Orkut Story

What is 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.

History
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. Some discomfort with this exists among users and potential users of Orkut, especially since Google's other noteworthy product of 2004, the Web-based email client Gmail, had servers scan emails for keywords in order to deliver advertisements targeted at them, which meant to some that Google was "reading your e-mail".
Originally, the Orkut community was felt to be elite, because its membership was by invitation only. At the end of July 2004 Orkut surpassed the 1,000,000 member mark, and at the end of September it surpassed the 2,000,000 mark. As of 9th April, 2007, the number of members was over 49 million
Orkut's use as a social tool is complex, because various people frequently try to add strangers to their own pool of friends, often just to increase the number indicating their number of friends next to their name in their profile.

List of Features

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", "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", "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 in India
Of late, the number of Indians on Orkut has been increasing rapidly. On October 10, 2006, the Bombay High Court's Aurangabad bench served a notice on Google for allowing a hate campaign against India. This referred to a community on Orkut called 'We Hate India', which initially carried a picture of an Indian flag being burned and some anti-India content. Often the creator of such groups give false information about their location to instigate further hatred.

The High Court order was issued in response to a public-interest petition filed by an Aurangabad advocate. Google had six weeks to respond. Even before the petition was filed, many Orkut users had noticed this community and were mailing or otherwise messaging their contacts on Orkut to report the community as bogus to Google, which could result in its removal. The community continues to exist and had spawned several 'We hate those who hate India' communities.
On November 23, Bombay High Court asked the state government to file its reply in connection with a petition demanding a ban on social networking site, Orkut, for hosting an anti-Shivaji Web community.
Recently, the Pune rural police cracked a rave party which is illegal in India. The accused have been charged under anti-narcotic laws, the (Indian) Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropics Substances Act, 1985 (NDPS). Besides the NDPS, according to some media reports, the police were deliberating on the issue of charging the accused under the (Indian) Information Technology Act, 2000 perhaps because Orkut was believed to be one of the mode of communication for these kind of drug abuses. Some Indians believe that Orkut digital social network should be moderated heavily in a place where people lack the maturity and misuse its facilities.

