After my first lap (day) of Orkut, I got these to share.

It's supposedly written in ASP.NET.  That one surprised me.

It has many security and privacy issues just as other social networking services have.  For example, one can send a message to thousands of members with only a few clicks.  There could be some XSS (cross-site scripting) problems as well.  But, overall, I have yet to see anything that can't be resolved over time given sufficient technical, financial, emotional, spiritual, or religious fervor.

Invitation-only aspect of Orkut blew me away in terms of its effect and its meaning.  Since you can't just register without an invitation from someone within, it creates a sense of value that drives people to signup.

As to the meaning, what invitation-only means is that everyone who is a member of Orkut knows Orkut himself through a string of friends.  It means you have joined a six-degree of separation experiment where the starting end is Orkut Buyukkokten.  I'll bet that was why it was named Orkut.

I am not yet convinced that there exists a workable revenue model behind Orkut but then I have similar opinions about Rovers in Mars.  Entertaining thoughts about what might lie beyond the horizon with a bunch of geeky friends is a reward enough for now.  To this end, I created an Orkut Community titled "Orkut Design" to examine Orkut in detail.

Update:

Well, it looks like this Rover is not rolling for a while as Google offlined Orkut to make improvements.  Wasn't it a fun party?