Orkut History

Orkut was launched on January 22, 2004 by Google as independent
project of Orkut Büyükkökten, The community membership was originally
by invitation only. Orkut's explanation for invitation
" Orkut is unique, because it's an organically growing network of
trusted friends. That way we won't grow too large, too quickly and
everyone will have at least one person to vouch for them. If you know
someone who is a member of Orkut, that person can invite you to join
as well. If you don't know an Orkut member, wait a bit and most likely
you soon will. We look forward to having you as part of the Orkut
community."
At first year, United States had the largest user base. By word of
mouth various Brazilians began adopting and inviting more friends, in
a viral driven by the blogosphere. Soon after, Brazil surpassed U.S.
in number of users and Orkut started becoming heavily popular in
Brazil. Americans then started leaving the service and switching to
other similar sites such as MySpace and Friendster. This phenomenon
was covered by the English blogosphere with some criticism towards
Brazilians [8][9][10] because they tended to communicate (not only
among themselves) using their native language Portuguese and not
English.
From that time, Orkut growth was driven by Brazilian users, first
being opened to everyone by register and becoming one of the most
popular websites in Brazil.[citation needed] The creator Orkut
Büyükkökten visited Brazil in 2007,[11] in attempt to understand the
success in that country. In 2007 Orkut began attracting large amount
of Indians who were not intimidated by the number of Brazilians on the
site. As for now, Orkut also has a simplified site for mobile users.
"m.Orkut.com". In 2008, a new feature was introduced for users having
slow internet connections to access Orkut using the "View Orkut in
lighter version" setting.