The interesting thing about Orkut is that its history has seen many different groups dominant in the overall consideration of membership in the website. Orkut for the most part started off as an invitation only website and that is perhaps one of the reasons why the site evolved as it did in terms of the user base.

In 2004, people from the United States were the dominant nationality in Orkut, accounting for more than half of the users at 52% of the total user base. They were followed by people from Japan at around 8% and people from Brazil at around 5%.

As time went on however, Orkut took off in popularity in Brazil. Different Brazilians sent invitations to their friends and as the internet community in that country really started to warm up to Orkut, their user base exploded. Nobody really knows why this happened and why Orkut was the conduit for people from Brazil entering the world of web 2.0 social networking. The creator of Orkut even went to Brazil in 2007 to try and figure out what was behind it, but no particularly satisfying theories beyond sheer luck on the part of the Orkut site have been put forward.

Nevertheless, Brazilians have supplanted Americans as the dominant nationality on the website. As of today, Brazilians account for approximately 50% of the people on the site. They are followed by Indians which represent a very large minority at 15%. They also represent a minority that is growing rapidly, so it is quite possible that the third chapter in the history of Orkut will see Indians as the dominant nationality on the website.

The previously dominant Americans now represent just 9% of the user base on the website, many having left for other pastures due to a lack of comprehension of Portuguese. Japanese people are nearly as numerous as Americans with people from Pakistan rounding out the top five at approximately 7% of the user base.

Orkut was created by Orkut Buyukkokten. That is where the name of the website comes from. Mr. Buyukkokten created the website independently and to a large degree continues to maintain the website and introduce new features into it independently. However, there is a clear timeline of events to be respected here as Google has gotten more and more involved in running this operation over the course of its evolution.

At first, Orkut was an invitation only service that was maintained almost entirely by Mr. Buyukkokten. However, as time went by, Google continued to take more interest in the project which started out being hosted in California. This was during the period of time when Americans enjoyed majority membership in the Orkut service. As time went on however, the service was taken over by people from Brazil. That brought certain language and legal issues to the forefront, many of which needed to be dealt with directly by Google.

In 2008, they made an announcement that Orkut would be moved from California to Brazil and headquartered at the Google branch in that country. Orkut was placed under the care of multiple workers reporting to Mr. Buyukkokten and Google became very involved in the operations on this social networking service.

Right from the very start, Google’s name and logo were a part of the Orkut service. Nowadays however, Orkut has been integrated into the larger Google Empire. You can log into Orkut with your Google username and password and you will see the very familiar Google login screen on the main Orkut page when you do so. Even though Orkut enjoys a lot more autonomy as a service than just about anything else that Google has to offer, it is most definitely a Google service. In the future once the beta version has passed and Orkut is a fully operational service, you can expect it to have a relationship with Google similar to the one that Blogger currently enjoys.

Orkut is a social networking website that was launched on January 22, 2004. It is owned and operated by Google and was named after the employee that initially created it as an independent project. To a large degree, it is still an independent project but it is an online social networking website that is affiliated with Google as evidenced by the ability of people to log into the site using their Google ID.

According to the main page at Orkut, it is still in the Beta stage. This is likely because of the independent project origins and continued leanings of the Orkut project. With very little time to work on it as compared to other sites like MySpace and Facebook, Orkut has progressed very slowly from where it was nearly six years ago.

If you are familiar with MySpace or Facebook, you will already know the gist of what Orkut is. It is a site that is designed to help you meet new people that have similar interests and keep contact with old friends that you may not have seen in a long time. In fact, Orkut is an online website with a lot of potential just because it does not have the same heavy commercialization as MySpace and Facebook. Orkut is free to try out new things and experiment and that is why it is worthwhile for you to maintain an account with this website if you like social networking. Of course, if you already have a Google account, you can just use that information as the basis for creating a new user profile.

Orkut is completely free to use like many of the other social networking sites and other Google services. It will likely change significantly once the Beta phase is over however, so be prepared to see some differences in Orkut a few years down the road.