Orkut

The title of this article is incorrect because of technical limitations. The correct title is 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 of Turkey, who had developed a similar system, "InCircle," for his previous employer, Affinity Engines. InCircle was intended for use by university alumni groups.

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 thin Circle 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

Brazilian Invasion

Brazilians users have "invaded" orkut. Creating joke communities and speaking portuguese in english-native others, Brazilians changed orkut to an authentic "Brazil party service" distimulating people from other cultures and countries from using it. Many brazilians have numerous profiles and they vary from jokes and porn to simply for vanity when the friends' list is full. Other common act by them is to select different countries in the profile, confusing other users outside Brazil who are looking for native people and distorting demographic statistics. The brazilian case was in the media in 2004 [1] [2] and ever since the invasion happened, the number of non-Brazilians is decreasing day by day. Because of this, north americans, australians and europeans actually migrate to Friendster, a more effective clone with strong Moderation service. In 2005, the orkut team introduced Portuguese as a second language to the interface, likely to cater to the undisputed number of members from the country.

Common Brazilians Acts

The common acts of the brazilians in orkut are:

• Trolling.
• Cloning profiles – one person might have thousands of them, even though the disclaimer states that only one is allowed.
• Creating joke and defamation profiles and communities.
• Choosing other countries in the profile, confusing foreigners in Friends Search. All countries have Brazilian members.
• Hostilizing foreigners who complain about the invasion.
• Taking over english communities, changing them into a portuguese community.
• Racism: a police case involving orkut in 2004 in Brazil.
• Vandalizing and flooding the scrap books.

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.

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." 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.

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’