what is ORKUT?

[Live & Let Live!]

I've heared this word from a friend but i didn't know what does it means?

[PAUL F]

Orkut is an online community that connects people through a network of trusted friends.

[Ashutosh]

Orkut is an online community for making friends, much like MySpace and Friendster.

[madhav_2308]

Orkut is an Internet social network service run by Google and named after its creator, Google employee Orkut Büyükkökten. It claims to be designed to help users meet new friends and maintain existing relationships. Similar to Friendster and MySpace, Orkut goes a step further by permitting the creation of easy-to-setup simple forums (called "communities") of users. Until recently, Orkut was invitation only, but it now permits users to create accounts without an invitation.

Orkut was quietly launched on January 19, 2004 by the search company Google. Orkut Büyükkökten, a Turkish software engineer, developed Orkut as an independent project while working at Google. 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, had servers scan emails for keywords in order to deliver advertisements targeted at them, which sparked an idea that Google was "reading your e-mail".

While previously working for Affinity Engines, he had developed a similar system, InCircle, intended for use by university alumni groups. 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 9 identical bugs in Orkut that also exist in InCircle.

Originally, the Orkut community was felt to be elite, because its membership was by invitation only. 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 December 6, 2006, the number of members was over 35.2 million.

Orkut's use as a social tool is complex, because various people frequently try to add strangers to their own pool of friends, often just to increase the number indicating their number of friends next to their name in their profile. Many "add-me" communities exist, solely for this purpose. A large number of bogus, cloned, fake, invisible and "orphaned" profiles also exist.

Users have options to rate their friends in the order of "Best Friends","Good Friends","Friends","Acquaintances" and "Haven't met". Further, each member can become fans of any of the friends in his/her list and can also evaluate whether his/her friend is "Trustworthy", "Cool", "Sexy" on a scale of 1 to 3 (marked by icons) and is aggregated in terms of a percentage. Unlike Facebook where a member can view profile details of people only on his/her network, Orkut allows anyone to visit anyone's profile, unless a potential visitor is on your "Ignore List". Importantly, each member can also customize his/her profile preferences and can restrict information that appear on their profile from their friends and/or others (not on the friends list). The highlight feature is where any member can add any other member on Orkut to his/her "Crush List" and both of them will be initimated about it only when both parties have added each other to their "Crush List".

If person A deletes person B from his friends' list, person A will be deleted from person B's friends' list also.