A Farewell to Orkut

After ten years of sparking conversations and forging connections, we have decided it's time for us to start saying goodbye to Orkut. Over the past decade, YouTube, Blogger and Google+ have taken off, with communities springing up in every corner of the world. Because the growth of these communities has outpaced Orkut's growth, we've decided to focus our energy and resources on making these other social platforms as amazing as possible for everyone who uses them.
We will shut down Orkut on September 30, 2014. Until then, there will be no impact on you, so you may have time to manage the transition. You can export your profile data, community posts and photos using Google Takeout (available until September 2016). We are preserving an archive of all public communities, which will be available online starting September 30, 2014. If you don't want your posts or name to be included in the community archive, you can remove Orkut permanently from your Google account. Please visit our Help Center for any further details.
It's been a great 10 years, and we apologize to those of you still actively using the service. We hope you will find other online communities to spark more conversations and build even more connections for the next decade and beyond.

WhatsApp Messenger

WhatsApp Messenger is a cross-platform mobile messaging app which allows you to exchange messages without having to pay for SMS. WhatsApp Messenger is available for iPhone, BlackBerry, Android, Windows Phone and Nokia and yes, those phones can all message each other! Because WhatsApp Messenger uses the same internet data plan that you use for email and web browsing, there is no cost to message and stay in touch with your friends.
In addition to basic messaging WhatsApp users can create groups, send each other unlimited images, video and audio media messages.

Download WhatsApp

A brief history of Facebook

Mark Zuckerberg, 23, founded Facebook while studying psychology at Harvard University. A keen computer programmer, Mr Zuckerberg had already developed a number of social-networking websites for fellow students, including Coursematch, which allowed users to view people taking their degree, and Facemash, where you could rate people's attractiveness.
In February 2004 Mr Zuckerberg launched "The facebook", as it was originally known; the name taken from the sheets of paper distributed to freshmen, profiling students and staff. Within 24 hours, 1,200 Harvard students had signed up, and after one month, over half of the undergraduate population had a profile.
The network was promptly extended to other Boston universities, the Ivy League and eventually all US universities. It became Facebook.com in August 2005 after the address was purchased for $200,000. US high schools could sign up from September 2005, then it began to spread worldwide, reaching UK universities the following month.
As of September 2006, the network was extended beyond educational institutions to anyone with a registered email address. The site remains free to join, and makes a profit through advertising revenue. Yahoo and Google are among companies which have expressed interest in a buy-out, with rumoured figures of around $2bn (£975m) being discussed. Mr Zuckerberg has so far refused to sell.
The site's features have continued to develop during 2007. Users can now give gifts to friends, post free classified advertisements and even develop their own applications - graffiti and Scrabble are particularly popular.
This month the company announced that the number of registered users had reached 30 million, making it the largest social-networking site with an education focus.
Earlier in the year there were rumours that Prince William had registered, but it was later revealed to be a mere impostor. The MP David Miliband, the radio DJ Jo Whiley, the actor Orlando Bloom, the artist Tracey Emin and the founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, are among confirmed high-profile members.
This month officials banned a flash-mob-style water fight in Hyde Park, organised through Facebook, due to public safety fears. And there was further controversy at Oxford as students became aware that university authorities were checking their Facebook profiles.
The legal case against Facebook dates back to September 2004, when Divya Narendra, and the brothers Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, who founded the social-networking site ConnectU, accused Mr Zuckerberg of copying their ideas and coding. Mr Zuckerberg had worked as a computer programmer for them when they were all at Harvard before Facebook was created.
The case was dismissed due to a technicality in March 2007 but without a ruling.

Orkut History

Orkut was launched on January 22, 2004 by Google as independent project of Orkut Büyükkökten, The community membership was originally by invitation only. Orkut's explanation for invitation


" Orkut is unique, because it's an organically growing network of trusted friends. That way we won't grow too large, too quickly and everyone will have at least one person to vouch for them. If you know someone who is a member of Orkut, that person can invite you to join as well. If you don't know an Orkut member, wait a bit and most likely you soon will. We look forward to having you as part of the Orkut community."