Yahoo Story

1. Introduction
1.1 What is Yahoo?
Yahoo is the world's most visited Internet destination, for many people Yahoo is the Internet. Yahoo INC is a leading global Internet communications, commerce and media company that offers a comprehensive branded network of services. These services are available worldwide and the company's global web network includes 24 world properties including Yahoo UK & Ireland, Yahoo Japan, Yahoo Germany, and Yahoo France to name just a few. A recently released figure shows that Yahoo had 156 million different people availing of these worldwide services in December 2001. The latest figure released regarding Irish interest in Yahoo shows that Yahoo had 340, 732 unique visitors in January 2002. Both these figures grow month by month. Yahoo INC'S flagship site www.yahoo.com was the first online navigational guide to the web and is therefore the leading guide in terms of traffic, advertising, household and business user reach. Yahoo INC has offices in Europe, Asia, Latin America, Australia, Canada and the United States.
2. History of Yahoo
2.1 Its creatorsYahoo was created in April 1994 by two Ph.D. candidates in Electrical engineering named David Filo and Jerry Yang at Stanford University in California. Both have been instrumental in building Yahoo into the world's most highly trafficked web site and one of the Internets most recognised brands
David Filo, a native of Moss Bluff, Los Angeles serves as a key technologist, directing the technical operations behind the company's global network of Web properties. Filo began his studies at Stanford after graduating from Tulane University in 1988. He was described as quiet, intense, and technically brilliant. Filo holds a B.S. degree in computer engineering from Tulane University and an M.S. degree in electrical engineering from Stanford University. He is currently on a leave of absence from Stanford's electrical engineering Ph.D. program.
Jerry Yang, is a Taiwanese native raised in San Jose, California. He moved with his family to the United States shortly after he turned age 10. When he started school in San Jose, his English vocabulary consisted of only one word--shoe. Yang says that he was a lazy student with a short attention span. Yet he succeeded in academics. He entered Stanford as an undergraduate in 1990 and earned both a bachelor's and master's degree in four years. Though he met with a few prospective employers at that point, Yang felt he lacked both the experience and the maturity to join the work force. Instead of donning a suit and entering the corporate world, he chose to stay in school. He is a leading force in the media industry. As a member of Yahoo's board of directors, Yang works closely with the company's president and CEO to develop corporate business strategies and guide the future direction of the company. Yang holds B.S. and M.S. degrees in electrical engineering from Stanford University and like Filo is currently on a leave of absence from Stanford's electrical engineering Ph.D. program
2.2 The early yearsYahoo started out as an idea, grew into a student hobby and then turned into a full time passion for both Filo and Yang. Now it is the brand name most associated with the Internet. It was started in February 1994 in Filo's and Yang's campus trailer. Originally it was called "Jerry and David's guide to the World Wide Web", but after randomly scanning pages in a dictionary for a smarter sounding name, they came up with Yahoo. Yahoo is actually an acronym for "Yet another Hierarchical Officious Oracle". The acronym represents the fact that Yahoo seeks to be a directory or hierarchy that serves as an oracle to the modern day office dweller who is officious. They just saw it as a way to keep track of their personal interests on the Internet, as at that time in 94 or so, the only means to find things on the Internet was spider based engines such as altavista.
Yahoo itself first resided on Yang's student workstation, "Akebono," while the software was lodged on Filo's computer, "Konishiki" - both named after legendary sumo wrestlers. The Yahoo directory was used originally only by Filo, Yang and fellow students at Stanford University, however the power of word of mouth kicked in and gradually people from the surrounding area and colleges began using it.
As Yahoo grew the strains on a university's resources became more and more extreme. Yahoo basically moved in and set up shop in Netscape facilities in early 1995. In the days before browser wars Netscape was a very large portal in its own right and had vast technical resources.
Due to the torrent of traffic and enthusiastic reception Yahoo was receiving, the founders knew they had a potential business on their hands. In March 1995, the pair incorporated the business and met with dozens of Silicon Valley venture capitalists. They eventually came across Sequoia Capital, the well-regarded firm whose most successful investments included Apple Computer, Atari, Oracle and Cisco Systems. They agreed to fund Yahoo in April 1995 with an initial investment of nearly $2 million.
Realizing their new company was growing quickly, Jerry and David began to shop for a management team. They hired Tim Koogle, a veteran of Motorola and an alumnus of the Stanford engineering department, as chief executive officer and Jeffrey Mallett, founder of Novell's WordPerfect consumer division, as chief operating officer. They secured a second round of funding in autumn 1995 from investors Reuters Ltd. and Softbank. Yahoo launched a highly successful IPO in April 1996 with a total of 49 employees.
As Yahoo grew as a directory people would bookmark it and link to this one of their favourite sites. Yahoo would not be where it is today at all if it were not for all of the sites that linked to it early on. The link, even before yahoo served as the lifeblood of the Internet and the means by which people could endorse their favourite sites.
