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by dahidahi1 2996 days ago
Orkut was so popular in some parts of the world like India that I always wondered why Google thought it better to shut it down. All those orkut users moved to Facebook & made Facebook a hugely popular platform. I hope the same does not happen with Hello.
1 comments

I am still trying to figure out why Orkut was more popular in India.
Brazilian here. I miss Orkut a lot, enjoyed much more than FB. I had the sense that Orkut lost a lot of users in Brazil right after "The Social Network" hit the brazilian movie theathers. Everyone jumped in the hype then.
It was really popular in Brazil, too. It would be cool if they just open sourced it, or launched Orkut the 2005 edition with security patches today. I would use it if it was web only.
The 2005 version is pretty trivial: each profile has friends, a scrapbook (known on FB as wall), and up to 12 pictures; Communities (forums) have topics and topics have posts. That's it. Any junior dev can build it on Rails/Django.

The tricky part is scaling it. The original version as a .NET app and it couldn't handle the number of simultaneous users.

I think Orkut was the first available one in Brazil. It got popular because it was new and had no competition.
I remember trying it out, but it was so so slow. Thats pretty much the only thing I remember about it.