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The Internet Bug Security

Orkut Goes Dark, At Least For A Bit 294

Posted by timothy from the no-date-landed-either dept.
caferace writes "As quickly as it went up, Orkut is offline, as least temporarily. Google's experiment in social networking had a huge rise in members over the last few days, and things got chaotic pretty quick, revelaing some scaling issues not well anticipated. It still ran quickly, but like infestations of mice, people were going where they shouldn't, exposing the systems weaknesses. :) Smart to pull the plug and work out some of the kinks. From the notice: 'We've taken orkut.com offline for a few days as we implement some improvements and upgrades suggested by users. Since orkut is in the very early stages of development, it's likely to be up and down quite a bit during the coming months. None of the information you've entered will be deleted, and none of the connections you've made will be lost. And, if all goes well, you should see some significant improvements when we come back online. We'll send an email once everything is ready and running again. Thanks for your feedback and for bearing with us as we work our way up the learning curve. The orkut team'"
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Orkut Goes Dark, At Least For A Bit More

Orkut Goes Dark, At Least For A Bit

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  • When will they stop innovating? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by VMaN ( 164134 ) on Sunday January 25, 2004 @09:12PM (#8084292) Homepage
    Seriously.. The google team has shown more innovation than ANY other .com Iv'e ever seen, and all this without intrusive ads...

    • Re:When will they stop innovating? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by lightray ( 215185 ) <tobin@splorg.org> on Sunday January 25, 2004 @09:32PM (#8084446) Homepage
      It's hard to call orkut 'innovative', when it appears to be an exact clone of Friendster with Crushlink-sans-spam thrown in for good measure (and without Friendster's poor stability and abyssmal performance). I wouldn't be surprised, though, if orkut got some blogging capabilities integrated.. that could be kind of interesting
    • Did you say innovation or invitation - From the orkut site:

      Membership to orkut is by invitation only.

      If you have a friend who's a member of orkut, have them invite you to join.

      Damn their elitest ways... didn't want to joing their stupid cult anyway *stomps off*

    • They WILL stop innovating... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Chordonblue ( 585047 ) on Sunday January 25, 2004 @10:11PM (#8084687) Journal
      ...a few months after going public. As with most companies who go public, the goal becomes shareholder value - at all costs.

      You watch how Google slowly goes down the tubes as itchy investors (who spent too much damn money on the stock in the first place), expect *BIG* returns. This doesn't always happen. I believe most companies in fact improve after going public. But investing idiots (see SCOX) risk huge amounts of money betting on tech stocks and so the pressure to perform often outweighs what would be considered REASONABLE returns for most.

      I don't want to see it happen, so don't think this is some sort of troll - but I know all too well the record of high flying tech companies like this. When their focus changes, the service will start to suck.

      Not to be redundant but Yahoo! pissed me off in much the same way - over what most would think was such a little thing. Yahoo! used, USED to be my home page. Then they started using intrusive and annoying flash ads. I accepted that, but then they did the unthinkable - they STOLE MY CURSOR!

      Look, just because they're my home page doesn't mean I always want to search for something. In fact 9/10ths of the time I just want to type in an address.

      So when you combine the two features, you have me opening up my browser and immediately start to type something like 'www.somethingorother.com' in their SEARCH BAR instead of the address field. Arrrgh!

      And...

      It's....

      OUTTA THERE!

      • Re:They WILL stop innovating... (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Awptimus Prime ( 695459 ) on Monday January 26, 2004 @12:01AM (#8085304)
        Yeah, just look at what happened with MindSpring. In 1995, before the big-boom, Charles Brewer had great control over his company and grew it amazingly well. Then as the boom hits, the company is showing a lot of promise. It has it's first profits, then investor greed got the best of them.

        They bought Netcom, then merged with EarthLink. At this point, investor hype was all that mattered. The things that made MindSpring a great company were now forever gone. Great things being: top notch in-house support, their own network, their own developers, and everything that could run on open-source being run that way (it saves money!).. Now they are EarthLink, technical support is handled by rude people in India, they outsource their network from the bottom dollar bidders, and have put 3000+ people out of work. To offer better service? Nope. Just so a very select few can make a few more dollars.

