Orkut is an online community designed to make your social life more active and stimulating.
Orkut's social network can help you maintain existing relationships with pictures and messages and establish new ones by reaching out to people that you have never met before.
At the end of July 2004 Orkut surpassed the 1,000,000 member mark; by September it had surpassed 2,000,000. As of August 2007, the number of members was over 67,000,000
A user first creates his or her "Profile", in which he/she mentions his/her "Social", "Professional" and "Personal" details, with the option of choosing which group ("Friends", "Friend's friends","everyone") of people would be allowed to view the particulars. A user can also upload his/her photo as the photo of his profile. If necessary, a user can completely remove his profile photo also.
Scrapping, though the word is not accepted officially in English, is popular among the Orkut community as a kind of offline chatting. Users can scrap on another member's scrap book, even if that member is offline. The scrap recipient will be able to see it when he or she visits their scrapbook. Contrary to personal messaging or email, scrap book entries are public, meaning that any one with an orkut account can read others' scraps. Users can reply to a scrap from their scrapbook itself by replying to a scrap. Scraps can also be in HTML, enabling users to post photos, videos, audio files and other embedded objects directly into others' scrapbook.
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 with topics ranging from pizza to pasta or from film star to superstar. The first five communities on Orkut were started with in 24 hrs of launch of orkut. Users can upload photos into their Orkut profile with a caption. Users can also add videos to their profile from either YouTube or Google Videos. Users can create either a restricted or un-restricted polls for polling a community of users.
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".
To join orkut, simply sign in with your Google Account and you can begin to create your own profile right away. If you do not have a Google Account yet, they will help you create one in minutes.
Official Site Orkut.com