Remember Orkut? A good four years have passed since the first known social networking site went completely kaput, Facebook having taken over the space long before that. Maybe it’s time now to say ‘Hello’ to Orkut again.
At a time when #deleteFacebook campaign is gaining ground in the wake of a massive data breach scandal, though founder Mark Zuckerberg has claimed no significant increase in Facebook users deactivating, Orkut Buyukkokten, the former Google employee who founded Orkut.com more than a decade ago, has launched a new social network, “Hello”, in India.
Targetting the new mobile generation, of course, “Hello” had been in beta test mode in India for the past few months.
Hello claims to have thousands of communities, and the company claims it wants to bring people together “around their interests to create positive, meaningful, authentic connections and sustained social engagement”.
The free app is available on Apple App Store and Google Play Store.
Hello is already available in the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, England, France and Brazil. It currently supports iOS 8 and beyond, and Lollipop and Marshmallow on Android. The app will soon support Android versions KitKat and Jelly Bean.
“We designed ‘Hello’ to help you make connections in the real world. It’s a social network built on loves not likes, and I’m delighted to say ‘Hello’ to India once again,” says Buyukkokten, who is now the CEO of San Francisco-based Hello Network Inc.
After the beta launch in India, the company claimed, test users spent over 320 minutes each month on the app, reflecting the popularity of sport, entertainment, devotion and technology in India.
“Today’s online networks force people to treat each other totally differently from how they would behave face-to-face. Technology should help us become more understanding, more optimistic, kinder and better people,” says the Orkut founder.
Orkut, named after its creator, was owned and operated by Google, which shut down the trendsetter social networking website on September 30, 2014.
Hello Network, Inc. was founded by Orkut Buyukkokten and a small group of former Google engineers. The company has its headquarters in San Francisco and a development office in Mountain View, California. Hello was launched in June in English and in July in Portuguese and French.
“Hello was built with a human focused design, based on universal human needs. Its personas were created on human passions, the main things we care about,” says the company.