Orkut Shutting Down Tuesday, Last Chance to Export Your Data

If you want to revisit your long ignored Orkut profile, now is the best time to do so. Google is going to shut down its Orkut social network on September 30, as it had announced earlier. Orkut was the search giant's first foray into the social networking space, which failed to take off due to tough competition from rival services such as Facebook and Twitter.

Google later launched another social network called Google+, which may not be giving sleepless nights to Facebook, but turned out to be far more popular than Orkut. While Orkut wasn't a big success across the world, it was very popular in India and Brazil.

In a blog post, Google had said, "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."

September 30 is also the last day for you to export your photos to Google+, although you can download your Orkut profile, scraps, testimonials, community posts and photos to your computer via Google Takeout until September 2016. If you want to save the data you have on Orkut, we've written a complete guide on how to download your Orkut scraps, testimonials, and photos.

Google had said that it would save an archive of all Orkut communities after it shuts down the service on September 30. The company had asked people to remove their Orkut account from Google permanently if they didn't want their name or posts to be included in the community archive.

Both Orkut and Facebook were launched in 2004. While Facebook has become the world's largest social network with over 1.2 billion users, a Reuters report said Google declined to comment on the number of users Orkut has.

Orkut's fortunes floundered a few years ago and it is finally being closed.