The Birth of Orkut
Early Beginnings
In 2004, just a month before Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook from his Harvard dorm room, another social media site made its debut with a splash of hot pink. If you were online in the mid-2000s, you might remember Orkut, with its distinctive logo, tiny profile pictures, and text-heavy, pastel-blue feeds. Unlike Zuckerberg or Jack Dorsey, the founder of Orkut managed to stay under the radar. Interestingly, the man behind Orkut is also named Orkut.
Orkut Büyükkökten’s Journey
Born in Konya, Turkey, Orkut Büyükkökten moved to Germany at the age of 1. His childhood obsession with Star Wars led him to study computer science at Stanford. There, he noticed that people socialized more in their dorms than on campus, prompting him to launch the first-ever college social network, Club Nexus. “I noticed I met most of my friends through friends of friends,” he says. “And I was like, what if we could meet people using the social graph?” He later developed InCircle, a network for alumni. Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook arrived three years later.
Creating Orkut
Google and the 20 Percent Time
A meeting with Larry Page and Sergey Brin led Büyükkökten to a job as a frontend software engineer at Google. The tech giant offers a perk known as “20 percent time,” where employees can spend a day a week on passion projects. Büyükkökten used this time to start a new platform aimed at connecting people globally. “I wanted to create a global community that gave everyone around the world a way to connect,” he says. Google approved, and Büyükkökten developed the entire platform, even setting up the servers himself.
Choosing the Name
The name Orkut was suggested by a colleague. “They said, why don’t you just name it Orkut? You’re the only person who worked on it, it’s a five-letter word, it’s very unique, and you already own the domain,” he recalls.
Orkut Büyükkökten photographed at home in San Francisco in April. Photograph: Carolyn Fong
The Rise and Fall of Orkut
Initial Success
Before Orkut launched in January 2004, Büyükkökten warned the team that the platform could handle only 200,000 users. “They said, let’s just launch and see what happens,” he explains. The rest is history. “It grew so fast. Before we knew it, we had millions of users,” he says.
Unique Features
Orkut featured a digital Scrapbook, the ability to give compliments, create communities, and curate a Crush List. “It reflected all of my personality traits. You could flatter people by saying how cool they were, but you could never say something negative about them,” he says.
Challenges and Decline
Initially popular in the US and Japan, Orkut faced server issues. “We started having a lot of scalability issues and infrastructure problems,” Büyükkökten says. They had to rewrite the entire platform, causing many users to drop off. Despite this, Orkut became incredibly popular in Finland, India, and especially Brazil. “It became a huge success. A lot of people think I’m Brazilian because of this,” he explains.
Controversies and Shutdown
Orkut faced several issues, including bans in Iran and the UAE, and concerns about inappropriate content in Brazil and India. In 2014, Orkut went offline due to declining users and competition from Facebook. “Vic Gundotra, in charge of Google+, decided against having any competing social products,” Büyükkökten explains.
Legacy and New Ventures
Fond Memories
Büyükkökten cherishes the stories of people connecting through Orkut. “We had so many stories of people falling in love and moving in together from different parts of the world,” he says. It also provided a platform for minority communities. “I was talking to a gay journalist from a small town in São Paulo who told me that finding all these LGBTQ people on Orkut transformed his life,” he adds.
New Social Network: Hello
After leaving Google in 2014, Büyükkökten founded a new social network called Hello. Focused on positive connections, Hello used “loves” instead of likes and connected users with common interests. Launched in Brazil in 2018, Hello enjoyed high engagement. “One of the things that stood out in our user surveys was that people said when they open Hello, it makes them happy,” he says.
Future Plans
Now, Büyükkökten is working on a new platform leveraging AI and machine learning to foster happiness and community. “Connection will be the cornerstone of design, interaction, product, and experience,” he says. While he hasn’t revealed the name yet, he is optimistic about its potential. “One of the biggest ills of society is the decline in social capital. We have a loneliness epidemic,” he says.
“My biggest passion in life is connecting people through technology. But when was the last time you met someone on social media? It’s creating shame, pessimism, division, depression, and anxiety,” he says.
Optimism for the Future
Büyükkökten believes his next platform will bring back authenticity and a sense of belonging. “We haven’t announced it yet. But I’m really excited. I truly care. I want to bring that authenticity and sense of belonging back,” he concludes.
This story first appeared in the July/August 2024 UK edition of The Zero Byte magazine.
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