Google Social Network: Orkut

shelleymonster writes "According to CNET, Google has quietly released its own version of Friendster, called Orkut. About 3 months ago, Google entered into talks to acquire Friendster, but was turned down. Named after one of its engineers, Orkut Buyukkokten, the new social network looks even tougher to get into than Friendster. An initial 12,000 invitations were sent out, and new users can only join through an existing user. Someone want to invite me?"

Comments

Re:oo, shiny web site

[CaptainBaz]

It's just javascript and css - the javascript darkens the rgb values of the text progressively in a setTimeout(), until it hits the maximum. not very Accessible, but looks pretty...

Not the most fortunate name

[joonasl]

In finnish, the word "orkut" is the plural form of the slang word for orgasm. Gives a completely new meaning for the idea of "Orkut is an online community that connects people through a network of trusted friends."

Re:oo, shiny web site

[mansemat]

Right Click > View Source

This is only art of it, but it's the color changing part...

<script>
col=255;
function sa() { document.getElementById("ws").style.color="rgb(" + col + "," + col + "," + col + ")"; col-=5; if(col<0) col=0; if(col>0) setTimeout('sa()', 10); }
</script>

Re:Orkut?

[agurkan]

actually this sounds like a turkish name and turkish people usually go by their first name rather than last. politicians are the exception but even they sometimes go by their full names rather than only last. common example is the football players, few people know their last name even though they usually are very famous if they are good (or in good teams).

Club Nexis

[darksmurf]

Orkut Buyukkokten has done this before.

Slashster

[DarkHelmet]

Okay everyone, shameless plug time.

I am currently creating a PHP version of friendster which I call Slashster. (Yes, this is inspired from Slashdot and Friendster).

I figured that a PHP/mysql implementation would be interesting, and I'm rather curious to see how this thing can end up scaling, and if it can do it well.

I was thinking of launching this on Monday, but this slashdot story was too relevant for me to wait on it, and get some of the press on it.

Right now, its layout is nearly identical to friendster, but will change once I actually get someone with design skill to help me redo it.

There are a couple primary differences between slashster and friendster so far:

• Slashster has a messageboard. You can only see threads / post from people two degrees of separation or less from you (You, your friends, their friends). Friendster kind of had a "post-it" system on their site, which didn't have any sort of interaction on it. This aims to be a little better.
• News feeds. I'm still working on getting the XML parser working better, but I have a couple news feeds on the "main page" which are pretty much customizable.
• Moderation: Right now, people who submit new threads to the messageboard have control on moderating people up / down on those posts. The way I figure, people who want to talk about one thing will have their own corner. People who want to be irrelevant and stupid will have another corner.
• Karma. Your karma is (roughly) the sum of your moderations (slashdot style) divided by the number of days you've been on the site. This way, it'll encourage people to be there on a daily basis and contribute. Also, the amount of space you get for uploading pictures depends on your karma.
• Referrals: You end up getting more picture space for the Karma of your friends. Hopefully this will encourage people to invite others who participate, and not those who do nothing.

I'm very interested in getting input on the place. I'm still doing bugfixes on the site, as I said before, so people visiting might get the occasional parse error or two while I'm updating things.

Still, I'm looking forward to any feedback (positive and negative) on this place. I'm really hoping this post gets modded up, simply so that more people will check it out.

You can email me at the address listed with this user account. Thanks everyone.

--Mark

Orkut running Windows/ASP.NET ... HMM

[x31forest]

Well well, and I thought google is all for linux. It seems their orkut site is running on a Windows ASP.NET platform. That can be checked easily with http://www.orkut.com/inc which is an invalid page but shows you their menu structure.

Re:WOO HOO!

[Anonymous Coward]

You're 100% right. I'm posting anonymously because of my Stanford ties, but this is precisely what (and who) Orkut is. There was a demo version built while he was at Stanford, and it was just a clique competition... you even got ranked (similar to PageRank) by the number of "important friends" you had. It's truly repugnant.