Orkut’s Hello expects to hit Indian users soon

In 2004, when Google launched the social networking site, Orkut gave us the first glimpse of the dominating form of internet. Though it went off successfully, Orkut was slowly strangulated to death in 2014 by Facebook’s raging popularity.

However, Orkut’s founder, Orkut Büyükkökten, was not done, and in August 2016, he launched ‘Hello, a social network built around interests and passions. And now, Hello is available in India.

Currently in beta, Hello is app-only and doesn’t have desktop or mobile web versions but offers two different iterations of iOS and Android.

The primary focus of Hello is what users love doing, instead of on the people they follow, Büyükkökten wrote in a blog post. While announcing Hello, Orkut had said, “The world is a better place when we get to know each other when we are a little less strange to each other… Fear and hatred have no place when you make such a simple and friendly gesture to someone else.”

The company is headquartered in San Francisco with a development office in Mountain View, California, and has a team of 20 members. The social network is right now available in the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand, France, Italy, Canada and Brazil.

In the crowded market of social networking platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat dominating Indian users, it remains to be seen if Hello can pull off something significant against these social media giants or it will just fade away like many apps.