I have been a member of Orkut for a few days. For those who don’t know about Orkut, it’s a social networking site where people can communicate with their old friends and colleagues. There are other popular social networking sites as well like Linked In which is primarily for business purpose, Rediff Connexions, Friendster etc. The special thing about Orkut is that it is owned by Google.

Orkut is named after its creator Orkut Büyükkökten, a Turkish software engineer and an employee of Google. What sets Orkut apart from other similar services is that it is invitation only. You need to be invited by an existing user to join Orkut. This is similar to GMail. Another startling feature (according to me) is that it is developed in ASP.Net! A Google product developed on a Microsoft’s technology! This is strange because although Orkut is not an organic Google product it was launched by Google in January 2004. Two and a half years is enough for Google to convert it to their proprietary platform. Probably it is not that easy since Orkut has a huge user base.

Orkut is addictive for sure. I found a lot of old colleagues over there. But the server seems to be buckling under the pressure far too often. Bad bad server, no donut for you message is becoming frequent. May be since it’s in .Net so it is hosted on Windows servers and probably that’s why the service is not able to leverage Google’s huge computing power which mainly runs Linux and probably Google’s own operating system.

But Orkut is fun! Let me know if you want to join and I will send you an invite.

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