ORKUT History

I almost forgot that I was writing blogs few months ago. Few of my friends asked me "no new entry on your blog ???" and that clicked me - "Oh man.. I almost stopped contributing on blogspot". So now Nisarg has woken up....

After having a heavy lunch today, I just opened Orkut and I saw Orkut's 6th Birthday logo on its home page. So instead of logging into Orkut, I started doing research on okrut - How orkut came into market and how a baby orkut grew up.

1. Orkut was launched on January 22, 2004 by Google as independent project of Orkut Büyükkökten (Don’t know how to pronounce his LastName).
2. 
   This guy is a Turkish software engineer, obtained Ph.D. (Computer Science) from Standford University and started working in Google in 2002. He developed Orkut as a 20% independent project while working at Google.
3. 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 has launced orkut which is based on inCircle code. The allegation is based on the presence of 9 identical bugs in orkut that was also existing in InCircle
4. At first year, United States had the largest user base. By word of mouth various Brazilians began adopting and inviting more friends. Soon after, Brazil surpassed U.S. in number of users and Orkut started becoming heavily popular in Brazil. As on January 1^st 2010, below is the statistics.
5. 
6. Orkut was very popular in Iran, but the website is blocked by the government. As they say, this is due to national security issues, as orkut users have the ability to spread messages rapidly, but the government says it's due to Islamic ethical issues about dating and match making. To get around this block, sites such as "orkutproxy.xom" (now defunct) were made for Iranian users. Followed by Iran, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain have also taken an action to ban Orkut.
7. Similar kind of actions have been taken in India as well. On October 10, 2006, the Bombay High Court's Aurangabad bench served a notice on Google for allowing a hate campaign against India. This referred to a community on Orkut called 'We Hate India', which initially carried a picture of an Indian flag being burned and some anti-India content. The High Court order was issued in response to a public-interest petition filed by an Aurangabad advocate. Google had six weeks to respond. Even before the petition was filed, many Orkut users had noticed this community and were mailing or otherwise messaging their contacts on Orkut to report the community as bogus to Google, which could result in its removal. The community has now been
8. Prior to the 60th Independence Day of India, Orkut's main page was revamped. The section which usually displayed a collage of photos of various people, showed a stylized Orkut logo. The word Orkut was written in the Devanagiri script and was colored in the Indian national colours. Clicking on the logo redirects to a post by the Orkut India Product Manager, Manu Rekhi
9. According to some media reports, the police were deliberating on the issue of charging the accused under the (Indian) Information Technology Act, 2000 perhaps because Orkut was believed to be a mode of communication for these kind of drug abuses. The Cyber police in India have entered into an agreement with Orkut to have a facility to catch and prosecute those misusing Orkut since complaints are rising
10. By March of 2008 the number of Orkut communities had reached more than 47 million (I don’t know how trustworthy this news is)

While doing all these research, I came to know a very funny story published on some “aaltu-faaltu” site. Worth reading it J

A guy lost his girlfriend in a train accident, but the girl's name nowhere appeared in the dead list. This guy grew up and became IT technical architect in his late 20's, achievement in itself!!

He hired developers from the whole globe and planned to make a software where he could search for his girlfriend through the web. Things went as planned and he found her, after losing millions of dollars and 3 long years!!

It was time to shut down the search operation, when the CEO of Google had a word with this guy n took over this application. This Software made a whopping 1 billion dollars profit in its first year, which we today know as ORKUT JJJ