Before knowing why the platform finally disappeared, it is interesting to know when and why it was launched. After failing to acquire the then-viral platform Friendster, the tech giant Google decided to launch its own site, Orkut, in 2004.
“Over the past decade, YouTube , Blogger and Google+ have taken off, with communities springing up in every corner of the world. Besides Orkut, he also co-founded Hello Network with John Murphy. “Two decades ago, I helped build some of the earliest social networks. Now, as AI changes how we connect, I keep coming back to what made all of this worth building: knowing there’s a real person on the other side of every message,” he wrote in a recent social media post. Büyükkökten continued, “I see a different future, built around real people and communities that reward kindness, trust, and belonging. It’s the spirit that made Orkut special, and the spirit I want to bring into its next chapter. Help me bring Orkut back.”
He started his career as a research assistant at Stanford University and then joined Google, where he worked for nearly 12 years, from 2002 to 2014. Because the growth of these communities has outpaced Orkut’s growth, we’ve decided to bid Orkut farewell,” Google said in a now-unavailable blogpost in 2014.
Since then, I’ve watched us spend twenty years optimizing the internet for attention, with feeds that hook us instead of helping us.
Because it was real, maybe the connection lasted only a moment, but it was thrilling. He shared a link to a website, asking people to visit it and add their name “in support of a new human social network. He also posted a letter addressed to social media users. Evoking nostalgia, he wrote, “Do you remember when the internet was human? When a message from a stranger on another continent felt like magic? Another person had reached across the world to share a small piece of themselves. “I still love this industry, but I despair at what it has become. Move fast and break things, so the slogan went. Well, things are broken. And now the machines have arrived. Artificial intelligence is extraordinary technology, but it’s dissolving the one premise that made social networking special and worth building: that there was a person on the other side.
He urged people to “join the movement” to revive the social media platform of the bygone era. The site also has a “sign the petition” section, which claims over 266,102 people have joined his mission. (With inputs from Reuters)
