Orkut: A Presentation

Last week, we had a concise but very informative presentation by some students from the PEX-08 A Batch. The boys had selected their topic as "Orkut". A snapshot of the discussion is given below:

Orkut, the popular networking site, was started by a Google employee- Orkut Buyukkokten. It claims to be designed to help users meet new friends and maintain existing relationships. Orkut is the eighth most visited site throughout the world. It is also the 31st most visited site in US.

Some of the disadvantages that Vijay highlighted were use of fake profiles, prevalence of hate communities, privacy infringement, anonymous postings, adult content and spam, addiction to the virtual world and a limit of 999 friends.

Patel informed us about the statistics like the number of users having crossed the 15 million mark. 60% of the users are in the 18-25 years age group, while the next largest segment is 26-30 years. 64% of the users are in Orkut for friends, while 18% each are for partners, business and dating. One surprising statistic was in terms of the countries that the users came from. Brazilians constitute the largest (55%) of the orkutians, with US, India following up at 19 and 16% resp. The reason for the Brazilian dominance is Orkut's availability in the local language, which no other similar site has. Incidentally, Indian participation has grown from about 2% in 2005 to the current 16%!

Orkut, one of the most popular Google properties, didn't seem to have a strong business model. Some of the possible revenue streams in future could come from selling premium subscriptions, classifieds and targeted ads. Data mining and user profiling could also be used to get to a certain business model.

One interesting aspect about Orkut is "Orkut Jail". Huy Zing, a very popular Orkuter with more than 600 communities ranging from the mundane to more controversial ones, was "jailed" in 2004. Basically, he was barred from posting anything on Orkut, though he was allowed to view everything. But there was such a big hue and cry over his "killing" that he had to be reinstated. Such is the power of networking sites like Orkut! Now, Orkut has a "policeman" logging in as OrkutGuy who has the rights to get into any community or user profile, and take appropriate action. For instance, OrkutGuy interfered when one of the communities changed its name from "Orkut Loser Patrol" to "Orkut Pedophile Society".

Orkut (and Google, in turn) has also supported Governments in getting information about any illegal activities.

We also had a comparative discussion about Orkut and other networking sites like MySpace and Linkedin. We ended the discussion with a note on SecondLife, one of the futuristic models in the virtual world. SecondLife is a virtual world with more than 8 mn residents, and a flourishing economy with almost $2 mn spent every day! More than 300 universities have setup their own campuses in this other world!

The next presentation in this batch will be on the pride of the Indian IT industry- INFOSYS. Keep watching this space...