Yahoo basically just took this to a whole new level. By linking to so many sites in categories many sites in return linked to them. Yahoo received an enormous amount of television and other media attention from 94 to 97 or so and became the defacto spokesman for the Internet world. As Yahoo transformed itself from a hobby to an empire, corporate thinking began to set in. The site and company began to think of itself as a "portal." A gobbling up of related sites that could serve to defend Yahoo's position was the result.
Yahoo purchased geocities, and free e-mail provider rocketmail.com from their parent companies. This was so that Yahoo could provide free WebPages and e-mail services to its visitors. Yahoo also acquired Webring.com by acquiring their parent company. Webring was a company with roots similar to Yahoo that grew as a means for individuals to organise data selectively by subject. When a webring on a given topic became too big or unfocused then another one could be formed with membership determined by the knowledge of the founder of the ring. This was a serious yahoo threat and that is partly why they were acquired.
Yahoo next acquired broadcast.com. By acquiring them they gained a foothold in the on-line broadcast radio and television market that they feel will be important in the future. Also by acquiring them they acquired simplenet.com, a small provider of webhosting services. This is ironic considering Yahoo itself still uses Exodus Communications to host their site rather than their own webhosting division.
Yahoo proceeded to create things that the general public would come back to see. Free e-mail would force people to come back daily to check their e-mail. Free webhosting via geocities would increase Yahoo's reach for advertisers. However it also would make it so in effect people collectively would be coming to Yahoo to find their own sites and Yahoo would make money coming to their flagship site and as people left for their favourite geocities pages. As free e-mail and WebPages services grew in the late 90s the market became common everywhere. Yahoo later formed on-line clubs and on-line game sections so that people could play chess on-line or meet up with others with similar needs. Just why so many advertisements on Television for Yahoo clubs are aired remains a mystery to many hardcore Yahoo users they had from the beginning.
Yahoo has moved from the areas of data organisation and ontology into many diverse and wide-ranging areas. These include news, stock quotes, and other syndicated information, which is purchased. Yahoo also serves as a hub for on-line shopping and a centre for e-commerce via Yahoo on-line stores. All of these changes have moved yahoo more away from the "cool" hip place to gather and more toward the realm of a big Walmart.All of these changes also have negated one factor, that the Internet has grown, but Yahoo's editorial surfing staff has not grown all that much. Yahoo's core supporters in the beginning were webmasters who gave Yahoo the grass roots support and help necessary for a small force of two to transform itself into the world's leading on-line entity.
3. Why is Yahoo so popular?
3.1 Internet PortalYahoo is so popular nowadays because it is an Internet portal, this means that it's a one stop internet destination for news, sports, stocks, searching, weather, communications, e-commerce among many other things. Now we'll look in more detail into the services Yahoo offers that attract so many people every day.
3.1.1 Search and Directory servicesYahoo continues to be by far the most popular way to find information on the web of any of the search engines and directories. With one of the smallest databases, Yahoo gets more traffic than the top five search engines put together. This is how Yahoo made its name - Yahoo has a team of web site reviewers called surfers who visit hundreds of Internet sites daily.
Yahoo is successful because its quality control is high providing users with high quality links and without all the redundant listings that plague so many of the search engines. Yahoo is a directory, not a search engine, making it possible to look up information within categories. In contrast, in the search engines like Google.com and Altavista.com your search is subject to a particular algorithm used by the engines and is dependent on how well the pages match the search engines criteria regardless of the actual real life relevancy of the page and site content. Yahoo on the other hand uses people instead of a computer algorithm to ensure that sites are listed appropriately and only lists valid sites and generally only the home page.
The result of Yahoo's painstaking efforts to ensure the integrity of its directory is that it is by far the easiest way to find information on the web. For example, when working on a project on "online investing". Making a comprehensive list of all sites providing online investing services. Using Yahoo I searched using the keywords "online investing" and found listings organised into categories like, brokers, mutual funds, etc. making it easy to put together a list of firms that trade online. In contrast, using other search engines that index every page on a site based on an algorithm I found an endless listing of pages. Some of these had little relevance to the keywords and information. The problem that search engines like Google.com and Altavista.com are stuck with, in comparison to Yahoo, is that no matter how good their algorithms are their results are dependent on a mathematical set of criteria not actual real life relevance. This means that using Google.com or Altavista.com, a search for online trading might not find anything buried in their listings.
3.1.2 News and Sports servicesYahoo provides a comprehensive news service. This includes breaking news stories, sports news, entertainment news, business news, technology and weather news. It does this by providing regularly updated coverage from many well know sources including Reuters, The New York Times, NBC and Sky News. Yahoo news alerts enable you to receive the latest news stories twice a day via email. Yahoo also provides Internet users with the ability to search for news using keywords related to the story/stories they are searching for. All of Yahoo's global web sites each contain stories relevant to their country as well as the biggest international news stories.
