hello, orkut

While we currently spend most of our daily time on Facebook, Twitter, or WhatsApp, there was once a time when the populace was talking about only one social network — Orkut. It was once the leading social media platform across the globe but the emphatic rise of Facebook sent Orkut on a downward spiral and to eventually vanish later in 2014.

Orkut is now officially dead and the company’s founder, Orkut Büyükkökten, has spent the previous two years with a small team of fifteen to develop another social network called Hello. This platform was launched in beta in India earlier last month and has been able to attract support from more than 10,000 users, who’ve already jumped in on the hype.

Hello Network is very different from the founder’s largely popular first social networking platform. While the latter was focused on updates and chats with friends and family, the former aims to help you meet new people and interact with them about the interests you’ve selected during the setup process. You can choose from a host of personas such as traveler, photographer, beer lover, runner, artist, cat owner, and coffee lover.

Once you’ve selected your persona, you can post your creations, ideas, and other experiences that you’d like to share with the Hello audience. There is a feed, much like Facebook, that shows you both the trending and popular posts based on several aspects of your persona. This will enable others, with similar interests, to discover you and engage in a conversation if they wish to.

Speaking about the tepid success of the platform in India, Büyükkökten in a statement to ET said:

Our topology goes beyond the broadcast model and takes into account not just your friends and people you follow, but also your interests, location, and personality. 

We are looking to add chai lovers besides the existing ones we have, which are a Bollywood fan, spiritualist persona, and cricket fan, and will also launch in Hindi during the coming months.

For those unaware, Orkut was operational under Google, who’ve quietly launched the said independent project of a developer from within the company. It was immensely popular in Brazil, as well as India, but was shut down way back in September 2014. By then, the Facebook fever has caught heat and everyone across the globe was using it. Büyükkökten, however, thought there was still some scope left in the social ecosystem and launched Hello back in August 2016.

Hello is app only and has two different iterations for iOS and Android, which don’t lay focus on people but interactions and activity on the platform. The company is currently headquartered in San Francisco and has launched beta versions of the platform in Brazil (its first market), England, Canada, France, Spain, Australia and Ireland among other locations. The venture is presently testing the waters and plans to strengthen its existing features, while also thinking to add new ones — upload collages, audio/video calling.

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