Orkut, Google’s own social network
I first read it on Jeremy Zawodny’s blog, “Watch out Friendster, here comes Google’s Orkut“, that a new service has been set up by Google to compete against ever-so-popular Friendster. From this The Register story, Orkut is set up by a Google employee, with “in affiliation with Google” on every page, even though Google has been tight-lipped about it. I am pretty sure that Google’s expertise on scalability can help Orkut to become one of the biggest on-line social community. Performance and responsiveness has certainly been an issue of Friendster lately.
It gets me wondering, what would Google do with this social network community? How is Orkut part of Google’s strategy in becoming one of the biggest portal on the Internet? In what way would Google use data collected from Orkut in its own search result? Part of PR for IPO?
Orkut is also different from Friendster in how you can participate. Basically you cannot just fill a form and sign up for membership, but the registration is by invitation only. So… <Cough cough> Is there any friend out there that can get me in? :)
Updated 24 Jan 2004: Here’s a coverage on Slashdot. Sounds like there is an initial of 12,000 invites as the seed. Do they pick the initial invites randomly?
And here’s some people’s impression on Orkut so far:
- Anders Jacobsen’s first experiences with Orkut.com
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It gets me wondering, what would Google do with this social network community? How is Orkut part of Google’s strategy in becoming one of the biggest portal on the Internet? In what way would Google use data collected from Orkut in its own search result? Part of PR for IPO?
I think creating Orkut has a great potential for individualizing searching online – imagine del.icio.us merged with Eurekster [1]?!
I think the “invitations only” policy might go away later on, but at the moment it ensures them a soft launch (I imagine there are hundreds of thousands of people ready to bang their front doors, but this way they get to see how well their servers/features/etc work in a steadily growing environment…
[1] http://www.jacobsen.no/anders/blog/archives/2004/01/23/hello_orkut.html
> It gets me wondering, what would Google do with
> this social network community? How is Orkut part of
> Google’s strategy in becoming one of the biggest portal
> on the Internet?
Frankly, I don’t think Google has thought much at all about this. The company has a history of (admirably) letting its engineers run wild a bit, coming up with cool new ideas, and then DOWN THE ROAD Google and those engineers come up with ways to fit the pieces into the grand scheme of Google things.
Frankly, orkut.com may fade out or be abandoned someday (though I doubt it). But only time will tell how it fits into the GoogleWorld ;)
hello,
could u send me the invitation of orkut id
plz send me it it’s very important fa me,
thanks
What I think is, currently google is trying to fetch details of every single person on orkut. I’m sure they’ll have most of the people who have access to the internet. Once they accomplish this task, they’ll be in better position to attack yahoo, aol and other internet messenger services, mail services, etc. So probably, after about 2 -3 years google will be everywhere around us.
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that is a well known issue in p2p, since there has to be some initial users to bootstrap into the network. but, the likelihood of social clusters or segregration is quite high i reckon, so what if non of my friends on on Orkut? anyways …