Wading through time and space I stumbled upon a community for orkut’s history. Well with India featuring third in the worldwide user list it was interesting to note the content.
Orkut was launched way back in January 22, 2004 without any fanfare usually associated with Google (remember Chrome). The site is named after its creator Orkut Büyükkökten, a humble Google software engineer. Orkut Büyükkökten hails from Turkey and was 27 years old when he developed it as an independent project. Initially the network was intended as an elite community with membership accessible only through invitation.
Well, Orkut (the guy) has a profile on orkut network with more than a million scraps which I am sure he never cares to go through. The handsome young man has very normal interests and no wonder this software wizard fails to understand women! His communities listing were interesting apart from all those related to orkut—I mean the network. This Stanford geek loved his friends even before he created the most popular social network second only to Myspace.
As an employee of Affinity Engines, Orkut had developed a similar system, InCircle, intended for use by university alumni groups. Within six months of its launch by Google, Affinity Engines filed suit against Google, claiming that Büyükkökten and Google based orkut on inCircle code. The allegation was based on the presence of 9 identical bugs in orkut that also existed in InCircle. The lawsuit has long been settled so we don’t need to get numbed.
Thankfully, by 2006 orkut was open to all. Since then it’s the most visible site in Brazil, followed by US and India. In August 2008, Google decided to manage and operate it from Brazil shifting its base from California.
It holds its obligatory state censorship in Iran for being a threat to national security and ethical issues (yawn…) and ran into trouble with Brazilian government for spreading child pornography and hate speech. India too had its share of trouble with orkut with various hate campaign hurting national sentiments. The Indian Cyber Police have since then made agreement with orkut to prosecute anybody found misusing the networking site. Seems they are not sleeping….
Presently, there are more than hundred social networking sites doing the rounds of the internet, with facebook, orkut, flickr, myspace, netlog etc being just few of them…
It is all the more amazing to find that Orkut’s history community has only 23 registered members and Orkut Büyükkökten has only 506 memebers in his friend list. Seems people are too busy networking…
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