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The third largest social networking website Orkut.com was created & developed by Google employee Orkut Büyükkökten (born Feb 6, 1975), a Turkish computer engineer, Orkut.com was named after the creator.

Originally from Turkey Konya, Büyükkökten obtained a B.Sc. degree in Computer Engineering and Information Science from Bilkent University in Ankara and earned a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University, California. His research at Stanford focused on Web search and efficient PDA.

Orkut started working at Google in 2002 and is one of their top employees.

(In the picture/photo/pic is the Orkut profile picture at Orkut.com)

He developed Orkut.com the 3rd largest social network in the world as a 20% independent project while working at Google.

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.com on InCircle code. The allegation is based on the presence of 9 identical bugs in Orkut.com that also existed in InCircle. Google and Orkut have since settled the lawsuit; the terms have not been revealed so far.

Orkut.com Successes & Failures:

The initial target market for Orkut was the United States, but the majority of its users are in Brazil and India. In fact, as of May 2008, 53.86% of Orkut’s users are from Brazil, followed by India with 16.97% and 23.4% of the traffic comes from Brazil, followed by India with 18.0%. Unlike Facebook and Friendster, it is not a popular website in the United States of America and Canada.

With much inputs from Wikipedia

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