Orkut

Orkut was a silo from Google that existed from 2004 to 2014 (see site-deaths) and was very popular in Brazil and India.

The popularity of Orkut waned among English-speaking users as it became more popular in Brazil following its translation into Portuguese in 2005. Orkut started losing popularity in Brazil around 2009, following the rise of Facebook, as well as due to issues with spam.

Scrapbook

Orkut's Scrapbook was a messaging service of Orkut that allowed public small scraps (a text message) to be posted by anyone to anyone's account.

Orkut's Scrapbook, although simple, was a somewhat unique messaging service for a social network. It worked as a hybrid between private messaging and publicly posting, for example, on a friend's Facebook Timeline. But, unlike private messaging, unlike posting to a friend's Timeline and unlike sharing content with everybody and at the same time with no one (as with Twitter), in the Scrapbook:

the content was public;
the content was directed to someone;
the posted content wasn't mixed with totally unrelated contents (in a Twitter or Facebook stream, for example);
the posted content wasn't perishable;
the posted content wasn't streamed to anywhere, so it wasn't a big deal to send someone a scrap, it would not be shown to a lot of unrelated people, except if they went looking after it;

These apparently simple features:

encouraged quick message exchanges, regarding any subject, big or small, even between strangers;
allowed people to include themselves in others' conversations, if the theme interested them and they happened to see it;
encouraged public discussion of themes that, at first, could be seen as unworthy, because they were not being displayed at everyone's computers, they were shown just to the interested people.

Scrapbook

See Also