. Orkut started as the first social networking service for Google Inc(NASDAQ:GOOG). In a statement from Google, Google said that it plans to preserve all of the site’s public communities in an archive. Users who aren’t interested can choose to opt-out from the archive by decoupling Orkut from their Google account.

Orkut was established by the Google Inc(NASDAQ:GOOG) in 2004, the same year when Mark Zuckerberg co-founded Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB). Google’s Orkut is still popular in Brazil and India, but its user base is incomparable with Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) with 1.28 billion users. Even in Brazil and India, Orkut has started losing their hold to Facebook in the recent years.

With the emergence of Google+ along with the pacy growth of YouTube and Blogger, Google Inc have positioned Google+ as the premier networking platform. Google’s decision to axe Orkut came just days after the company confirmed it was retiring its Quickoffice app, which had only been released about a year ago.

Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) News: Blog Statement on Orkut

“Over the past decade, YouTube, Blogger and Google+ have taken off, with communities springing up in every corner of the world. Because the growth of these communities has outpaced Orkut’s growth, we’ve decided to bid Orkut farewell,” Google said in a post in a blog post on Monday.

Moreover, Google did not mention Google+ as an alternative to transfer the data currently present on Orkut. Google+ has been termed as a “tremendously growing” service by Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) co-founder Larry Page in the recent Google I/O conference. Google Inc has been trying to project Google+ as an integrated user platform for all of Google’s applications rather than a social networking tool like Facebook.

Google Inc Financial News (NASDAQ:GOOG)

Orkut was Google’s first venture into Social Networking. From Google Inc prospective, it did perform well in certain countries. But with the increasingly declining user base, Google’s decision of axing Orkut and placing Google+ as a tool of establishing a “unified user identity” would be welcomed warmly by most. Google has updated the Google+ platform with a new photo editor, Auto-Awesome Effects and photo albums called Google+ Stories over the last couple of months.

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