Well, for dummies like me Orkut is a social networking website launched by Google in January, named after Orkut Buyukkokten, a Google engineer who created it. It aims at connectings users to their friends and their friends' friends for talking, dating and business networking. Only people invited by an orkut member can join, create profile, join communities, and check for friends and other people.
I wondered who this Orkut Buyukkokten is.
Browsed www, found his snap. Looks cool isn't it??? Looks pretty young isn't it? Thought will check out more details.Well, Orkut Buyukkokten was born on 6-Feb-1976, in Konya, Turkey.
Did his high school from Konya Meram Anadolu Lisesi (1986-93), BS Information Engineering from Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey (1993-97). Currently pursuing a PhD in Computer Science at Stanford University in the Database Group.
Thought, if he has created Orkut, he should be there. Found his profile there. Sent a friend request, but didn't get a reply. But Amazing number of scrape entries!! 470449 scraps!!!!
Found some funny information on net about Orkut's earnings, but I am sure if this is not right:
Orkut Buyukkokten(the creator of Orkut) gets $12 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 a 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.
Many Global Financial Consultants think this person might become the richest-person in the world by the end of 2009.
Finally, this is the best fact. This person has 13 assistants to monitor his scrapbook & 8 assistants to monitor his friends-list. He gets around 20,000 friend-requests a day & about 85,000 scraps a day.
As I continued to search about Orkut Buyukkokten, found that there were some court cases against him.
A small social-networking software company has filed suit against Google, claiming that much of the source code behind orkut.com, the search engine's popular social service, was stolen by a former engineer. In its lawsuit, Affinity Engines, based in Palo Alto, California, said engineer Orkut Buyukkokten illegally took the code that he had written for the company -- which he co-founded -- with him when he joined Google.
Affinity Engines also claimed that Buyukkokten promised Affinity Engines that he wouldn't develop a competing social-network service for Google. Affinity Engines, which filed the claim on May 25 in Santa Clara Superior Court, is seeking unspecified damages and royalties.
Links:
His Site: http://www.stanford.edu/~orkut/
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/11/29/BUGU9A0BH441.DTL&type=business
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,64046,00.html
http://www.anthonyhempell.com/papers/orkut/
