Comment by achatham
8 hours ago
It was built in-house at Google, not aquired. Orkut (the person) had been working at Google for several years before he built orkut.com. He'd done a similar site at Stanford pre-Google (and pre-Friendster!)
8 hours ago
It was built in-house at Google, not aquired. Orkut (the person) had been working at Google for several years before he built orkut.com. He'd done a similar site at Stanford pre-Google (and pre-Friendster!)
IIRC it was a 20% time project. Up to you to decide if that makes 20% time more or less of a good idea.
I was the Associate Product Manager assigned to Orkut as it prepared to launch. It was not 20% of his time ;-) Orkut was the backup name we had to go with because we couldn't reach a deal to get the name he wanted (eden.com) from a domain squatter.
They paved Paradise and put up a parking lot.
Today I learned! The aspx and the lack of branding really had me fooled. And when the Google branding came along, that’s when it started to go down in my circle, so I never knew that it was a Google (20%) project!