        I, personally, hope this activity destroys corporate america. I am not any sort of activist, I could just do without the excessive greed destroying everything good. Just because some other guy is the market leader, there is no reason to sacrifice your ethics to "win".

        Good old Mindspring would still be a profitable business with it's 300,000 organic-growth customers.

        Enjoy the churn, Mr. Sky Dayton. You shorted a lot of investors and are a criminal. I guess I should stop there, next thing you know the big, scarey church of Scientology will file a lawsuit against me for picking on their little boy.
      • As with most companies who go public, the goal becomes shareholder value - at all costs.
        Which should be unsurprising, because the law requires them to do so .
        • There is a level at which greed takes over common sense. Common sense will tell most reasonable people that Yahoo! stock isn't worth $100 a share, but that didn't stop all those idiots from snapping it up over that price.

          Does anyone here realize how long it would take Yahoo! to even come close to paying a dividend that would compensate that insanity? Ultimately, a company whose stock goes through the roof on IPO has to figure out how to make a quick buck instead of slow, even growth (which is generally bet
    • Seriously.. The google team has shown more innovation than ANY other .com Iv'e ever seen, and all this without intrusive ads...

      They are nearly as innovative as Microsoft!

  • Ahh (Score:5, Funny)

    by rmohr02 ( 208447 ) <mohr.42NO@SPAMosu.edu> on Sunday January 25, 2004 @09:12PM (#8084299)
    So that explains why nobody invited me--the site's down.

  • cache...lol (Score:5, Funny)

    by bucklesl ( 73547 ) on Sunday January 25, 2004 @09:13PM (#8084303) Homepage
    google's cache [216.239.51.104] in case you missed it.

  • Slashster - Thank you Slashdot (Score:5, Interesting)

    by DarkHelmet ( 120004 ) <mark&seventhcycle,net> on Sunday January 25, 2004 @09:13PM (#8084308) Homepage

    Well, I'm glad that the people at Orkut are working on their user system. I'm hoping that they end up making their system highly scalable.

    Time for another shameless, but fairly relevant plug.

    A few days ago, I posted about [slashdot.org] a new Friendster implementation I'm working on called Slashster [slashster.com]. It's a PHP/MySQL implementation of Friendster which I've been working on for the past few weeks. I'm hoping that with some attention, that it will scale to a decent size network of people.

    As stated in my first post about Slashster, it has a couple features that Friendster doesn't. It has a messageboard, and it's easier to find friends who are closer to you (1-4 degrees of separation). It also has news feeds (which I'll be adding some more fairly soon) It's also quite a bit faster for the time being, but that's obviously because it's fairly small at the moment. :)

    I'm thinking about making it open source after most of the features / bugs have been worked out of it. I'm not sure whether a BSD or GPL license would be better for publishing a work like this. Any input from the slashdot community is always welcome :)

    Of course, having a business model for this type of site would be useful too. After all, last I heard Friendster has roughly 50 machines for handling its traffic, and is still buckling under the weight of people going on it. I'm really curious to see if MySQL's replication could help a Friendster / Slashster type site scale well. And I'm hoping there will be a way to pay for it. Breaking even for hosting on a project like this would make me happy.

    I've also had suggestions to use DB's from Oracle or IBM. There's also postgres... I'm curious to hear input on that as well.

    Everyone is welcome to email me [mailto] with ideas on how to make Slashster [slashster.com] pay for itself with an open source model.

    Right now Slashster [slashster.com] is hovering around 200 users. Of course with a userbase of that size it's going to be pretty zippy even without any optimization whatsoever. I imagine things will start getting interesting around the 10,000 mark. This is, presuming that the people who come to slashster bring their friends, and there's an actual network there. I'm really hoping for something to come out of this.

    I doubt that I'm ready for a slashdotting (well, at least making the front page), but in time, I'm hoping the project will grow into something useful, scalable and great user community. Only time will tell.

    The support I've had so far has been pretty positive and I've met some pretty nice people from starting the site. I'm hoping to meet some more great people out of this, too.

    Thank you Slashdot!

