Orkut's Success Story

I met a friend of mine after a long gap of three years recently. We had a small chat lasting for a couple of minutes and finally when the moment of parting arrived, he asked me a question what has now become a cliché among the today’s young, “Hey man, you there on Orkut?”
‘Orkut’ - well this is one word that is now taking the country by a sweep.
What is Orkut?
For people who are not well accustomed to internet would find the word ‘social networking’ a bit alien. But those who are accustomed would be aware of the websites of the same kind like Hifi, MySpace etc.., As said ‘Orkut’ is basically a social networking website, where in one can socialise, communicate and make new friends or meet old and long lost friends. This is one place just like any other on the World Wide Web where one gets to post one’s pictures, videos and even blogs for that matter. It allows the user to send messages, create forums or to start discussions on a variety of subjects ranging from science to politics to day to day activities including fan clubs.
Coming into existence: Well the name ‘Orkut’ sounds like a name of a person, if your guess was yes then you are right; ‘Orkut’ is actually a part of the name of one ORKUT BUYUKKOTEN.
The story is a bit exciting. It’s about a guy who lost track of his girlfriend in a train accident. He tries hard to find her but his luck runs out. The guy grew up and become an IT architect in his late 20’s. He hired professionals from all over the world and began the hunt again. After three long years and losing millions of dollars he found his long lost girlfriend. Sounds flimy doesn’t it? But it’s a true incident, an accomplishment only a few lucky ones can achieve. When the time for shutting down the project arrived, Mr. Buyukkoten was approached by Google CEO and the software was taken over by them which we call ‘Orkut’ today.
Google paid a hefty sum to Mr. Buyukkoten and the very year it was launched , it became a huge, instantaneous hit. It earned a whopping profit of approximately 1bn dollars in that very year.
Fact Fantasy:
ORKUT BUYUKKOTEN today has 13 assistants to monitor his scrapbook and 8 to monitor his friends-list. He gets around 20,000 friend-requests a day and about 85,000 scraps.
* 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.
* He gets $6 if anybody adds you as friend in the resulting chain.
* He gets $5 when you scrap somebody and,
* $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 and,
* $0.5 every time you view your friend's friend-list.
The Success: The success of Orkut, mainly lies in its flexibility when compared to other sites of a similar genre. It’s a simple design, with better user interface and offers a wide variety of options. It is estimated that it has approximately 58,950,000 members, which in itself tells a wide story. But then again success and controversy go hand-in-hand. And this point has found its place in this website too. There have been cases of misuse of the flexibility offered. Recently, there was an uproar in the state of Maharashtra over the defaming remarks made against a political leader in one of its forums and finally Google had to get down to damage control. Not long though there were cases of morphing of photographs especially of the feminine gender, finally the case was resolved and the culprits found their right place, behind the bars. Well, the controversies surrounding ‘Orkut’ elucidates the concept of misuse of technology and makes it clear how technology in the wrong hands, can prove to be a dangerous thing.
Whatever may be the reason behind ‘Orkut’ coming into existence, the outcome is that it is the in thing among the young now-a-days. It is also estimated that he would be the richest person by the year 2009. One can also find more about ORKUT BUYUKKOTEN on his homepage http://www.stanford.edu/~orkut/.