Website: orkut.com Summary: orkut is a broad-market social networking platform, offering the standard mix of profiles, private messaging, and user-created groups. It is currently in beta, and is most notable for being a) invitation-only and b) affiliated with Google. Membership: Over 6,000 members as of day 3 after the launch The membership currently consists predominantly of people interested in the social networking space�technologists, sociologists, active bloggers, et al. Launched: January 22, 2004 Founder: Orkut Buyukkokten, a software engineer with Google, created the site over a several month period working on it one day a week. Google requires its engineers to devote 20% of their time to personal pet projects, and this was his. Corporate Overview: Orkut is officially run by "orkut.com LLC", but a notice on the footer of the site says simply "in affiliation with Google". Beyond that, the precise nature of the relationship is unclear, and both Orkut and Google have declined to comment. The site launched just a few months following Google's acquisition of Pyra Labs' Blogger.com, and rumors of a possible acquisition of Friendster. It also follows the announcement of the launch of Eurekster, a search engine that uses social networking to personalize and supposedly improve search results. While the potential availability of Google's resources is certainly noteworthy, as the San Jose Mercury News reports: It's still unclear how Orkut would affect relations with the venture capitalists on Google's small board. Three of the six board members have invested millions of dollars into competing services. John Doerr, of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and Ram Shriram, an angel investor, have invested in Friendster. Michael Moritz, of Sequoia Capital, has invested in Mountain View's LinkedIn, a networking service more aimed at the business community. Fees: Free Description: Orkut provides the core essentials of a social networking site. Major features include: Profiles � Profiles are divided into three areas: social, professional, and personal. The profiles are fairly extensive. Many fields are multiple-choice, simplifying entry and potentially improving searchability (although many of the fields do not appear to be searchable). Friends may leave testimonials, which will appear on your profile page when others visit it. Friends � A list of your confirmed friends is viewable by both you and anyone in the network. You can request people to confirm you as a friend with a single mouse-click when visiting their profile. If you use their invitation system to invite people to join Orkut, they are automatically added as your friend (if they choose) when they join. A convenient feature is the ability to have "friend groups", which allow you to organize and easily send messages to particular groups of your contacts. This is for your contact management purposes only and is not visible to your friends who you place in those groups. For example, you could group friends by geography, common interest, etc., so that you could easily send a message to all your friends in your city, or to all your friends in, say, the healthcare industry. This represents a simple alternative to mail merges or mailing lists for communicating to several people at once. Messages � The private messaging system uses icons to distinguish messages from various sources: friends, friends of friends, system messages, etc. It also allows you to send messages to various sets of people: friends, friends and friends of friends, a friend group you have defined, or members of a community of which you are a member. Communities � Several hundred user-created communities are available in a number of pre-defined categories based on business or personal interests and regional or organizational affiliations. The communities consist of simple message boards and a member list, including photos. Communities can also have a list of events relevant to that community (apparently events only CAN be entered under a community, not publicly or across all communities). User search � The search function is disappointing, especially given the Google affiliation. Currently, you can only search on name, age, location, high-level interest (friends, activity partners, business networking, or dating), and relationship status. The dozens of rich profile fields are not searchable at all. Notes: The first thing an experienced user of other social networking systems will notice about Orkut is that it's heavy on the use of photos, yet still really fast. This is easily attributable to a combination of the designer's experience developing for one of the world's highest-traffic websites, the fact that Orkut is running on Google's servers, and the relatively small number of users at the moment. Nonetheless, the noticeably excellent performance significantly enhanced the user experience. This is clearly a beta version. I only discovered a few actual "bugs", but several things where the navigation or activity flow was unclear or awkward. For example, it was unclear that "adding a friend", putting in their name and e-mail address, was going to send them an invitation. On other systems, this is used as a way to make sure you have the correct person. Also, it was extremely frustrating not to be able to personalize each individual invitation I sent out. I had to keep editing my master preferences to give some semblance of personalization. The structured profiles with multiple-choice questions made the process of filling out the profiles relatively quick and painless, but without the ability to search on those fields, having the data be structured minimizes its usefulness as a tool for meeting new people in a focused way, as one would do for business networking purposes. The biggest challenge here, though, is the attempt to combine social, romantic, and business networking all into one site. Rumors are that Friendster may be trying to diversify, as well, and they face the same challenge. The challenge, which either site has yet to meet, is that of faceted identity. Some people may feel completely open about all their personal interests in a business setting, but others don't. More to the point, many�perhaps even most�people are uncomfortable being exposed to some of the frank and open information presented in the profiles (sexual preference, etc.). As a result, it is unlikely for these environments to attract a broad audience for business purposes. Furthermore, this section in Orkut's Terms of Service raises some questions: The orkut.com service is made available for your personal, non-commercial use only. Businesses, organizations or other legal entities may not use the orkut.com service for any purpose. I understand that the intent is to prevent the creation of corporate-run communities within the system, but where does that leave sole proprietors and small business owners who are interested in building their business by building relationships? Recommendation: Orkut is worth watching, if only because of the Google affiliation. The frank and open nature of many of the discussions and member profiles, though, make it attractive as a business networking environment only to those not easily offended by a prospective business associate's personal interests. The biggest shortcoming, though, is the limited search functionality. Without the ability to search on common interests, company, title, etc., it is not useful for any focused relationship-building, only for general socializing and conversation. Orkut is a viable alternative to Friendster, Friendzy, et al., but not to more business-focused networks. compliments of http://www.onlinebusinessnetworks.com/online-social-networks-guide/orkut.php Scott Allen vc conference Main Menu