Orkut

orkut is a virtual community designed to help users meet new friends and maintain existing relationships. Similar to Friendster, orkut goes a step further by permitting "communities" of users. It is also invitation-only: Users must be invited to join the community by someone already there.

orkut was quietly launched on January 22, 2004 by Google, the search engine company. The service was created by Google employee Orkut Büyükkökten, who had developed a similar system, "InCircle ," for his previous employer, Affinity Engines . InCircle was intended for use by university alumni groups.

Users of orkut can maintain profiles, keep in touch with friends online and participate in communities, as this screenshot shows.

Some discomfort with this exists among users and potential users of orkut, especially since Google's other noteworthy product of 2004, the Web-based email client Gmail, allows the company to automatically scan the text of users' private emails in order to target ads toward them.

In late June 2004, Affinity Engines filed suit against Google, claiming that Büyükkökten and Google based orkut on the inCircle code. The allegation is based on the presence of bugs in orkut that also exist in inCircle.

Originally, the orkut community was felt to be elite, because its membership is by invitation only. However, at the end of July 2004 orkut surpassed the 1,000,000 member mark, and at the end of September it surpassed the 2,000,000 mark. As of February 2005, 63% of orkut's members were from Brazil, followed by 11% from the United States and 7.6% from Iran. Brazilians were below 50% from August 9 to August 20, 2004. It is believed that this happened because a lot of them changed their nationality to something else due to a rumor that users with their countries set to Brazil got slower speeds and a greater chance of getting an error page.

Invitations to orkut are obtainable, with a few minutes' (or days) worth of diligence, via the web.

Controversy

Hate groups

There has recently been controversy revolving around the use of Orkut by various hate groups. Virulent racists allegedly have a solid following there. Because of the invitation-only structure, closed groups of like-minded people are susceptible to breeding.

Brazilian Invasion

Interestingly, many users complain that Brazilians "have invaded" orkut. It is true that the service is remarkably popular among Brazilians. A similar situation happened a while before with Fotologs. This is a curious phenomenon which deserves some study.

Copyright disclaimer

orkut's terms of service state:

By submitting, posting or displaying any Materials on or through the orkut.com service, you automatically grant to us a worldwide, non-exclusive, sublicenseable, transferable, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable right to copy, distribute, create derivative works of, publicly perform and display such Materials.

This technically means that any contribution to the orkut community (be it forum posts or photos) is the property of the site owner. When spotted, it arose quite some flames among orkut users who dedicated themselves to add their values to the community, as this felt like a stab in the back for them, causing many of them to terminate their accounts as a protest.

Jail

One of orkut's most infamous features is the "jail". Users who misbehave or are reported to misbehave are "jailed", which means their account is getting suspended and their site access gets reasonably limited, also their current profile picture gets temporarily exchanged to a silhouette of a man behind prison bars. This alone serves a positive purpose - but the way people are selected to be jailed arose heated discussions and complains among orkut users: Every user's profile has a "Report as Bogus" button, which, if pressed, automatically flags the user to be jailed. This technically means that anyone can be jailed by just pressing a single button.

Another way of getting there is "acting like a robot": To avoid spambots and other automated users, people who do actions like adding friends or joining communities in a very quick and repetitive order also get jailed. This, however, usually happens when a new user is invited to join the site and finds a lot of people he/she already knows and tries to add them as friends immediately.

Users who get jailed neither get a notification about the event, nor get to know the reason why they were put there. Jailing usually does not last long (up to 24 hours in most cases), but is generally very disturbing, as there is no direct contact to the orkut team (their contact form only answers with template emails) and the most one can do while jailed is wait and occasionally ramble in a designated forum.

Ironically, site users once reported to see Orkut Büyükkökten, the creator of the site, being jailed once as well.

Speed and reliability

Due to the massive load on the server, orkut has a bad habit of breaking down, running slow or returning one of its infamous "Bad, bad server. No donut for you." error messages. These slowdowns mostly can be noticed during the day hours in america (south and north), which probably explains the reason as well, as more than 75% of the orkut users are from the American continent, more than 50% from Brazil only.

See also

• List of Google services and tools

External links

• orkut website
• Orkut Büyükkökten's Personal Home Page
• Google revives discredited Microsoft privacy policy for Friendster clone - Article at The Register

References

• Meneses, J. (2004). The Orkut.com case: a reflection on the exploration of new ways to online sociability in the tradition of the study of virtual communities

• Butalia, S. (2004). ‘The potential for marketers to exploit the emerging trend of online social networking groups’