    --Mark

  • /.ers looking for GFs (Score:5, Funny)

    by Dreadlord ( 671979 ) on Sunday January 25, 2004 @09:13PM (#8084311) Journal
    Google's experiment in social networking had a huge rise in members over the last few days...

    what do you expect when posting a dating service story on /.?

  • So Realistic ... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 25, 2004 @09:13PM (#8084312)
    Just when the geeks with Orkut accounts thought they'd finally made a friend ... WHAM! Gone! I'd say Google has built the first truly realistic social network.

  • Honest Question. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by dodald ( 195775 ) on Sunday January 25, 2004 @09:14PM (#8084314) Homepage
    What is down about it? I don't see that notice and everything looks like its working.

  • Hmmm... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Afromelonhead ( 730368 ) <`moc.liamg' `ta' `smada.ttocs.nayr'> on Sunday January 25, 2004 @09:14PM (#8084319)
    This story seems kinda curious to me. Google appears to handle what has to be a magnificient strain on their webservers just fine... and I doubt that Orkut had as many users as Google.

    Then again... this just proves that not even Google is immune to being slashdotted...

  • Remember southpark? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Mr2cents ( 323101 ) on Sunday January 25, 2004 @09:17PM (#8084334)
    Where Cartman bought his theme park (losing money at the time) and let nobody in? In no time everyone wanted to come to the theme park, and others followed his idea. Restaurants allowing nobody in, etc. Orkut seems like the latest development in that area to me..

    • Re:Remember southpark? (Score:2, Insightful)

      by kfg ( 145172 )
      Did not the previous story end with a plea for an invitation?

      What is the first thing a child does when you tell them they can't do something?

      Don't people buy Tommy Hilfiger jackets?

      Q.E.D.

      KFG
      • Don't people buy Tommy Hilfiger jackets?

        Well, five years ago they did. I think Tommy Hilfiger went out of fashion around the time people stopped wearing their keys, credit cards and a pound of other junk on a stupid lanyard around their necks.

        It looks like you'll fit nicely into Orkut's demographic, though! ;-)

    • I don't think it is a matter of trying to run a closed community, but more of a matter of the way the social network system works. It will be an interesting experiment, because you will truely know that everyone on the site is linked via someone else. Everyone will get their chance. It will expand exponentially.
    • Too bad it doesn't fucking work. My own network [24.125.12.101] is invitation only, and 8 months later we're struggling along at 50 people.

      As it is, I still have half a dozen slots open for anyone outside of US borders... want to invite yourself?
  • From the site, it almost sounds like Orkut is a more personalized version of TalkCity... Or perhaps another weird spin on messaging.
  • ..while it lasted. But seriously, it is rather interesting, but there where niggling problems (mostly UI in my opinion) that needed to be fixed. Kudos to them for addressing them so quickly.

  • It is a good thing.. (Score:5, Informative)

    by RainbowSix ( 105550 ) on Sunday January 25, 2004 @09:19PM (#8084352) Homepage
    I don't know what bugs other people saw, but I had 13 messages in my orkut box this morning, all of which were about how there was a but that let anybody message everybody :)

    I didn't read into it so unfortunately I can't give details.

    • since you seem to already be in... how bout inviting everyone who is asking in this thread?

      <pathetic>like me?</pathetic>
    • I can answer this.

      When you do a search on orkut for people, you can save your search settings. Male only, female only, picture or no picture, within a certain distance from a zip code, things like that. You can set the search so that you'll look up every member, and then save that setting. Then you go to write a message, and you have the option of selecting a search setting to send it to. Load up the setting that selects everybody, and wham -- global message.

  • Male/Female Ratio (Score:5, Interesting)

    by vpscolo ( 737900 ) on Sunday January 25, 2004 @09:21PM (#8084369) Homepage
    You have to wonder what male/female ration there is. You can't help but think there are much more men taking the typical geek is expected to be a male

    Rus
    • That's why the logo has 4 women and 4 men. To mislead hopeful male geeks as to the ratio, ;)

      Orkut seems to continue the trend of taking well established
      text based internet services and putting them on the web.

      usenet -> groups.google (by way of dejanews)
      archie -> images.google
      invite only rooms on irc -> orkut

      I wonder if orkut is going to become the word for 'dating service' as google has
      become the word for 'search engine'.

