orkut is a social networking service which is run by Google and named after its creator, an employee of Google - Orkut Büyükkökten. The service states that it was designed to help users meet new friends and maintain existing relationships. Orkut is similar to other social networking sites. Since October 2006, Orkut has permitted users to create accounts without an invitation. Orkut is the most visited website in Brazil and second most visited site in India. The initial target market for Orkut was the United States, but the majority of its users are in Brazil and India. In fact, as of May 2008, 53.86% of Orkut's users are from Brazil, followed by India with 16.97% and 23.4% of the traffic comes from Brazil, followed by India with 18.0%. Unlike Facebook and Friendster, it is not a popular website in the United States of America and Canada.

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

History

Orkut was launched in January 2004 by search company Google, as the brainchild of Orkut Büyükkökten, a Turkish software engineer, who developed it as an independent project while working at Google. In late June 2004, Affinity Engines filed suit against Google, claiming that Orkut Büyükkökten and Google based Orkut on inCircle code.

Originally, its membership was by invitation.. By April 2008, Orkut's user base numbered at around 120 million, next only to MySpace.

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.

Scrapbook

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

Communities

Another feature of Orkut are "Communities". Anyone with an Orkut account can create a community on anything. One can post topics, inform users about an event, ask them questions or just play games. There are more than one million communities on Orkut with topics ranging from pizza to pasta. The first five communities on Orkut were started within 24 hrs of the site's launch. There were a total of 47,092,584 communities on Orkut as per March 24, 2008 4:25PM IST (+5:30 GMT). With the recent addition of the search topic feature in the communities, some Orkut communities become the in fact source for the website links to movies, e-books etc. A community's members may also create polls, and invite other members.