Orkut

The title of this article is incorrect because of technical limitations. The correct title is orkut.

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orkut is an Internet social network service run by Google. It claims to be 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 of Turkey, 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 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 malicious hoax, telling 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.

Contents

1 Controversy

1.1 Brazilian invasion
1.2 Hate groups
1.3 Copyright disclaimer
1.4 Iranian censorship
1.5 Jail
1.6 Speed and reliability

2 See also

3 External links

4 References

Controversy

Brazilian invasion

Main article: Brazilian Internet Phenomenon

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The Brazilian Invasion: The numbers show the recent phenomenon

The orkut community has been watching a large surge of Brazilian users registering on its service. This is a known and curious fact, and it is being the target of disappointment of many users from other countries, including the United States. The amount of Brazilian orkut users has reached approximately 71% of the total of users, followed by United States, with about 6.85%. Due to the amount of Brazilian users and communities in the Portuguese language, users from other parts of the world have become upset with the service, which had English as its default language. Some went as far as to start online communities and discussion groups dedicated to complain about this phenomenon. Hoaxes have also been spread, with the intention of tricking Brazilian users to change their nationality in orkut. Also for that reason, many Brazilian users changes their nationality in orkut, confusing other members when they use the Friends Search tool. As a reaction to this surge of Brazilian users, orkut recently introduced Portuguese as a second language to its interface, due to countless requests.

The reasons for this phenomenon are still unknown, yet orkut is not the only segment where this is being noticed. Services such as weblogs and photoblogs are now very popular with Brazilian users as well. For example, it's not hard to see Internet searches within the Brazilian territory returning several results pointing to weblog entries. That is seldom seen in other parts of the world. The popularity of such services in Brazil intrigues many people, making this phenomenon worth of study.

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. Several hate communities focused on Racism, Nazism and White Supremacy have been deleted due to guideline violation.

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.

Iranian censorship

Orkut is popular in Iran, but the website is blocked by their fundamentalist government. To get around this block, sites such as "orkutproxy.com" (now defunct) were made for Iranian users. Other websites such as Yahoo! Groups and Google Groups have communities dedicated to receiving updates on the newest location of Iran's Orkut proxy.

Jail

One of orkut's most infamous features is the "jail." Users who misbehave or are reported to misbehave are "jailed." Their account is suspended, their site access is reasonably limited, and their current profile picture is temporarily replaced with a silhouette of a man behind prison bars. Although this serves a useful purpose, the way users are selected to be jailed has caused heated discussions and complaints among orkut users: Every user's profile has a "Report as Bogus" button, which, if pressed, automatically flags the user to be jailed. Conceivably, this means that anyone can be jailed at any time by pressing a single button.

Another way to be jailed is to "act like a robot." To safeguard against bots and other automation, users who add friends or join communities in a very quick or repetitive manner, or perform similar actions, are jailed. Often, however, this happens when a new user is invited to join the site and finds many people he/she already knows and tries to add them as friends immediately.

Users who are jailed are not informed of the reason, nor are they notified that they have been jailed. Jailing usually does not last long (up to 24 hours in most cases), but is often disturbing to users, as there is no direct contact to the orkut team (their contact form only answers with template emails) and jailing limits one to waiting or posting in a designated forum.

Ironically, site users once reported that Orkut Büyükkökten, the creator of the site, was jailed.

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.