      • I wonder if orkut is going to become the word for 'dating service' as google has become the word for 'search engine'.

        It won't happen in Holland, that's for sure. Kut is Dutch for cunt.

        JP

    • Ratio? (Score:2)

      by juuri ( 7678 )
      Of users or people running the system?

      The user percentage of females was easily almost equal to males with many females creating new communities and inviting their own friends to grow the network.

      My friends list on Orkut was more female than male.

  • Things got chaotic... (Score:5, Funny)

    by mat catastrophe ( 105256 ) on Sunday January 25, 2004 @09:23PM (#8084382) Homepage

    On the intraweb? Chaos?

    Say it ain't so.

    "..people were going where they shouldn't, exposing the systems weaknesses.."

    No, again I say! No!

  • An article from "The Register" (Score:5, Interesting)

    by BlueTrin ( 683373 ) on Sunday January 25, 2004 @09:23PM (#8084386) Homepage Journal
    Article from "The Register" [theregister.co.uk]

    Best part:
    Google has attempted to play down the relationship with Orkut, although each page is branded "in affiliation with Google." The Privacy Policy notes "We may share information that you submit and any non-personally identifiable information we collect with Google, Inc. and agents of orkut in accordance to the terms and conditions of this Privacy Policy," according an FAQ on the site. Fix that recursion!
    • Google doesn't even own the Orkut.com domain name... some guy named Orkut who works for Google does. That's the "affiliation"... Orkut is not a formal project of Google, but a project that resulted when employees were given company time to work on personal projects. Therefore, this project hangs in an interesting space where Google somewhat owns it, but somewhat doesn't. That's what this strange "affiliation" thing is all about...
  • So how do you get in? (to see what it is and how it works?

    • Re:get in? (Score:3, Informative)

      by LostCluster ( 625375 ) *
      You don't. This service is right now only meant for the friends of the developers and their friends and their friends and their friends...

      Those who are not 6 degrees of friendship away from the developers may be waiting a while.

  • Orkut, Friendster, and Patented Friends (Score:5, Interesting)

    by boutell ( 5367 ) on Sunday January 25, 2004 @09:27PM (#8084416) Homepage
    This commentary originally appeared on my livejournal, shortly before the Slashdot story: [livejournal.com]

    Friendster and Orkut

    A few days ago ronebofh [livejournal.com] handed me an invite to Orkut [orkut.com], Google's new Friendster [friendster.com] clone. I played with this for about 48 hours, adding and inviting various friends to my network and reading the messages that percolated through the network -- probably the only feature of Orkut I'll get much use out of. I'm a married person, not looking for a date, and not living in the Bay Area.

    The topic of every message: Orkut itself. According to one message, any random friendless person can conveniently post a message that reaches thousands of users via their friend "networks." In other words, insanely convenient spammage. Another poster replied that this sort of endless nitpicking is sure to turn Orkut into yet another "hippie echo chamber." I think they opened for the Flaming Lips last week at the Trocadero.

    Tonight Orkut has been shut down to "implement some improvements and upgrades suggested by users." In their defense, the Google staff point out that Orkut is in beta and they did warn us this sort of thing could happen. Ticked off, I decided to check out Friendster, which I somehow skipped up until now.

    When I got to Friendster's site, I was surprised to see that Friendster also describes itself as a "beta" version. And that gave me some sympathy for the Orkut administrators, who are only trying to use the word "beta" to mean what "beta" is supposed to mean:

    • Beta means "outsiders are welcome to play with this, but don't trust it with your life."
    • Beta means "we have run out of ways to break it ourselves and really need some outside input now."
    • Beta means "if something breaks, that's good; give us specific and detailed feedback, and don't whine."
    This is a pretty accurate description of what Orkut is doing. Is this really an accurate description of what Friendster is doing, after three years? Or are they just afraid to call it a finished product and invite the level of criticism that is appropriate for a finished product? No wonder people don't understand that Google's staff are acting appropriately when they take the beta version of Orkut down for a while to fix the important problems users have pointed out.

