Orkut

Orkut turned communities and scrapbook messages into a social home, especially in Brazil and India.

Communities made shared interests visible alongside personal connections. A user could move between a profile and a subject-based gathering place, making the service a map of both people and the things they cared about. That mixture gave the network a social texture beyond a stream of individual posts.

The shutdown removed a familiar setting for those conversations. Its memory is therefore tied to the groups and relationships that formed there, and to the particular ways users made the platform part of their everyday online lives.

Google retired Orkut as users shifted to other social networks.