About ORKUT !!!

Orkut is an Internet social network service run by Google and named after its creator, Google employee Orkut Büyükkökten. It claims to be designed to help users meet new friends and maintain existing relationships. Similar to Friendster and MySpace, Orkut goes a step further by permitting the creation of easy-to-setup simple Communities of users. Since October 2006, Orkut permits users to create accounts without an invitation. In April 2007, Orkut introduced polls in communities.

Orkut is the eighth most visited site throughout the world; it is also the second most visited site in India.

Orkut has a list of features unique to itself like "Scrapbook”, “Communities" etc., apart from the normal features like messaging and photo album..
Scrapping, though the word in not accepted officially in English, is popular among the Orkut community as a kind of offline chatting. You can scrap a person even if he is offline. The person to whom the scrap is sent will be able to see it when he visits his scrapbook. Contrary to personal messaging or email, scrap book entries are public, meaning that any one with an orkut account can read others scraps. Earlier if a person had to reply to the scrap he had to visit the person's profile then go to his scrapbook then scrap him. But in late 2006 Orkut changed it by adding a feature by which one can reply to a scrap from their scrapbook itself.

Another unique feature of orkut is "Communities". Anyone with an orkut account can create a community on anything. One can post topics, inform users about an event, ask them questions or just play games. There are more than a million communities on orkut on absolutely everything from pizza to pasta from Film star to superstar, from your pet to your teacher. The 1st 5 communities on orkut were started with in 24 hrs of launch of orkut. In April 2007, orkut added a feature called "Polls" where in community users can be polled. Participation can be open for all or can be restricted to only the members of community.
In addition to this there is a personal messaging feature. Users rarely use this feature. It is mainly used by community owners to ask others to join their community. Though the messages are meant to be personal they aren't. If you know the exact link of the message then you can visit read their messages.

There is also a feature to upload photos and videos into your orkut profile. One can have up to 12 photos on his album. Each photo can also be tagged with a citation. The video upload feature was added in early 2007, probably after Google's acquisition of YouTube. Users can even link their videos from Youtube or google video and make it play as an inline video within orkut.
Users have options to rate their friends in the order of "Best Friends", "Good Friends", and “Friends”, Acquaintances “and” Haven’t met. Further, each member can become fans of any of the friends in their list and can also evaluate whether their friend is "Trustworthy", "Cool", and “Sexy" on a scale of 1 to 3 (marked by icons) and is aggregated in terms of a percentage. Unlike Facebook where a member can view profile details of people only on their network, Orkut allows anyone to visit anyone's profile, unless a potential visitor is on your "Ignore List". Importantly, each member can also customize their profile preferences and can restrict information that appear on their profile from their friends and/or others (not on the friends list). The highlight feature is where any member can add any other member on Orkut to his/her "Crush List" and both of them will be informed only when both parties have added each other to their "Crush List".

If person A deletes person B from his friends' list, person A will be deleted from person B's friends' list also.

Orkut has many other competitors such as MySpace and Facebook, widespread internet communities. Orkut as some major service like Blogging service. Google is planning to add several new features to orkut in 2007.