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Orkut Goes Dark, At Least For A Bit

Posted by timothy on 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'"

8 of 294 comments (clear)

  1. It is a good thing.. by RainbowSix · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

    --
    --------
    It's OK to be social, just don't tell anyone about it.
    1. Re:It is a good thing.. by 404notfound · · Score: 2, Informative

      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.

  2. Re:Honest Question. by mattdm · · Score: 3, Informative

    The notice is there after you log in.

  3. Re:get in? by LostCluster · · Score: 2, Informative

    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.

  4. Security issues. by Kelmenson · · Score: 2, Informative

    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.

  5. The way Orkut should be by beaverbrother · · Score: 3, Informative

    Search + Social Networking = Eurekster Too bad google doesnt do what Eurekster does and combine its excelent search capabilites with social networking.

  6. Re:They WILL stop innovating... by DerekLyons · · Score: 1, Informative
    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 .
  7. The return of Club Nexus! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    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.