ORKUT – A DEEP THOUGHT

Orkut – A social networking website does not require any kind of introduction. But a brief introduction is kind of necessary in such a post.
Orkut was launched on January 22,2004 by the search company Google, the brainchild of Orkut Büyükkökten, a Turkish software engineer, who developed it as an independent project while working at Google. Google allows its workers 20% of free time in which they can work in their field of interest. And anything developed in this time is a property of Google. Orkut was a result of Büyükkökten’s work in this free time. You can visit his orkut profile by clicking here on this link ->
Orkut Büykkökten's Profile

At the time this post was created orkut had 61,623,260 users. Orkut is the eighth most visited site throughout the world. It is also the second most visited site in India . Orkut has highest number of users from Brazil followed by US and India is at third place. India is with 8.90% share. It has become one of the greatest time pass for the people like us in India. Most of the time you can find us logged on to orkut and sending s‘craps’ like “Hi Dude , Whats up ?” , or just “sssup ??” and one of our favourite is “Aur batao” ….. some time I feel that orkut must include some shortcuts for such scraps ….. this feature will save a lot of time for us.
Well this is just a brief info. I don’t think there is any need of telling you more about the features and benefits of orkut because you would already know that. This post is actually meant to take your attention to something you might have never given a thought before. It was Thrusday 31st May , Ankur and Puneet came home. We called Priyank to come home but he couldn’t due to some unavoidable reasons so we people thought to just drop by his house to say a “hi” . Well it was almost 10 at night. We met Priyank. Where there is Priyank there has to be discussions. So just like that we started talking about google and then came to orkut. The four of us were discussing that why does google need orkut !!!
(Yes we discuss such things even at odd hours like 2200)


So that is the question….. Why does Google need Orkut ??
I am sure you would have your profile on orkut and would be well aware of all its features. You would never see any major advertisements on orkut. Infact you would not see much source of income on orkut. So the question is why is google giving terabytes of storage space to orkut on its servers and has employed thousands of people just to ensure proper working of orkut and also keeps on introducing new features on this website. I gave a thought to this question, also dived into the world of cyber space to get the answer and then came to a conclusion. Google is the greatest search engine in this world. If you were to believe Chetan Bhagat (Author of Five Point Someone and One Night @ the Call Centre) , nothing is perfect in this world other than Google. Some “rivals” of Google are Yahoo,MSN etc. Now you would say that Google is better than these search engines. It is ofcourse !! That is because of the search technique which it uses in its search which is different from that used by its rivals ( Will tell you in detail about it in another post). But Google is lagging behind Yahoo and MSN and others in one field, which is the knowledge about its users !!! Google doesn’t know anything about its users because there is no registration process required to search using Google whereas services like Yahoo and MSN has the registration process while we use these sites so these sites have a user database. So in order to know about their users, instead of convincing them to register they choose a social networking website “orkut”. Now this website contains tons of data about you (Now they even know whether you are going around with someone or not by your status ;-) ). So Google has the user database now. Moreover just imagine, if Google integrates Orkut with google.com (like they have integrated Google Talk , Youtube and Google Videos ) and starts directing your requests by “orkut.google.com”…… so now they have a “.google.com” cookie on your PC and your orkut id using both they can mine a lot of data about you. This data can be very useful for Google. Which can make them improve their search results and it can be beneficial in many other ways.

So in this way you don’t even come to know and without registering for Google.com , google has a lot of information about you , this time more than Yahoo and MSN had !! On a more philosophical note….. sometimes we just enjoy things as they come in our way but we should always remember that everything in this world comes with a REASON !!!