Orkut was great stuff. Every time they went down, I'd get paged (if on call that week) because every single person in Brazil would go back to the login page and start submitting the form over, and over, and over...
I wasn't on-call for Orkut, but rather something else it depended on. All of that login load translated through to us. It got to the point where we'd interpret a load spike as "let's check Orkut" and when it got to "yep, it's down", we'd just ignore it.
i start to use it in 2004.. i guess facebook was not even dreaming to born.. i guess i've stop to use it in 2008.. too many people.. to many noise.. and stop for the same reason that now i dont use facebook anymore..
is interesting with few early adopters friends.. (they have a high intelectual standard in median) .. but then.. everybody start to use it and say every #$% they are doing..
theres nothing magical about who get the top on the list.. they were there, in the right time.. and got the right sort of luck :)