Orkut's founder wants to rebuild it, but Google owns the name

Orkut's founder wants to bring the social network back, more than a decade after Google switched it off. The awkward part is that the two things that made Orkut worth anything, its name and its social graph, are not his to revive: Google still owns the trademark, and the user data was deleted on 30 September 2014.

What changed

TechCrunch reported on 9 October 2026 that Orkut Büyükkökten, the Stanford-trained engineer who built Orkut as a Google side project and now runs Hello, an interest-based network, has said he wants to bring it back. The report is thin on specifics, and that thinness is itself informative. No launch date. No disclosed funding. No product description. No confirmation that Google, which has owned the Orkut trademark since 2004, is involved at all.

The history is worth restating because it explains both the appeal and the difficulty. Orkut went live on 22 January 2004, invite-only, three weeks before Facebook opened to the public. It never caught on in the United States. It caught on enormously in Brazil, and then in India. At its peak it carried roughly 300 million registered accounts, and by 2010 about 30 million Brazilians were using it, close to half of the country's online population at the time. For a generation of Brazilian internet users, Orkut was not one social network among several. It was the internet.

Google announced the closure on 30 June 2014 and pulled the plug three months later. Profiles, communities and scraps were wiped. The company nudged users towards Google+, which itself shut down on 2 April 2019. What survived was the brand, which Google has never sold.

Büyükkökten has been here before. He left Google in 2014, launched Hello in 2016, and has spent a decade arguing that social networks should be built around shared interests rather than follower counts. Hello remains small. A revived Orkut would be his second attempt at rebuilding the same idea, this time with a name people remember.

Impact on businesses

Brazil is the obvious beachhead, and the Brazilian advertising market is the reason this story has commercial weight. The country now has around 180 million internet users and a digital advertising market worth roughly $8bn a year, but the supply of social inventory is concentrated in a handful of apps. A credible alternative, even a mid-sized one, would give agencies a new place to spend and a new lever in negotiations with Meta and Alphabet.

The catch is scale. Orkut would launch with zero users, and advertisers buy reach before they buy anything else. Meta booked more than $160bn in advertising revenue in 2024 on the back of roughly 3.4 billion monthly users; a revival would be negotiating rates on a fraction of a percent of that audience. Media buyers will not build plans around a platform until it demonstrates weekly retention over two or three quarters.

There is an SME angle that is easy to underestimate. Orkut communities functioned as storefronts for thousands of small Brazilian sellers, from craft makers to electronics importers, long before Instagram Shopping existed. A rebuilt product that made small-merchant pages free and searchable would find a willing audience in Brazil and in India, where WhatsApp Business already proves the appetite for commerce inside social tools.

The cost base is the real problem. Running a user-generated network in 2026 means obligations that did not exist in 2004: risk assessments under the EU's Digital Services Act for platforms above 45 million EU users, compliance with Brazil's LGPD data law, and age-verification duties under the UK's Online Safety Act. Trust and safety teams are expensive, and the industry has already shown how fragile that discipline can be, as the dispute involving fired OpenAI safety staff demonstrated. Any investor backing a nostalgia play should price moderation into year one, not year three.

How the Brazilian market looks now

Figures are rough industry estimates and vary by tracker.

Impact on consumers and users

Nothing will be restored. The profiles, testimonials and community threads that people remember are gone, and Google is not sitting on a backup it can hand over. A new Orkut would mean new accounts, new friend requests and empty communities with familiar names.

That is a harder sell than it sounds. The precedent set by revivals is not encouraging. Bebo was relaunched in 2021 by its original founder, Michael Birch, and never regained meaningful scale. Friendster pivoted into gaming in 2011 and faded. Clubhouse peaked at around 10 million weekly users during the pandemic and then contracted sharply. Nostalgia drives sign-ups; it does not drive daily habits.

There is a genuine technical choice that could change the