Google Is Killing Off Orkut, Its Social Network That You Don't Remember

If you remember Orkut, Google's first foray into social networking, good news: the site is still around. The bad news is that it's about to die. Orkut will go gentle into that good night on September 30, Google announced in a blog post on Monday.

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The social network -- which developed from Google's "20 percent" project that lets employees work on passion projects for a fifth of their time -- proved popular in a few countries like Brazil and India, but it failed to attract American users. Those curious to check out Orkut, whose 2004 debut was the first of Google's many attempts to crack the social market, are out of luck as the site is no longer accepting new users. The Orkut faithful, however, can export their data using Google's Takeout service through September 2016. And in a nod to the firstborn in its social media family, Google will preserve an archive of public Orkut community posts online.

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-- Julianne Pepitone