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It was really popular in Brazil, too. It would be cool if they just open sourced it, or launched Orkut the 2005 edition with security patches today. I would use it if it was web only.

The 2005 version is pretty trivial: each profile has friends, a scrapbook (known on FB as wall), and up to 12 pictures; Communities (forums) have topics and topics have posts. That's it. Any junior dev can build it on Rails/Django.

The tricky part is scaling it. The original version as a .NET app and it couldn't handle the number of simultaneous users.

I think Orkut was the first available one in Brazil. It got popular because it was new and had no competition.

Brazilian here. I miss Orkut a lot, enjoyed much more than FB. I had the sense that Orkut lost a lot of users in Brazil right after "The Social Network" hit the brazilian movie theathers. Everyone jumped in the hype then.

I remember trying it out, but it was so so slow. Thats pretty much the only thing I remember about it.