orkut
orkut is a social network invented buy orkut beyekuttan a officer of google  | |
 The new Orkut interface | |
| URL | http://www.orkut.com/ |
|---|---|
| Slogan | Who do you know? |
| Commercial? | Yes |
| Type of site | Social Network Service |
| Registration | required |
| Available language(s) | Portuguese English Spanish French Kannada and other 39 languages |
| Owner | |
| Created by | Orkut Büyükkökten |
| Launched | 22 January 2004 |
| Alexa rank | |
| Current status | Active |
History
Orkut was launched on January 22, 2004 by Google as independent project of Orkut Büyükkökten, a Turkish software engineer. The community membership was originally by invitation only. At first year, United States had the largest user base. By word of mouth various Brazilians began adopting and inviting more friends, in a viral driven by the blogosphere. Soon after, Brazil surpassed U.S. in number of users and orkut started becoming heavily popular in Brazil. Americans then started leaving the service and switching to other similar sites such as MySpace and Friendster. This phenomenon was covered by the English blogosphere with some criticism towards Brazilians [8][9][10] because they communicate among themselves using their native language Portuguese and not English.
From that time, orkut growth was driven by Brazilian users, first being opened to everyone by register and becoming the most popular website in Brazil.[citation needed] The creator Orkut Büyükkökten visited Brazil in 2007,[11] in attempt to understand the success in that country. In 2007 orkut began attracting large amount of Indians who were not intimidated by the number of Brazilians on the site. As for now, orkut also has a simplified site for mobile users. "m.orkut.com". In 2008, a new feature was introduced for users having slow internet connections to access orkut using the "View orkut in lighter version" setting.
Features
| Traffic on Orkut by country | |||
| Traffic of Orkut on March 31, 2004 | |||
 | United States | | 51.36% |
 | Japan | | 7.74% |
 | Brazil | | 5.16% |
 | Netherlands | | 4.10% |
 | United Kingdom | | 3.72% |
 | Other | | 27.92% |
| Traffic of Orkut on May 13, 2009[12] | |||
| Brazil | | 50% |
 | India | | 15% |
| United States | | 8.9% |
| Japan | | 8.8% |
 | Pakistan | | 6.9% |
| Other | | 29.6% |
A user first creates a "Profile", in which the user provides "Social", "Professional" and "Personal" details. Users can upload photos into their Orkut profile with a caption. Users can also add videos to their profile from either YouTube or Google Video with the additional option of creating either restricted or unrestricted polls for polling a community of users. There is an option to integrate GTalk (An instant messenger from Google) with Orkut enabling chatting and file sharing. currently gtalk has been integrated in orkut. Users can directly chat from orkut page.
Themes
The new features in orkut is Themes. Users can change their interface from a wide range of colorful theme library.Themes are currently only available in India and Brazil.
Other miscellaneous features
Members can make groups to join friends according to their wishes. 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" (this feature has been recently changed so that users can choose between showing their profile to all networks or specified ones). 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). Another feature is that 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.[13] 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.
Controversy
Fake profiles
As with any online social networking community, a number of fake and cloned profiles exist on Orkut.[15] Due to the large number of users and the deactivation of the jail system, the profiles were often left unremoved or, when removed, recreated easily. These profiles are normally created to troll, to spam, to flood or just for fun. It is not hard to find users owning more than one profile, with some stating they own hundreds.[citation needed]
Invisible profiles
In 2005, invisible profiles, communities and topics started to appear in Orkut. This could be achieved by using HTML escaping codes and 1x1 pixel photos to fool the engine behind the site.[16] This hole was later fixed, and currently there is a lower limit on profile image dimensions.
Flooders
In August 2005 a freeware program was made in Delphi called Floodtudo ("tudo" in Portuguese means "everything". This was developed by a Brazilian) specifically for flooding Orkut. It quickly spread through the users and was easily downloadable. The most common Floodtudo versions were 1.2, 1.5, 2.0 and 2.2. As this program was massively used by thousands of spammers, a big spam wave struck Orkut in September and October 2005.
Another most commonly used Scrap Flooder "Carbon Copy Scraper" & "Blind Carbon Copy Scraper" (commonly called CCS & BCCS ) was javascript based (popular versions 2.4, 3.3, and 5.1), available on almost every famous orkut community. The main idea behind this was to let profile holders send the same scrap to all their friends at a once, but it was missued by spammers.
As the flooding of Orkut was becoming out of control, the developers implemented some features to stop it by
- not allowing 2 or more verbatim topics or scrapbook entries to be submitted
- forcing the user to wait before posting another topic or scrapbook entry
- requiring captchas, whenever a scrap entry is hyperlinked.
Community moderators were given the ability to ban users outright instead of relying on the developers to remove them.
Electronic spam
Recently, Orkut implemented an automated system to prevent spam. Orkut users can't send too many friend requests or scraps within a short time interval. If anyone does so, the user will temporarily be disabled from that feature for 24 hours to 1 week, depending on the users activity.
Security and safety
In December 2007, hundreds of thousands of users accounts were affected, using another XSS vulnerability and a worm.[citation needed] A user's account was affected when the user simply read a particular scrap containing an embed which caused the user to automatically become a part of a community on the site, without approval. The affected user's account was then used to send this scrap to everyone present in the user's friend list thereby creating a sort of a huge wave
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