3.1.3 Community and Communication servicesYahoo has a comprehensive suite of community and communication services for Web users. Yahoo Clubs enables individuals to create personal, customisable Web communities integrating Yahoo's popular communications tools. The company provides Yahoo Calendar to provide registered Yahoo users with a full-featured, Web-based personal calendar they can view, edit and manage from any Net-connected computer. Yahoo's most popular communication tool however is free Yahoo email. This email service is second only to Microsoft's Hotmail.com in terms of the amount of people who use it. Yahoo's chat is the most popular chat on the web, users can chat in topic specific chat rooms in real time with people on the other side of the world. Another very popular Yahoo communication and community tool is Yahoo messenger, which allows friends to chat and have conferences over the Internet.
3.1.4 Merchant and Shopping servicesMerchant and shopping services provided by Yahoo are second to none on the web. Yahoo auctions and shopping are person to person services, which enables users to easily browse, buy and sell items online. For users shopping for travel packages, Yahoo travel allows them to compare prices for vacations and cruises over a large number of travel agencies. Yahoo store enables merchant's to sell an unlimited number of products direct to Yahoo's massive audience. Yahoo also provides Classified ads, which allow merchants to reach millions of people each day. Yahoo also offers web-hosting services. Thousands of businesses rely on these Yahoo services on a daily basis.
4. Yahoo - A financial Insight
4.1 How does Yahoo make its money?Just like TV and radio Yahoo makes the bulk of its profit from advertising. Different web sites and companies pay Yahoo to let them display their banner ad on the various Yahoo sites. Yahoo served 3,795 advertisers during the fourth quarter of 2001, including more than 1,842 clients outside the United States.
Yahoo also uses a form of advertising called premium listings, which enables web sites to appear at the top of any searches done containing certain keywords. Yahoo also partners with two well known online retailers, the first a Yahoo.com partner - Barnes & Noble is an online book retailer, their ad appears on the right hand side of the web page when any search is performed using Yahoo.com. Every time a searcher visits barnesandnoble.com from this ad on Yahoo.com and buys a book, Yahoo receives a portion of the profits. The second is a partner of Yahoo.co.uk and it is another well-known bookstore. Amazon.co.uk's ad also appears on the right of the web page for any search performed and again Yahoo receives a portion of the profits from sales generated through the ad.
Yahoo also makes its money through premium business services such as extra mail storage, Yahoo Bill Pay, Yahoo Auctions, Yahoo Photos and Corporate Yahoo. Another service based income generator for Yahoo is Yahoo stores. Yahoo stores currently has 17,000+ merchants. Each time any of these merchant's sells a product from their Yahoo store, Yahoo takes a percentage of the sale price, usually 2% - 8% depending on what the merchant is selling. Thousands of products are sold via Yahoo stores every day.
In fact one of the few things that Yahoo users can complain about is the level of commercialisation which Yahoo sites take on, almost every page of results returned from a search on Yahoo has advertisements related to the keyword(s) just searched for. This in itself does not take away from the search service Yahoo provides but it could do in the future, if Yahoo starts to concentrate more on making money than providing users with quality free search like it always has.
4.2 YHOO - Yahoo and the NASDAQYahoo stock shares are traded on the NASDAQ under the ticker symbol YHOO. Yahoo started trading on the NASDAQ in April 1996, this time is referred to as the IPO. The opening price of Yahoo's stock on the day of the Initial Public Offering of stock (IPO) was $13.00, by the time the NASDAQ closed on the same day share prices had risen to $33.00 per share. The per share price rose so much because of the enormous potential Yahoo INC had shown in previous months in terms of its growth as a search directory and potential Internet portal. Since then however the share price has lowered but has still remained reasonably strong on most trading days. Yahoo's 52-week low was $8.02 and its 52- week high was $ 25.938. At the time of writing the last Yahoo INC stock share was sold for $14.93. The latest Yahoo market value is $ 8,504,307,160, this figure changes based on the number of outstanding shares (shares that people own) and the per price share. So at the moment Yahoo has 569,612,000 outstanding shares. This figure is calculated by dividing the marketing value $8,504,307,160 by the latest share price $14.93, which equals 569,612 million shares currently trading on the NASDAQ. These figures were a real eye opener in showing me just how big Yahoo INC actually is. The bottom line regarding Yahoo and the NASDAQ is that Yahoo INC is an unstoppable monster.
4.3 2002 outlookThe financial outlook for Yahoo INC looks better than ever for the year 2002. Yahoo's profits were not affected by the September 11th attacks on America. Yahoo's global visitor figures and profits continue to grow. 2002 should be no different. The company expects revenues for the first quarter 2002 to be between $160 and $180 million, and between $750 and $800 million for the full year 2002.
5. Conclusion and sources
5.1 ConclusionYahoo is and will be for some time the leading Internet destination, every couple of months it buys out companies which it sees as potential competition to protect it's future. No other web companies come near in terms of what Yahoo offer home and business based Internet users.
In a very short time a project of two college students named David Filo and Jerry Yang has turned into the world's most successful Internet company with well over 3,100 staff. In short Yahoo has given the dream of dot com success to everyone with a PC and modem.