    But "beta" is not the most offensive phrase on the Friendster home page. "Patent pending" is much worse. A patent on online social networking? I'd laugh if it wasn't so... no, wait, I am laughing. Give me a break, here. Surely this is nonsense no one takes seriously. Right?

    Wrong, wrong, wrong, according to this news.com story. [com.com] sixdegrees patented online "social networking" sites in 2001. Two Friendster-like sites have acquired the patent. Now everyone in the field is furiously writing patent applications.

    I'd like to invite you all over for a beer, but I can't afford the intellectual property fees.

    • Any new commercial service/application/video game is in beta version since some years ...

      Companies just have to market the "new features" to sell their products and then will use the cash to fix some of the most obvious bugs, or use the crowd to test their products instead of paying beta testers.

  • The real letter (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 25, 2004 @09:29PM (#8084427)
    Dear orkut.com users,

    Wow.

    I can't believe how buggy my software was. People have been flaming me non-stop since it launched!

    Based on your suggestions, I will be deleting everyone I don't like/agree with. There are so many of you it will take a few days. I also hope you didn't notice that it was slowing down to friendster-esque speeds right before I shut it off. I'll have some nice surprises in the way of criminally ugly UI components when I bring it back online. I'll spam you to start using it again once I've deleted all references to how insecure the service is.

    Thanks for being guinea pigs in my side-project of seeing how much press I can personally get by dropping Google's good name.

    stay beautiful,
    Orkut Buyukkokten

  • why orkut is cooler than friendster (Score:5, Insightful)

    by mattdm ( 1931 ) on Sunday January 25, 2004 @09:32PM (#8084443) Homepage
    (In addition to not being as slow as dirt, I mean.)

    One of the obvious and natural things for a site like this is to try and link people together via shared interests, quirks, ideals, memberships, and so on.

    Friendster lets you list these things, but has a terrible search interface -- if you like the band Poster Children [posterchildren.com], you can say so, but then trying to find other people with the same interet will reveal everyone who mentions either "poster" or "children". Basically, broken.

    People try to work around this by creating fake "people" for abstract ideas -- there's a whole article about it at Salon [salon.com]. But the Friendster site people, instead of capitalizing on this, decided t hat this "subversion" is a plague trying to destroy their system. And, this work-around does make the social network part less useful -- having no way of distinguishing links between real people from those via Mickey Mouse is a problem.

    Instead of trying to kick every abstract concept, cartoon character, university mascot, and geek web site logo off of the network, these things should be *encouaged*, but defined as separate from real people. It's both more fun *and* more useful. And it's exactly what Orkut does -- in addition to your own entry, anyone can create a "Community", and join as many such communities as they like.

    So, Orkut is cooler because they have this feature -- but even more because they understand *why* to have it.
    • You took a weird example ...
      Interest: children and poster ... ahum ... I hope you have chosen these words for the purpose to show it was broken :D
    • Tribe.net manages this pretty well. Instead of creating a fake user to represent a common interest, you create a "tribe." These can be open to all or moderated, and you can belong to as many tribes as you like. And having been around a while, it already has a fairly large userbase.
    • #1 reason why Orkut is cooler than Friendster (besides the obvious things, like -- hey it's by Google!):

      It's not called "friendster".

      [Man, what godawful name that is; if the people there are anything like the name suggests, stay far, far, away... and even if they're not, it's pretty annoying if you cringe everytime you go there.]

  • If it is by invitation only... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by John Seminal ( 698722 ) on Sunday January 25, 2004 @09:33PM (#8084451) Journal
    Then who were the first people selected to join?

    This sounds to me like those psych games of "you can't have it" to make you want something you did not want. If I have to jump through a hoop to join something, then I do not want anything to do with it.

    Also, did anyone read their privacy statement. Looks like they not only share your personal information with 3rd parties, but they also share whatever information you send in your messeges to other members and people you invite.

