Orkut was quietly launched on January 22, 2004 by the search company Google. Orkut Büyükkökten, a Turkish software engineer, developed Orkut as an independent project while working at Google (required by its policy). Some discomfort with this exists among users and potential users of Orkut, especially since Google's other noteworthy product of 2004, the Web-based email client Gmail, had servers scan emails for keywords in order to deliver advertisements targeted at them, which sparked an idea that Google was "reading your e-mail".
While previously working for Affinity Engines, he had developed a similar system, InCircle, intended for use by university alumni groups. In late June 2004, Affinity Engines filed suit against Google, claiming that Büyükkökten and Google based Orkut on inCircle code. The allegation is based on the presence of 9 identical bugs in Orkut that also exist in InCircle.
Originally, the Orkut community was felt to be elite, because its membership was by invitation only. At the end of July 2004 Orkut surpassed the 1,000,000 member mark, and at the end of September it surpassed the 2,000,000 mark. As of December 6, 2006, the number of members was over 35.2 million.
Orkut's use as a social tool is complex, because various people frequently try to add strangers to their own pool of friends, often just to increase the number indicating their number of friends next to their name in their profile. Many "add-me" communities exist, solely for this purpose. A large number of bogus, cloned, fake, invisible and "orphaned" profiles also exist. [citation needed]
isn't tht nice...me lucky :bleh: :bleh: 