Backbytes: Orkut? Or what?

Orkut, Google's other barely used social network, is about to be shut down. Whaddya mean you've never heard of it?

Lots of people used to have a MySpace account. A fair number will also have half-dead Friends Reunited accounts. But did anyone ever have an Orkut account?

Well, if you did, now's the time to migrate it to Google+ as the internet giant is about to close it down, which is sad news to a handful of people in India and Brazil where it was briefly popular.

It was founded in 2004 by a Google employee, Orkut Büyükkökten, after whom it was named - it's just as well he wasn't called Gerald or Percival.

He naively opted to use his "20 per cent time" at Google to try and make his billionaire employers even richer, rather than establishing it as a start-up. Its first product manager was none other than Marissa Mayer, now the exceedingly well-remunerated CEO of Yahoo.

Apparently, Orkut had as many as 100 million users at its height, although the precise figures seem somewhat shrouded in mystery. Either way, it is comforting to know that not all of Google's efforts to harvest as much data as it can about our everyone in the world is successful.