    • It seems to work:

      proof [slashdot.org]

      Maybe shutting down their site to be referenced by slashdot may be a good marketing move. I guess that once the site will be back (and once Slashdot will add an article about how orkut fixed their problems and got back online) they will have more customers.
    • Orkut has very fine levels of control on how your private information is shared among strangers, friends and friendsOfFriends unlike many of the other networking community sites. They seem to have taken a look at many of the other sites and fixed a lot of the more obvious problems.

      However the site was taken down because it wasn't doing any input validation so fine grained user security or not info was easily obtained by any random person.

    • Or maybe this was a small project that was not expecting the attention of a slashdotting because it's not ready yet...

    • who
      socialsoftwareweb [weblogsinc.com] reports - "... Right now it is 'invitation only...' Google employees, and friends of Google employees make up the 'orkut' membership ..."

      privacy
      register [theregister.co.uk] reported - "... Google has attempted to play down the relationship with Orkut, although each page is branded "in affiliation with Google." The Privacy Policy notes "We may share information that you submit and any non-personally identifiable information we collect with Google, Inc. and agents of orkut in accordance to the terms

  • Hacking for dummies... (Score:3, Funny)

    by LostCluster ( 625375 ) * on Sunday January 25, 2004 @09:35PM (#8084470)
    It still ran quickly, but like infestations of mice, people were going where they shouldn't, exposing the systems weaknesses. :)

    Translation: Users were able to do things they weren't supposed to... no need for security holes when you have wide open doors. :)
  • Rejected by geeks! What could be worse??

  • Growth (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Zwoop ( 35471 )
    I watched the population size from Saturday 1/25 10am (PST) to Sunday 1pm (PST). It grew pretty steadily all day, from 5,349 to 8,662 users over a 24 hour period. Of course, by this time, the abuse on broadcast messages etc. was rampant.
  • No Homers...


  • Security issues. (Score:2, Informative)

    by Kelmenson ( 592104 )
    I think the site is down due to many security issues/flaws. People were sending messages to the entire userbase, and more significantly, people were able to delete accounts that weren't theirs... Myself and quite a few of my friends' accounts were deleted, and it seems good that Google locked the door for a while until the iron out some of these major kinks.

  • The way Orkut should be (Score:3, Informative)

    by beaverbrother ( 586749 ) on Sunday January 25, 2004 @10:16PM (#8084706)
    Search + Social Networking = Eurekster [eurekster.com] Too bad google doesnt do what Eurekster does and combine its excelent search capabilites with social networking.
  • So Google will go the been-there-done-that route Yahoo has taken of copying any service they can't buy??

  • How much does anyone want to bet that these improvements involve moving away from Windows and Active Server Pages for their page serving tech?

    It doesn't make much financial or strategic sense. I can almost see the conversation over the weekend: "Wow, the site is popular and growing exponentially! We need to add another two or three servers... Google's got thousands, so that isn't a problem, so now we just need to buy more copies of Windows Server..." (Or who knows, maybe even pay for the version they were

    • Re:Some improvements? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 25, 2004 @10:51PM (#8084930)
      You have it all wrong. If you do some research into this mess you will see that orkut (the service) is the side project of some guy named orkut. He happens to work at google. The servers are not hosted at google.

      orkut (the guy) seems to like ASP. This is his side project. It's his call. He's paying for the servers and bandwidth out of his own pocket.

      All of you slashdrones think this is some google-bet-the-company play into social software. The reality is much more mundane. It's some weird, lonely PhD who has a side project. He happens to work at a company everyone cares about.

      If you read google's statements about this you will see that they don't particularly care. The only reason they might care is that all of this crazy, breathless bullsh*t is getting spread around.

      it is not getting re-written. At least not until google actually starts contributing to the project. You will know when that day comes when they change the name to something less awful and a traceroute actually goes to a google-owned server.

  • Mediachest Napsterizes Blockbuster (Score:3, Interesting)

    by muscleman706 ( 654133 ) on Sunday January 25, 2004 @10:24PM (#8084749) Homepage
    Mediachest [mediachest.com] is another social software / friendster type site that allows you to create real-life P2P borrowing networks out of the physical items that you own. It supports integration into existing online and offline communities through its group system, and doubles as an inventory tracking site with public lists of what you own so that you can show them off to your friends or members of web forums you frequent.
  • I can look at it right now...but not get in seeing as I haven't been invited. Was the main page down with that message or did it only pop up if you tried logging in?
  • Given the news coverage [google.com] Orkut received, it's not at all surprising it went down. The traffic must have been extraordinary.

