Orkut

Orkut is a free-access social networking service owned and operated by Google. The service is designed to help users meet new friends and maintain existing relationships. The website is named after its creator, Google employee Orkut Büyükkökten.

Although Orkut is less popular in the United States than competitors Facebook and MySpace, it is one of the most visited websites in India and Brazil. In fact, as of May 2009, 49.83% of Orkut's users are from Brazil, followed by India with 17.51%.

Originally hosted in California, in August 2008 Google announced that Orkut will be fully managed and operated in Brazil, by Google Brazil, in the city of Belo Horizonte. This was decided due to the large Brazilian user base and growth of legal issues.

Features

A user first creates a "Profile", in which the user provides "Social", "Professional" and "Personal" details. Users can upload photos into their Orkut profile with a caption. Users can also add videos to their profile from either YouTube or Google Video with the additional option of creating either restricted or unrestricted polls for polling a community of users. There is an option to integrate GTalk (An instant messenger from Google) with Orkut enabling chatting and file sharing. currently gtalk has been integrated in orkut. Users can directly chat from orkut page.

Scrap Book

"Scrapping" is popular among the Orkut community as a form of offline and online communication. In December 2007, the ability to pop up alerts when a scrap is received was added.

History

Orkut was launched on January 22, 2004 by Google as independent project of Orkut Büyükkökten, a Turkish software engineer. The community membership was originally by invitation only. At first year, United States had the largest user base. By word of mouth various Brazilians began adopting and inviting more friends, in a viral driven by the blogosphere. Soon after, Brazil surpassed U.S. in number of users and orkut started becoming heavily popular in Brazil. Americans then started leaving the service and switching to other similar sites such as MySpace and Friendster. This phenomenon was covered by the English blogosphere with some criticism towards Brazilians because they communicate among themselves using their native language Portuguese and not English.

From that time, orkut growth was driven by Brazilian users, first being opened to everyone by register and becoming the most popular website in Brazil. The creator Orkut Büyükkökten visited Brazil in 2007, in attempt to understand the success in that country. In 2007 orkut began attracting large amount of Indians who were not intimidated by the number of Brazilians on the site. As for now, orkut also has a simplified site for mobile users. "m.orkut.com". In 2008, a new feature was introduced for users having slow internet connections to access orkut using the "View orkut in lighter version" setting. Soon Orkut emerged as the No. 1 social networking website in the industry. It was claimed that Google makes in turn profit from Orkut, with AdSense Revenue generation system.

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