At first year, United States had the largest user base. By word of mouth various Brazilians began adopting and inviting more friends, in a viral driven by the blogosphere. Soon after, Brazil surpassed U.S. in number of users and Orkut started becoming heavily popular in Brazil. Americans then started leaving the service and switching to other similar sites such as MySpace and Friendster. This phenomenon was covered by the English blogosphere with some criticism towards Brazilians [8][9][10] because they tended to communicate (not only among themselves) using their native language Portuguese and not English.

From that time, Orkut growth was driven by Brazilian users, first being opened to everyone by register and becoming one of the most popular websites in Brazil.[citation needed] The creator Orkut Büyükkökten visited Brazil in 2007,[11] in attempt to understand the success in that country. In 2007 Orkut began attracting large amount of Indians who were not intimidated by the number of Brazilians on the site. As for now, Orkut also has a simplified site for mobile users. "m.Orkut.com". In 2008,

How Orkut was Born

A guy lost his girlfriend in a train accident... but the gal's name nowhere appeared in the dead list. This guy grew up and became IT technical architect in his late 20's, achievement in itself!!




He hired developers from the whole globe and plan to make a software where he could search for his gf through the web...



Things went as planned... and he found her, after losing millions of dollars and 3 long years!!



It was time to shut down the search operation, when the CEO of Google had a

word with this guy n took over this application. This Software made a whopping 1 billion dollars profit in its first year, which we today know as ORKUT.



The guy's name is Orkut Büyükkökten Yes it's named after him only. Today he is paid a hefty sum by Google for the things we do like scrapping. He is expected to b the richest person by 2009. Orkut Büyükkökten today has 13 assistants to monitor his scrapbook & 8 to monitor his friends-list. He gets around 20,000 friend-requests a day & about 85,000 scraps!!!



Some other Cool Facts about this guy:





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 & gets $6 if anybody adds you as friend in the resulting chain.

He gets $5 when you scrap somebody & $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 & $0.5 every time you view your friend's friend-list.


Orkut Buyukkokten celebrate Five Year of Existence



Two of the biggest social networks are celebrating. Celebrating five years of its existence as a meeting point for users worldwide.






Orkut was launched officially on January 24 2004 by Google engineer Orkut Buyukkokten, hence the name of this network. Was one of the first social networks in the market and soon achieved great success among the first bloggers.


At first, the network could be accessed only through an invitation which led to greater interest among the first users to get any of them.The rapid success of Orkut took the "early adopters" to leave quickly and try out new networks. MySpace began to attract attention and when the time was an almost unknown phenmenon.


MySpace precisely aimed more directly at the "user" which was directed Orkut as the force that was taking Facebook among U.S. community college andalusia ostracism led to this network. Only Brazil withstood the force of the new social networks becoming the country with the largest number of subscribers and also with the wider community.

How Twitter Was Born

Twitter was born about three years ago, when @Jack, @Biz, @Noah, @Crystal, @Jeremy, @Adam, @TonyStubblebine, @Ev, me (@Dom), @Rabble, @RayReadyRay, @Florian, @TimRoberts, and @Blaine worked at a podcasting company called Odeo, Inc. in South Park, San Francisco. The company had just contributed a major chunk of code to Rails 1.0 and had just shipped Odeo Studio, but we were facing tremendous competition from Apple and other heavyweights. Our board was not feeling optimistic, and we were forced to reinvent ourselves.

“Rebooting” or reinventing the company started with a daylong brainstorming session where we broke up into teams to talk about our best ideas. I was lucky enough to be in @Jack’s group, where he first described a service that uses SMS to tell small groups what you are doing. We happened to be on top of the slide on the north end of South Park. It was sunny and brisk. We were eating Mexican food. His idea made us stop eating and start talking.



I remember that @Jack’s first use case was city-related: telling people that the club he’s at is happening. “I want to have a dispatch service that connects us on our phones using text.” His idea was to make it so simple that you don’t even think about what you’re doing, you just type something and send it. Typing something on your phone in those days meant you were probably messing with T9 text input, unless you were sporting a relatively rare smartphone. Even so, everyone in our group got the idea instantly and wanted it.



