Orkut: Google's Forgotten Social Network That Conquered Brazil

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On January 22, 2004, Google quietly launched a social network named for the engineer who built it in his 20 percent time, Orkut Büyükkökten. Within months his former employer, Affinity Engines, sued, claiming the site shared code with its own alumni network and pointing to nine identical bugs in both. The product itself was startlingly open: any member could view any profile, and friends could publicly rate one another as trustworthy, cool, or sexy.

This episode follows Orkut from side project to accidental giant. It flatlined in the United States but spread through internet cafes in Brazil and India, and in 2008 Google moved its operations to Belo Horizonte. Growth brought fake profiles, state censorship, criminal cases, and a standoff with a Brazilian judge over user data. Worms and a botched redesign weakened it further, and on September 30, 2014, the site went dark.

• When the platform was winding down in 2014, Brazil supplied 55.5 percent of its traffic and India 18.4 percent. The United States accounted for just 3.3 percent.
• In 2006 a Brazilian federal judge fined Google $23,000 a day for refusing to hand over data on about 24 users, while Google argued the data sat on servers in the United States under American law.
• A 2007 flaw kept sessions alive for 14 days after users clicked log out, a serious danger for people signing in at public cyber cafes.
• A worm written by a Brazilian user infected more than 700,000 accounts by exploiting scrapbook messages that accepted raw HTML.
• The 2009 redesign split users between old and new versions, and private messages sent across the divide simply vanished. In April 2022 the old address came back with a letter from the founder promising something new.