Google announced on Monday that it is shutting down is original social networking service Orkut after ten years of existence.

Orkut never quite caught on in our neck of the woods, but was pretty popular in Brazil at one point, with Facebook finally overtaking it in that country two years ago. Apparently there’s not even enough of an active user base left to justify keeping it around (although if Google Reader is any indication, an active user base isn’t even enough sometimes).

The company says its other products like Blogger, YouTube, and Google+ have taken off, and outpaced Orkut’s growth, so it’s just going to stick with them (another indication that Google+ isn’t really going away anytime soon).

Orkut, like many other Google products, was originally conceived as a “20 percent” project. According to Google, it “helped shape life online before people really knew what ‘social networking’ was.”

Google will refocus its Orkut resources on its remaining social properties. Orkut will be shut down on September 30th. Users can export their data, posts, and photos using Google Takeout until September 2016. As of now, it’s no longer possible to create a new Orkut account.

Google will leave up an archive of all public communities starting on September 30th, but users can opt out of having their posts included if they want to.

“It’s been a great 10 years, and we apologize to those still actively using the service,” says engineering director Paulo Golgher. “We hope people will find other online communities to spark more conversations and build even more connections for the next decade and beyond.”

More info about the site’s demise can be found here.

Image via Google