Orkut was quietly launched on January 24, 2004 by Google, the search engine company. Orkut Büyükkökten, a Turkish software engineer, developed it as an independent project while working at Google (required by its policy). 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 email”. 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 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. Some prominent controversies faced by Orkut in these 4 years.

  1. Recently an Indian girl had filed a complaint against a boy who put up her fake profile along with abuses and profanities. But now its gone a step above a notice was issued by the Aurangabad bench of the Bombay High Court to Google’s social networking site Orkut, for spreading “hatred against India.” The Court responded to a public interest litigation (PIL) that took exception to a “We hate India’ community in Orkut. The community, set up by a *Russian, Miraslov Stankovic, states that it is against all those people who are against Pakistan. The community is about having a group of people who have enmity against India because of its oppressive and hostile approach, it says in the description of the community. The number of members of the community as on Thursday was 91, down from 100 the previous day.
  2. A case has been filed against ‘Orkut’ website at Pune for deplorable denigration of Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj and Lord Rama. An assurance was given by the police to investigate the matter. The case has been filed under article 67 of Information Technology Act and article 505 of Indian Penal Code. Actually, whatever may be the problems, its certain now that social networking groups have a long way to go. Lets wish Orkut a happy birthday and hope that it maintains a clean environment. A very popular story about Orkut Büyükkökten is circulated on Orkut social networking site through mails and scraps. Its something like the follows A guy lost his girlfriend in a train accident,but the gal’s name nowhere appeared in the dead list. This guy grew up n became IT technical architect in his late 20?s, achievement in itself!!He hired developers from the whole globe and plan to make a software where he could search for his gf through the web.Things went as planned n 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. The guy’s name is ORKUT BUYUKKOTEN.Yes its named after him only.Today he is paid a hefty sum by Google for the things we do like scrapping.He is expected to b the richest person by 2009.ORKUT BUYUKKOTEN today has 13 assistants to monitor his scrapbook & 8 to monitor his friends-list. He gets around 20,000 friend-requests a day & about 85,000 scraps!!! Some more cool facts about him He gets $12 from Google when every person registers to this website.
  • He also gets $10 when you add somebody as a friend.
  • He gets $8 when your friend’s friend adds you as a friend & gets $6 if anybody adds you as friend in the resulting chain.
  • He gets $5 when you scrap somebody & $4 when somebody scraps you.
  • He also gets $200 for each photograph you upload on Orkut.
  • He gets $2.5 when you add your friend in the crush-list or in the hot-list.
  • He gets $2 when you become somebody’s fan.
  • He gets $1.5 when somebody else becomes your fan.
  • He even gets $1 every time you logout of Orkut.
  • He gets $0.5 every time you just change your profile-photograph.
  • He also gets $0.5 every time you read your friend’s scrap-book & $0.5 every time you view your friend’s friend-list. “Moral of the story”? LOSE U R GIRLFRIEND AND MAKE BILLIONS !!!! I don’t know if its real or unreal, its very much of a bollywood type thing. Who knows?? :P Don’t believe me?? Well..you can take a look at Orkut Büyükkökten (Orkuts) official profile on Orkut.. :D
Its ORKUT 4th Birthday 2008 - 64