Orkut, a social networking site named after creator and Google employee Orkut Buyukkokten, is "currently garnering the most hype among the Internet cognoscenti". Orkut combines many of the features of its competitors, encouraging users to create profiles about their interests, professional life and personal life. The site's design appears inspired by Buyukkokten's previous work on Club Nexus, a system developed at Stanford University in 2001 . Created by Stanford students, Club Nexus was designed to assist students' communication requirements . Membership on Orkut is invitation-only; new members must be invited to join by an existing member. This exclusivity has caused Orkut to gain a certain social currency that comes with being a member of a private club. Some enterprising individuals have even gone as far as auctioning Orkut invitations on eBay.Google claims that Buyukkokten developed Orkut during his "personal project time" while at work with the help of "a few other engineers". All Google employees are encouraged to spend part of their time working on personal projects in order to boost creativity and innovation. This "official" story about Orkut being a side project is not believed by the authors of rafer.net, who point out that Orkut is the "most fully featured social network in existence," and "grew from almost zero page views to serving (probably) 3 [million] pages per day... that is a lot of work... it wasn't the work of one man anytime in the last several months. This challenge to the pervasive myth of Orkut being a "pet project" leads into the possible business case of why Google has sponsored such a project. Revenues and profitability may not exist yet, but a possible business model exists in selling subscriptions, classified and targeted advertising. Social networks can be called as the "next generation of online classifieds". Some believe Orkut is another asset in Google's business strategy for positioning itself as a market leader, others feel it is a way of creating a larger database of user behaviour for better data-mining capabilities .

Orkut's design model

While Orkut allows people to create profiles and links to friends, and participate in discussion communites, Orkut also has a 'feature' that has become very contentious among members: Orkut has a jail. Jail is ostensibly a 'time-out' area where someone who has been abusing the system is put for a limited period of time. While in jail, the 'offender' may not post or send messages on Orkut, but can view and read content. It essentially restricts users to viewing the site in a read-only mode. However, the rest of the parameters about jail are confusing, and are muddied by the fact that there is no official mention of Jail on the Orkut help page. There is no warning when you are jailed: you log on and instead of your picture appearing on your profile page, a shadowy image of someone in prison appears. There are no no phone calls, no lawyer, no judge, no jury... nothing. The closest action one can take to an appeal is to email "help@Orkut.com" and hope for the best. Usually most people are 'released' from jail within 24 hours, but this isn't always the case. Some report being in jail for minutes, some for days. Over time, users have managed to piece together theories about what constitutes a "jailable" offence. Orkut does have a codified "law", in that site administrators maintain Terms of Service (TOC) and Community Standards documents, which outline certain legal issues regarding using the service, such as copyright, ownership of content, acceptable use, non-commercial use, and so on. The Community Standards outlines many of these issues in plain language, and also acts as a 'bill of rights'-type document, with general standards for outlawing hate speech, harassment and discrimination. However, many instances of users being put in jail does not seem to come from contravening the TOS or Community Standards (the most common offence being the use of a psudonym or an obviously fake image, leading some people to use "real" sounding fake names and photos). Orkut also allows individuals to help "police" the site by having a "report as bogus" link on each person's profile page, where Orkut users can "tattle" on others. Clicking on "report as bogus" essentially places that person in jail until Orkut administration can review their profile. It also seems that the jailing procedure is at least partially automated to detect "robot"-like actions, such as joining too many communities at once, editing too many posts, or performing other actions in rapid succession. Part of many people's problem with the "Jail" design is that there is almost no user feedback - contacting "help@Orkut.com" almost invariably results in either no response or a canned email reply. Seemingly in response to this and other requests for information, the site administrators created "OrkutGuy", a persona who could communicate with users in communities directly. OrkutGuy is personified as police officer, which is interesting in light of Williams' warning to choose leadership metaphors carefully: Orkut apparently sees its leadership personification as a cop (and a white, male one at that).

The Orkut Loser Patrol

The second case is one that blurs lines of appropriate behaviour and good taste, and almost seems designed to challenge the notion of "community standards" in general. It involves a community called the "Orkut Loser Patrol" (OLP). At times Orkut can feel cliquish and immature as people try to collect as many friends and see how high they can get their "cool" and "sexy" rankings (an exercise in vanity that this author must also admit to indulging in). The OLP was a facetious group created to point out people who were "losers" on Orkut, while simultaneously parodying the kind of "high school popularity contest" nature of the Orkut experience. The very existence of the OLP was contentious: some thought the very idea cruel, vulgar and against the spirit of Orkut as a community; these people perhaps did not share the darker or more ironic sense of humour displayed by many of the members. After several weeks and a large number of users joining OLP (and during this time the original sarcastic nature of the overriding joke had been significantly diluted by the influx of new members, some of whom took the joke literally), the moderator played a cruel joke on the community members. He changed the community name to "Orkut Pedophile Society", along with switching the former community image of a deranged clown to an innocent-looking picture of a young boy in red sweater and the caption "let us touch your little bits just a little bit... LEGALIZE PEDOPHILIA, NOW". The sick genius of this move was that the hundreds of members of the OLP suddenly found themselves members of a group that no-one in their right mind would want to be associated with; this information was also available to anyone who would look at their profile and see what communities they belonged to. Not surprisingly, there was a massive outcry from members, many of whom quickly deleted the group from their communities list. Some thought the joke funny and absurd, while others found the whole situation utterly disgusting and beyond humour, saying pedophilia was a topic that could not be comical in any context. One result was that the moderator who had made the switch was most likely the subject of a barrage of "report as bogus" claims from angry users, and thus was banished to jail for almost three days. Since he was in jail, he could not edit the community name. The joke quickly became painful, and eventually "OrkutGuy" stepped in, changing the community name back to its original (although inexplicably, misspelled) and explaining that the moderator powers to change community names and images were temporarily suspended. The result of this whole incident was a serious blow to the trust of many in Orkut. While the site was out to create a "trusted community", it was apparent that in some cases, some people could not be trusted to uphold the community standards and to take the whole experiment seriously. Others thought the incident indicated that the emperor had no clothes: while using a heavy-handed control system in one place, Orkut's design allowed for abuse on many other levels if one only used a little imagination. Eventually the moderator ability to modify community names and content was reinstated.