Introduction to Orkut

Introduction to Orkut

orkut.com is an online community website designed for friends. The main goal of the service is to make your social life, and that of your friends, more active and stimulating. Orkut’s social network can help you both maintain existing relationships and establish new ones by reaching out to people you have never met before. Who you interact with is entirely up to you. Before getting to know an orkut member, you can even see how they’re connecting to you through the friends network.

orkut named after its creator, Google employee Orkut Büyükkökten. It is designed to help users meet new friends and maintain existing relationships.

About the Author:

Orkut Büyükkökten is a Turkish software engineer who developed the social networking service called orkut while working at Google. He developed orkut as an independent project while working at Google, the outgrowth of a company policy whereby all employees at Google can spend 20% of their time working on personal interests.
Originally from the Turkish city of Konya, Büyükkökten obtained a B.Sc. degree in Computer Engineering and Information Science from Bilkent University in Ankara, and earned a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University. His research at Stanford focused on Web search and efficient PDA usage.

History :

Orkut was quietly launched on January 22, 2004 by Google, the search engine company. Orkut Büyükkökten, a Turkish software engineer, developed it as an independent project while working at Google (permitted by its policy).
Originally, the orkut community was felt to be elite, because its membership is by invitation only. However, at the end of July 2004 orkut surpassed the 1,000,000 member mark, and at the end of September it surpassed the 2,000,000 mark. As of July 2005, 73% of orkut’s members were from Brazil, followed by 6% from the United States, 5% from Iran and 3% from Pakistan. Brazilians were below 50% from August 9 to August 20, 2004. It is believed that this happened because a lot of the Brazilian users had changed their nationality to something else due to a hoax, telling that users with their countries set to Brazil got slower speeds and a greater chance of getting an error page.

Problems:

Due to the massive load on the server, orkut has a bad habit of breaking down, running slow or returning one of its infamous “Bad, bad server. No donut for you.” Error messages. These slowdowns mostly can be noticed during the day hours in America (south and north), which probably explains the reason as well, as more than 80% of the orkut users are from the American continent, more than 70% from Brazil alone.

Getting started on orkut:

To get most out of orkut and to have more friends, you’ll need to complete the “personal” section of your profile by following these steps:

1. Visit your home page and click the “profile” button under your photo.
2. Click the “personal” tab to the right of your name.
3. Select “edit” below this tab.
Fill in as much information as you’d like. When a potential friend visit this section of your profile, they’ll be able to add you to their “hot-list,” “crush-list” or send you a teaser.
To use orkut for business networking, you’ll want to fill out the “professional” section of your profile. The following steps will help you do so:
1. Visit your home page and click the “profile” button under your photo.
2. Click the “professional” tab to the right of your name.
3. Select “edit” below this tab.
Enter the information you wish to share with potential business contacts.

Orkut makes it easy to find people who share your hobbies and interests, look for romantic connections or establish new business contacts. You can also create and join a wide variety of online communities to discuss current events, reconnect with old college buddies or even exchange cookie recipes.

Change Orkut Language back English:

If you would like orkut to return to English, you can click “orkut in english” at the bottom of each page. You will only need to do this once for orkut to appear in English each time you log in.

To change to another language, please follow the steps below:
1. Visit your homepage and click “settings” under your profile photo.
2. Choose your primary language from the drop-down menu at the top of the page.
3. Click “update.”

Change orkut to another language:

Orkut is currently available in English, Portuguese, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Dutch and Russian.
Once you change your language interface on the settings page, orkut.com will appear in your language each time you log in.
To change your orkut language, please follow the steps below:
1. Visit your homepage and click “settings” under your profile photo.
2. Choose your primary language from the drop-down menu at the top of the page.
3. Click “update.”
If you select one of our supported languages, your interface will now be in your language. If you select a different language, you will still see orkut in English, but you will have the option to search for communities in your preferred language.

How to join a community:

If you’re interested in joining a community, simply browse to that community and click the “join” button below the community photo.
There are two types of communities on orkut.

1. Public
2. Moderated

Public:

If the community is public, you’ll automatically be added to it.

Moderated:

If the community is moderated, the community moderator will need to approve your request before you are actually added to the community.
If you’d like to search for communities on orkut.com, click on the “Communities” link in the blue bar at the top of the page to search by name or browse by category.

How are the friends on my homepage ordered?

When you view your friends using the “my friends” box on the right-hand side of your homepage, the orkut members who have recently logged on are featured at the top of the page.
You can see an alphabetical list of all your friends by clicking the “Friends” link in the blue bar at the top of the page.
When you view other people’s profiles, you will see their recently logged in friends at the top of the page. While we usually feature your most active friends at the top, keep in mind that orkut friend order isn’t an exact science and they sometimes mix up who logged in last!

How to personalize the orkut email invitations:

To personalize the text of your orkut invitations follow these steps:
1. Select the “Home” link in the blue bar at the top of the page.
2. Click the “settings” button under your photo.
3. Click “edit invitation to join” at the bottom of the box.
4. Enter the text for your orkut invitations in the white dialog box, and hit the “update” button when you are finished.

How to set orkut notifications to be send to a different email address:

You can have orkut notifications sent to a different email address by changing the primary email address in your profile. Please note that changing your orkut email address will not change your orkut login.
To change your email address in orkut, follow these steps:
1. Select the “Home” link in the blue bar at the top of the page.
2. Click the “profile” button under your photo.
3. Click “edit profile” below your picture.
4. In the box on the right-hand side of the page, click the “contact” link.
5. Click the “edit” link to the right of your primary email address.
6. Enter your new primary email address and click the “verify” button.
7. A verification email will be sent to your new primary email account. To complete the change, please click on the link in this email.
*Make sure you include all of your email addresses in the secondary email fields to ensure that friend requests sent to your alternate accounts reach you. Don’t worry, these additional email addresses are not visible to other orkut members.

How to send a message to everyone in a community?

You can send a message to all the members of a community if the community owner has selected this option and the community has less than 1,000 members.
If you do not see the link “send message” in a community or the community has more than 1,000 members, messages will be disabled for all members, including the owner.
As an alternative, you may want to post your message in the community forum with the steps below:
1. Click the link “new topic” at the bottom of the forum.
2. Enter a subject and message.
3. Click “submit” and you’re done!

What’s a bookmark?

The bookmark feature helps you keep track of members you want to remember. To create a bookmark, please follow these steps:
1. Visit the profile of the member.
2. Click the “add to bookmarks” button below their photo.
This allows you to create a list of bookmarks. This list is for your use only, and other members won’t know if you’ve bookmarked their profile. To view your bookmarks, please follow the instructions below:
1. Select the “Home” link in the blue bar at the top of the page.
2. Click on the “list” button under your photo.
3. Click the “view bookmarks” button that appears under your photo.

Maximum number of friends allowed on orkut:

You can have up to 1000 connections on Orkut. If you reach that limit, you will not be able to add new Orkut friends. This 1000 limit also includes Open Orkut Invitations - people you have invited to join Orkut but they haven’t done so yet.

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