Flashing Back to 2004 As Orkut Fades Away a Decade Later

“Exclusive Google will shortly unveil its social networking site, Orkut. The Friendster clone is the work of Google employee and former Stanford graduate Orkut Buyukkokten.

“Undetered by the feeding frenzy around the social networking bubble, and rebuffed by Friendster Inc, which it attempted to buy, Google has decided to build one better. Given Friendster’s well-documented problems with coping with a large number of users, and Google’s world class expertise in scalability, it ought to be more than up to the technical challange. But will it pay?”

“Orkut buit his eponymous service entirely on his own. It was a prototype to gather data, to try things out, to experiment. He wrote the code, designed the user interface, set up the databases. He didn’t intend for it to be a full-fledged Google product, so to accelerate the development, he used tools that were commonly available outside Google. They came from Microsoft. The server running Orkut wasn’t even located in a Google data center, but at the home of the weather site Wunderground.com. Orkut knew his system would never support Google-sized audiences, but it should safely scale to handle two or three hundred thousand users. Membership in Orkut would be by invitation only, so he would be able to throttle growth by controlling the number of invitations the system distributed.

“Marissa [Mayer] was the consumer product manager. She saw Orkut as a small startup within Google, operating autonomously to prove that a single engineer with a new idea could build and test a product without enduring the delays of Google’s increasingly bureaucratic development process. Larry and Sergey encouraged her to manage Orkut as if it were an independent operation.

[…Long section about the argument over whether or not Google would acknowledge that Orkut was a Google product. Eventually, It did.]

“Despite its rough start, Orkut became a smash success — in Estonia, India and Brazil. (And in Finland for a brief time, because ‘orkut’ in Finnish means ‘multiple sexual climaxes.’ Once people realized the site was not for romantic hookups, traffic quickly fell off.) Especially Brazil, where, Orkut informed me, a third of all the country’s Internet traffic is still on the site that bears his name. When he visited Rio de Janeiro, he was recognized instantly and mobbed like a rock star. Brazilians bought computers for no reason other than to use the service he had built.

“In the United States, however, Orkut lagged. Two weeks after its launch, a student at Harvard introduced a social network for his classmates. He called it ‘The Facebook.’
…

“Because Orkut had been written using Microsoft tools, Google’s engineers deemed it ‘not scalable.’ [Quoting Paul Buchheit, the former Google employee who would launch his own project, Gmail, a few months later] ‘They turned their noses up at it and they didn’t make the thing work. They just let it die. And by the time they managed to rewrite it in a way that was acceptable to the engineers at Google, it was already dead everywhere except for Brazil. Who knows? If they had actually done what was necessary to make it go, it could have been successful.'”