Growing up in Brazil, Orkut was as popular as Facebook is now; most people had an Orkut account.

Personally, I made a few new friends, connected with some high school colleagues and met a long term girlfriend.

I miss its simplicity. The lack of a news feed was a feature, not a bug.

Same here. I and roughly 100% of my college friends used Orkut.

Wish someone recreate Orkut :'(

Its Hello! Its a pure piece of shit.

I also did. Although it was a long time ago then the vague memory of it is that it was pretty similar to facebook, perhaps the minus the advertising. But groups and friends were there, could leave testimonials, send messages, etc.

So, in your opinion was it better than Facebook?

This is hard to say (and it was a long time ago!).

Perhaps Orkut was more predictable in what you got to see, but fb does need to have an algo to show the feed since you can't sift through all of it..

I did, for all of 5 minutes. There was nothing compelling about that product. Orkut's death was unnoticed and unmourned.

I am mildly surprised that Google wasted money on it for 10 years. However Google's lack of focus in it's pre-Pichai years was notorious, and undoubtedly explains this.

That's like saying that the end of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood TV show was unnoticed and unmourned... because I live in Brazil.

I didn't use it, but I remember it was really popular in Brazil.

In our college we used orkut. I have even built an web proxy to make orkut work within our campus. PS: I am from India

Oh, maybe in 2005 it was invite only so I couldn't.