Later, each group presented their ideas, and a few of them were selected for prototyping. Demos ensued. @Jack’s idea rose to the top as a combination of status-type ideas. @Jack, @Biz, and @Florian were assigned to build version 0.1, managed by @Noah. The rest of the company focused on maintaining Odeo.com, so that if this new thing flopped we’d have something to fall back upon.



The first version of @Jack’s idea was entirely web-based. It was created on March 21st, 2006.

Facebook Places takes aim at Google

Tech News -Aug20-2010

Facebook Places takes aim at Google

If Facebook Places catches on with the company's 500 million users, Facebook could be sitting on a gold mine of local business listings that advertisers and users will love and Google will hate.


Will visitors to Facebook's Palo Alto headquarters use Facebook Places to find legendary watering hole Antonio's Nut House...(Click on image for full size.)



(Credit: Screenshot by Tom Krazit/CNET) As part of Google's quest to pack useful answers into search results pages, it has built out a database of local business listings tied to its Google Maps service that gives someone searching for "pizza san francisco" a wealth of results to browse. Businesses are encouraged to claim their listings in Google Places to add their Web sites, hours, menus, or other information that searchers might value, in hopes of encouraging more people to think of Google as the place to find information about what's around them at any given moment.

Facebook Places is a similar idea with a social-media twist. Facebook users can "check in" to an existing list of nearby locations from their mobile phones or add new listings themselves, sharing that activity with their friends. But this isn't just about social butterflies: this feature will give Facebook a treasure trove of local business listings, the same prize that Google, Yelp, Foursquare, Gowalla, and others aiming for local advertising dollars are chasing.

Simply put, Facebook Places is the latest example of how the ways information is being sought and presented on the Internet are changing. Will Internet users continue to type queries into trusty old Google? Or will those users prefer to discover information through social networks like Facebook, where soon they'll be able to get much of the same information Google provides with the added bonus of reality checks from their friends.

Advertising dollars will follow whichever company manages to figure out the best blend, as neither approach will be enough to satisfy all the people all of the time. Small local businesses with limited advertising and marketing budgets for the Internet and social media will still probably have to hedge their bets across several sites, but Facebook's decision to add location data to its product immediately creates a Google-scale competitor that can't be ignored.
...or will they use Google's local search features to choose a happy-hour destination? The stakes are high for both companies.
Already Facebook is getting word out to local businesses about the launch of Facebook Places, as Techcrunch noted. Lots of businesses have already invested time in making a Facebook Page, and are in some cases being prompted to merge their Page and Place to avoid confusion.

Google has certainly noticed Facebook's intent. The company put out a blog post Thursday (a representative claimed the timing was pure coincidence) declaring that 100 million people a month are using Google's Maps for Mobile product and reminding business owners to "help millions of people find you by claiming your free Place Page available in Google Maps and our most used mobile 'app' -- Google Search."

It's just another sign that Facebook and Google are increasingly butting heads as two of the top five destinations for U.S. Internet users. It's not just because so many ex-Googlers are running the show over at Facebook, but because social media has emerged as an important way to navigate through the Internet, a task that for years now has been synonymous with Google.

Social-media success remains elusive at Google, although the company has put a lot more attention to the problem this year and is getting ready to launch its most ambitious effort yet, according to reports. The unquestioned leader in online information provided by computers, Google has been unable to develop a system that lets Internet users efficiently find information provided by friends or colleagues, which is Facebook's claim to fame.

It will take Facebook some time to build out its local database, and it remains to be seen how popular Facebook Places will prove among its users: especially if privacy concerns once again rear their head.

But for all the talk about how Facebook is squashing smaller services like Foursquare and Gowalla with this announcement, it's clear from Facebook's statements, and Google's response, that the stakes are much higher: Facebook is little by little trying to redefine the way people find information and cash in on the desire of big businesses to get their message alongside that information. That used to be Google's thing.