Before launching Orkut in January 2004, Büyükkökten warned the team that the platform on which they built it could only support 200,000 users. It wouldn’t scale. “They said, ‘Let’s just take off and see what happens,'” he explains. The rest is online history. “It grew very quickly. Before we knew it, we had millions of users,” he says.
Orkut included a digital Scrapbook and the ability to give others compliments (ranging from “trustworthy” to “sexy”), create a community, and manage your own like list. “It reflected all of my personality traits. You can flatter people by saying how nippy they are, but you can never say anything negative about them,” he says.
Initially, Orkut was popular in the US and Japan. However, as expected, server problems cut off connections to users. “We started having a lot of problems with scalability and infrastructure,” says Büyükkökten. They had to rewrite the entire platform using C++, Java and Google tools. This process took an entire year, with dozens of original users leaving due to slow speeds and too many encounters with Orkut’s nostalgic “Bad, bad server, no donut for you” error message.
However, it was around this time that the site became extremely popular in Finland. Büyükkökten was stunned. “I couldn’t understand it until I talked to a friend who speaks Finnish. And he said, “Do you know what your name means?” I did not do that. He told me this orkuta means multiple orgasms. Return? “Yes, so in Finland everyone thought they were signing up to an adult website. But then they left right after because we couldn’t please them,” he laughs.
Awkward double meanings aside, Orkut continued to spread around the world. Apart from exploding in Estonia, the platform has achieved huge success in India. His real second home, however, was Brazil. “It was a huge success. Many people think that I am Brazilian because of this,” explains Büyükkökten. He has a theory as to why Brazil is crazy about Orkut. “The Brazilian culture is very hospitable and warm. It’s about friendships, and they care about connections. They are also very early adopters of technology,” he says. At its peak, 11 million of Brazil’s 14 million internet users used Orkut, with most logging in through internet cafes. It took Facebook seven years to catch up.
But Orkut wasn’t without its problems (and plenty of fraudulent profiles). The site has been banned in Iran and the United Arab Emirates. Government authorities in Brazil and India have had concerns about drug and child pornography content, which Büyükkökten denies exists on Orkut. Brazilians coined this word Orcutization to describe a social media site like Orkut that becomes less nippy once it goes mainstream. In 2014, as users suffered from issues related to snail-paced server speeds, Facebook’s more intuitive interface, and privacy concerns, Orkut went offline. “Vic Gundotra, who is responsible for Google+, has decided not to have any competing social media products,” explains Büyükkökten.
But Büyükkökten has fond memories. “We had many stories about people who fell in love and moved in together from different parts of the world. I have a friend in Canada who met his wife in Brazil through Orkut, a friend in New York who met his wife in Estonia and now they are married and have two children. He says. It also provided a platform for minority communities. “I talked to a gay journalist from a small town in São Paulo who told me that finding all these LGBTQ people on Orkut changed his life,” he adds.
Büyükkökten left Google in 2014 and founded a novel social network, again with a uncomplicated five-letter title: Hi. He wanted to focus on positive relationships. It used the words “loves” rather than likes, and users could choose from over 100 people, from a cricket fan to a fashion enthusiast, and then connect with like-minded people and shared interests. Hello, launched in Brazil in 2018 with 2 million users, enjoyed “very high engagement,” which Büyükkökten said outperformed Instagram and Twitter. “One of the things that stood out in our user surveys was that when people opened it, they said, ‘Good morning, this makes them happy.’
The app has been downloaded over 2 million times – a fraction of Orkut’s users – but Büyükkökten is proud of it. “It exceeded all our dreams. In many cases, our K-rate (the number of new people that existing users bring to the app) has reached 3, which has led us to exponential growth,” he says. But in 2020, Büyükkökten will say goodbye to Hello.
Now he is working on a novel platform. “It will use artificial intelligence and machine learning to optimize to improve happiness, bring people together, support communities, empower users and create a better society,” he says. “Connection will be the foundation of design, interaction, product and experience.” And the name? “If I told you about a new brand, you would be blown away and everything would be crystal clear,” he says.
Once again, he is motivated by his constant desire to connect people. “One of the greatest problems facing society is the collapse of social capital. After smartphones and the pandemic, we stopped meeting friends and we don’t know our neighbors. We have a loneliness epidemic,” he says.
He is sharply critical of current platforms. “My greatest passion in life is connecting people through technology. But when was the last time you met someone on social media? It causes shame, pessimism, division, depression and anxiety,” he says. For Büyükkökten, optimism is more important than optimization. “These companies have developed an algorithm to calculate revenue,” he says. “But it was terrible for mental health. The world is scary right now, and a lot of it can be heard through social media. There’s a lot of hate in it,” he says.
Instead, he wants social media to be a place of love and a place to meet novel people in person. But why will it work this time? “That’s a really good question,” he says. “The one thing that has really been consistent is that people miss Orkut now.” It’s true – Brazilian social media has recently been full of memes and memories celebrating the website’s 20th anniversary. “A teenage boy recently drove 10 hours to meet me at a conference to talk about Orkut. And I thought: How is this even possible?” laughs. Orkut’s landing page is still up and features an open letter calling for a social media utopia.
This, combined with our shared desire to create a more humane social media, makes Büyükkökten believe that its next platform will be truly sustainable. Has he decided on this critical name? “We haven’t announced it yet. But I’m really excited. I really care. I want to restore authenticity and a sense of belonging,” he concludes. Perhaps, as his Finnish fans would joke, it’s time for the second coming of Orkut.
This story first appeared in the July/August 2024 UK issue of WIRED magazine.