All about orkut-

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 Facebook, Friendster and MySpace, Orkut goes a step further by permitting the creation of easy-to-set-up simple forums (called "communities") of users. Since October 2006, Orkut has permitted users to create accounts without an invitation. In April 2007, Orkut introduced polls in communities.

The initial target market for Orkut was the United States, but the majority of its users are in Brazil.[1] In fact, as of November 2007, 62.9% of the traffic come from Brazil, followed by 19.2% from India.[2]



History

Orkut was launched in January 2004 by the search company Google, the brainchild of Orkut Büykökten, 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 only. At the end of July 2004, Orkut's membership surpassed 1 million accounts, and by the following September, it had surpassed 2 million accounts. In October 2006, Orkut stated to have 37 million accounts and 1.3 million daily visitors.[3] As of August 2007, the service claimed 67 million users.



Features

A user first creates a "Profile", in which the user provides "Social", "Professional" and "Personal" details and determining who is allowed to view certain details. Users can also associate images with their profiles.
"Scrapping" is popular among the Orkut community as a form of offline communication. Users can "scrap" on another member's scrapbook, even if that member is offline. The scrap recipient will be able to see it when viewing their scrapbook. Unlike instant messaging or e-mail, anyone with an Orkut account can read other users' scrapbook entries. Scraps can also use HTML to embed files, including photos, videos and audio, into other users' scrapbooks.

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 or from film star to superstar. The first five communities on Orkut were started within 24 hrs of the site's launch. Users can upload photos into their Orkut profile with a caption. Users can also add videos to their profile from either YouTube or Google Videos with the additional option of creating either restricted or un-restricted polls for polling a community of users.
In addition to this, there is a personal messaging feature which is rarely used by members.
It is mainly used by community owners to ask others to join their community. One issue of this feature is that it lacks confidentiality, owing to the reason that if you know the exact link of the message then you can read such messages.

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 their list and can also evaluate whether their 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 their network, Orkut allows anyone to visit anyone's profile, unless a potential visitor is on your "Ignore List". Importantly, each member can also customize their 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 informed only when both parties have added each other to their "Crush List".

When a user logs in, they see the people in their friends list in the order of their logging in to the site, the first person being the latest one to do so. Orkut's competitors are other social networking sites including MySpace and Facebook. Ning is a more direct competitor, as they allow creation of Social Networks which are similar to Orkut's communities.