ORKUT: The Protocol City

Back in the summers of 2004, a 28 year old Turkish software developer, unheard, unknown, was independently developing a multi interface social network.
Little had Orkut Büyükkökten known that within 2 years his innovation will over ride all predicted barriers of growth, and popularity on the big bad world of Internet?
With 25 million users worldwide and 1.5 million across India, Orkut is already a phenomenon. Lets get the inside story of this phenomenon.
If you are an average Netizen, you may already be a member of Orkut, if you are not, then you may be sitting like a stranger among a group of friends, listening to their babble-babble about Orkut, and in very near future you will find an Orkut invitation in your inbox and you too will give in.
Orkut is an Internet social network service, though the literal meaning of the Turkish word Orkut is 'A beautiful city', it has been named after its author, Google employee Orkut Büyükkökten.
Similar to its parent company's mail service gmail.com, orkut also works on an invite only basis, where in order to register on orkut you need to know someone who has already registered and can send you an invite. A multilayered marketing you may call it.
The idea behind Orkut's network is easy. You get an invite, and you join the site, after joining, you write stuff about yourself, your interests and stuff like age, sex and marital status. There are different leaflets for your social, personnel and professional details. Also, there is also an option of an album which can hold up to 12 high resolution photographs, and that of a scrap book which is used for chatting.
The point where orkut differs from other social networking assemblies is that each and every bit of the information that you put up on the canvas, is publicly viewable, i.e. anyone, anywhere on orkut can have a look at all your information, including the chat with your friends. "This does kill some privacy, but then this is where all the fun starts. Besides, you have the 'ignore user' tab which would keep an unwanted person from scrapping you." says Aviral Jain, a member. The highlight feature of Orkut is where any member can add any other member on orkut to his/her "Crush List" and both of them will be prompted about it only when both parties have added each other to their Crush List, man, isnt this exciting. Though amusing as it may seem, Orkut has millions of love lives being processed by its servers, day and night. The majority of orkut users are youngsters, and orkut has moved in with an addictive status for them.For most, Orkut is an obsession, once logged on you forget all about eating, sleeping, working, you know, there is so much to do on orkut that you never get bored, plus, having that increasing number in your friends list is a real ego booster, while if your friends list remains dormant for a long time, it is a sort of humiliation. it's all about your profile being so good that people themselves send you friendship requests.
Besides friendship requests there is a fan's list, for vending ones kudos. Once a friendship request is accepted, both the people get the opportunity to enter each others fan's list. Also, you have the privilege of rating your friend's being Trusty, Sexy, and Cool, out of five; this is shown in percentage form after the summing of the votes that he\she has received from all his friends. And then there are testimonials which could be written by friends, quite charming as they are, there are no limits for testimonials."One thing that I would like to thank orkut for is my reunion with my college friends after about 18 years," says 41 year old Zafar. He continues "besides reuniting us orkut is a good interface for us to keep in touch with each other".Orkut is equipped with the Google search engine which searches through 25 million users, and has an array of over a dozen filters, which narrow down your search such that it is impossible that an existing orkut user skips your view. Besides all, there is the firebrand feature of communities.There are about 7 lakh communities on orkut, and all are indexed under its search engine.Any user of Orkut could create a community of his own, it will be at his discretion to moderate the comments and posts on his community, and it will be at his decision that a user joins his community with or without his approval.

There are all sorts of communities, ranging from 'I hate Himesh Reshamiya' to 'I love Pani Puri' I came across one on 'Rajdeep Sardesai' and then, there are those on Schools, Colleges, Places, Movies, Sportsmen and Movie stars, there are kinds like 'Pepsi rocks' and 'Voices in my head' to 'I love babies' and the ones like 'anti-reservation' and 'Farzi Engineers' and some belonging organizations like newspapers and magazines. The list has extreme variety and absolute infinite. The popularity and number of members in your community once again depend upon the presentation of your community. Also the search engine shows the community with the maximum membership on the top as it goes descending.But as it is, Orkut has started pulling together controversies, because of some communities propagating hate and explicit content. Though the system does allow A 'report bogus' tab which is supposed to delete a community if it is reported by 200 people, but practically it is not working.So this is it, if you have in you the proficiency for enjoying and being a part of a society which is resting on a simple ribbon of 0s and 1s, just stay ready to be pulled in. BUT BEWARE!! It is addictive.

ALI KIRMANI