File photo of a Google self-driving vehicle driving around the parking lot at the Computer History Museum after a presentation in Mountain View, California
A Google self-driving vehicle drives around the parking lot at the Computer History Museum after a presentation in Mountain View, California in this May 13, 2014 file photo. REUTERS/Stephen Lam/Files

Google has decided to hang the boots for Orkut, one of the earliest social networking platforms the world has ever seen.

Orkut is older than Facebook, though only by a few days. Orkut had been founded on January 24, 2004 before Mark Zuckerberg and his four fellow Harvard University partners founded their social networking platform on February 4 in the same year. Orkut became exceedingly popular as a major Web site as the services it provided, which were similar to Facebook's or any other social network, was unprecedented 10 years back. Orkut was especially popular in Brazil and India.

However, people got more interested in Facebook which would later become one of the biggest online businesses in history. It collected US$7.87 billion as its revenue in 2013 itself. Orkut, which created sensation among a great number of people, lost its glory over the years. Almost all the people who once made profiles on Orkut had their Facebook profile. Google realised over the years that Orkut was hardly adding anything significant to its social networking resume.

Google will officially close the social networking Web site down on September 30, 2014. The company has, however, refused to disclose how many people are still hooked to Orkut. Google revealed its plan to shut Orkut down in a blog on the social networking Web site itself. It said that Orkut had failed to keep up with the pace of growth of its other social networks such as Blogger, Google+ and YouTube. Whereas the other networks spread its wings everywhere in the world, Orkut was "outpaced," it said.

The decision to close Orkut down comes after Google's social networking services head Vic Gundotra left the company in April 2014. Gundotra declared in October 2013 that Google+ had 300 million people visiting the Web site each month. Google has started giving more importance to Google+ of late. It has attempted establishing Google+ as a system with user identity for improving various other Web properties of the company.

Contact the writer: s.mukhopadhyay@ibtimes.com.au