  • Joining (Score:2, Interesting)

    by denjin ( 115496 )
    How did they pick the initial 12,000 anyway?

    Looks interesting, but it is fairly hard to try if you don't know anyone who joined in the first place.:(

  • I can't believe that no one mentioned the .NET (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Twister002 ( 537605 ) on Monday January 26, 2004 @12:17AM (#8085379) Homepage
    I can't believe that no one has mentioned that this was built using .NET. And now it's down because it couldn't handle the stress. That's almost TOO easy, c'mon. No MS bashing? I'm disappointed.

  • How exactly does okrut get it's initial user base if it's invite only?

  • My God. (Score:2, Interesting)

    by mindstrm ( 20013 )
    Think of the information sites like this collect, and think doubly before paticipating.

    They get to know who signed up who, TONS of personal details that many people reveal, age, approximate locations, who they know, how they are all connected... you didn't think this was done out of pure goodwill, did you?

    OF course they won't destroy the data.. it's too valuable.

    I can't believe how many people blindly just give it all up to some site just becuase it's fun.

    Google is a great search engine, and has some gr
  • I mean, they have a neat idea, but what can they do with it? Users aren't going to pay for it. Advertising? Even with VC funding last fall performance has gotten progressively worse over the past year so that it's largely unusable most of the time - and over which time I can't think of any change I can recall. It's still beta, still has the same UI...

    It seemed like an ideal candidate to be swallowed up by Google, Yahoo, MSN or AOL - as a service to offer to bring in users or whatever.

    I mean, I think

  • Official Explanation (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Dear Orkut Users,

    Unfortunately, my parents came back from vacation, and they immediately noticed the tire marks on the lawn, even though we did our best to paint them over in a matching color. Things went downhill from there, as my mother caught the little bit of remaining vomit smell from the bathroom, and then my dad decided to check the four bags of trash that were stacked up on top of the cans. Fortunately he didn't find the bong, but the six cases of empties were pretty hard to deny - all three of m

  • The return of Club Nexus! (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    2 (or so) years ago, before friendster and all its look-alikes, there was a service called club nexus. It had the built in trust system that to sign up you had to have a stanford.edu so only students and faculty of stanford could join. The guy who ran it was a cs grad student named orkut. Club nexus seemed to morph in a Stanford Alumni Associate service called incircle powered by "Affinity Engines". It looks like orkut how now joined google. Congrats.
  • Here's a page from the wayback machine dating 1997 [archive.org] describing friendsters et al. The last reference on the wayback machine is in april 1999...
  • .. the multilingual meaning of word 'Orkut' first.

    Why? 'Orkut' means 'multiple orgasms' in finnish slang, and not just any regional slang but in pretty much nationwide spoken language.

    It's fun, but I still think twice before I send anyone an invitation email with subject: "Come and join me in Orkut!". People would think that I'm sending them porn site advertisements or proposing inappropriate action in the middle of a day and most likely wouldn't even open the mail but flame me instead.. sigh :D

    Well,

  • The hole I found... (Score:4, Funny)

    by andy@petdance.com ( 114827 ) <andy@petdance.com> on Monday January 26, 2004 @11:21AM (#8087869) Homepage
    The self-made communities are kind of fun, except for two big problems: You can't delete a community, or even leave it if you created it, and you can rename any community at any time.

    As a joke, I created a couple of communities like "Community For People Who Don't Join Communities" and "Orkut, for people who are users of Orkut." Turns out I got about 15 members of the Orkut community, who actually began discussing stuff! The nerve!

    So I renamed the community to "Barry Manilow fans", and changed the image for the group to this [amazon.com]. Alas, I went out for the day soon after, and by the time I came back, Orkut was down, so I never did see what happened, if people noticed or what.

    That being said, it was nice to be able to create them for legit groups, like "Computer Authors" and so on.

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