Orkut was launched in January 2004 by Google Inc., Orkut named for the Google engineer who developed it, Orkut Buyukkokten. It was created as an independent project to help people around the world connect.
A Google representative said during its launch that “the site is the independent project of one of its engineers, Orkut Buyukkokten, who works on user interface design for Google. Buyukkokten, a computer science doctoral candidate at Stanford University before joining Google, created Orkut.com in the past several months by working on it about one day a week–an amount that Google asks all of its engineers to devote to personal projects. Buyukkokten, with the help of a few other engineers, developed Orkut out of his passion for social networking services.”
Its great to see Orkut come a long way, inspite of lot of controversies, criticize, bans etc. And its interesting to see people using proxies in office and schools to access Orkut!
With all these, Orkut is 5 now. Yes, its been 5 years after Orkut was officially launched by Google.
Orkut has come up with many new and useful features all these years, and some of them have been covered on our blog frequently.
To have a flashback and to celebrate Orkuts birthday, we present their previous birthday logos. Sorry we missed 1st and 2nd birthday logos.
We really like the concept of Google doodles and all the logos developed on different occasions. Its simple, effective, lovely, conveying some message, greeting etc.
Anyway, we would never want to see Orkut in the list of “Stopped Services by Google”!
We wish Orkut a great success in the coming years, and Hugh market share even outside Brazil, India, Africa. “Happy Birthday Orkut”.
Happy birthday Orkut. Its good see that Orkut is leading the Indian Social networking market even after facing stiff competition from lot of other similar networks.
Thanks for sharing this info.
I had earlier read in some forwarded mail that Orkut had been started in Brazil by a young engineer who wanted to trace out his long lost girlfriend.
Which one is true?
@Suneel, Those are just spamms!
Actually Orkut is a gay man. And I have no comments about his personal sexual preferences.
Orkut Buyukkokten is now married to his boyfriend Derek Holbrook.
Most of their scrap entries are in Portuguese, so not sure about his native.
And to everyone’s info, California Supreme Court has made gay marriages legal recently.
And further, I don’t have any comments regarding this. As this was not our topic! I have already talked a lot out-of-topic now 🙂
Thanks for the extra bits of info,Satish !!.I didn’t there was such a story behind it…
Anyways,I believe Orkut continues to be strongly bonded with Indian lives.It would still dominate the social networking market in the sub-continent for the years to come.
Another thing worth mentioning-Orkut won the MTV’s Youth Icon 2007 award.
@Rohit, I also feel that Orkut will maintain its position long enough. But the fact is, FaceBook and Twitter are already ahead of Orkut and are growing in an exponential manner. And the features in those Social Networking sites are worth its popularity. So can’t say about the future of Orkut!