Orkut at eleven weeks:
An exploration of a new online social network community

By Anthony Hempell
anthony AT anthonyhempell.com

April 16, 2004

Introduction

About Social Networking Software

Social networking sites such as Orkut work by allowing their users to create connections with other users, based on making a link (sometimes called a "friend" or "buddy"). Not only is social networking a way to meet people, it is a way to market oneself or affiliations through links to personal or professional sites (Search Engine Journal, 2004). The original social networking site was SixDegrees, which debuted in 1996 (Schofield, 2004), although the roots of social networking can be traced as far back as bulletin board services (BBSs) in the 1980s and 90s (Holzchlag, 2004). Subsequent major developments have been Friendster (friends & dating), LinkedIn (business networking), Tribe ('affinity groups' for communities of interest) and MeetUp (meeting/events organizing) (Pasick, 2004).

About Orkut

Membership on Orkut is invitation-only; new members must be invited to join by an existing member. This exclusivity has caused Orkut to gain a certain social currency that comes with being a member of a private club (Pasick, 2004). Some enterprising individuals have even gone as far as auctioning Orkut invitations on eBay (Olsen, 2004b).

Orkut members sign in and are asked to enter a broad swath of information about themselves, from personal contact information to favourite music, movies and TV shows to their sexual proclivities. All information supplied is optional. Users can upload a photo of themselves as well, although not all choose to do so. Once online, Orkut users can join discussion communities, or create their own. They are also encouraged to enhance their links with their friends, by ranking them ("karma" rankings on how "trusty", "cool" and "sexy" their friends are - this is borrowed straight from Club Nexus), being their "fans" (adding themselves to a "fan" list) and writing "testimonials" (a short blurb explaining why their friend is a great person, or sometimes a cryptic, amusing or bizarre bit of creative prose).

Google claims that Buyukkokten developed Orkut during his "personal project time" while at work with the help of "a few other engineers" (Olsen, 2004a). All Google employees are encouraged to spend part of their time working on personal projects in order to boost creativity and innovation. This "official" story about Orkut being a side project is not believed by the authors of rafer.net, who point out that Orkut is the "most fully featured social network in existence," and "grew from almost zero page views to serving (probably) 3 [million] pages per day... that is a lot of work... it wasn't the work of one man anytime in the last several months (rafer.net, 2004, p.1).

This challenge to the pervasive myth of Orkut being a "pet project" leads into the possible business case of why Google has sponsored such a project. According to Tribe founder Mark Pincus, revenues and profitability may not exist yet, but a possible business model exists in selling subscriptions, classified and targeted advertising (Naraine, 2004); Pincus calls social networks the "next generation of online classifieds" (Nariane, 2004, p.1). Some believe Orkut is another asset in Google's business strategy for positioning itself as a market leader before it goes public in the near future (Kim, 2004); others feel it is a way of creating a larger database of user behaviour for better data-mining capabilities (Zawodny, 2004). Conversely, Regan (2004) feels that the lack of explicit support and marketing (Orkut is only "sponsored" by Google) is a sign the company does not want to take too many risks before its IPO. One potential snag in any Google business plan to profit from Orkut is that some members of the Google board are investors in competing services such as Friendster and LinkedIn (SAP, 2004).

Methodology

The initial phase of the research involved three methods of collecting data. First, I invited a select group of my personal contacts to join Orkut, along with participating in the Orkut community and observing these interactions. I also collected statistical data and reviewed recent blog and media postings about Orkut from both participants and outside observers.

In my role as a participant-observer, I accepted an invitation to join Orkut from my supervisor and created a "profile". This step was necessary in order to gain access to the system, due to Orkut's invitation-only policy. I then went about creating a profile and inviting people from my "real world" community to join Orkut. I started with sixty contacts, evenly spread between close friends and family, professional contacts, and people I know only virtually, through my participation in Usenet and online fantasy sports gaming.

My intent as a participant-observer was to track how many of my original sixty contacts join Orkut, observe their behaviour, both quantitatively (number of friends added to network, frequency of posting) and qualitatively (how these people contribute to the online community, inviting new people to join, creating new communities). During this observation phase, I attempted to remain open to new ideas, methods and techniques of analysis that have emerged as I become more familiar with the environment. As I discuss later in the paper, it became apparent that a major design issue was the administration's rather heavy-handed role in controlling "deviant" behaviour on Orkut, which led to a number of interesting incidents and observations. From these observations I chose to explore some of the issues around community building and deviant behaviour in greater detail.

I did not divulge my role as a researcher to the other participants, and will only refer to participants in general terms or by an identifying code on my data sheet. All information collected on participants is freely available within Orkut (to whatever extent Orkut constitutes a "public domain"). No coercion or persuasion was used in order to convince others to participate, other than the invitation to join itself.

Initial experiences

On February 16th I sent out initial "invitations" to join Orkut to sixty people from my personal, professional and online community contacts. There was very little response. This was odd, I thought, and started to try re-sending invitations. From some investigation on some of the meta-communities on Orkut ("Orkut Design", "Problems with Orkut") it seemed that the site did indeed have some "beta" issues -- new users are warned that Orkut is in beta phase and may experience downtime or lack of functionality. In short, the invitation feature was not always working. I sent an email to the Orkut help desk and got a reply saying to be patient and that invitations would be automatically resent when the problem was fixed. Finally, around February 22nd, invitations appeared to be getting through and people from my invitation list began signing up.

I originally decided to bound my "friend" invitations to people that I would say "hello" to on the street if I bumped into them; or people who I've had significant interactions with online; i.e. someone who if they asked me a question by email I would be happily willing to respond honestly. There's a number of differing opinions on how to approach "friend" adds on social networking systems, from Marc Canter's collect-as-many-friends-as-possible approach (Schofield, 2004) to Danah Boyd's metric "that I would never invite anyone who I don't consider a friend or colleague" (Boyd, 2004). After playing around with Orkut a bit, I decided to relax my standards and accepted friend requests from two people who inhabited a number of my communities and seemed like interesting people. After further reflection, I decided to start actively adding people I would frequently see in my communities as "friends"; so far all of them have returned the favour. I quickly became bored of this game, as all it did was make my friend list swell with a lot of people I didn't really know. However, with continued presence and contribution to various communities, I could argue that many of the people I "friended" in this way have now become online friends, especially those that populate the Vancouver community.

A number of the features such as the "fan" and "karma" rankings seem designed to appeal to users' competitiveness or vanity. Originally, Orkut published a "top 30" list of the people with the most profile views and fans; this has since been removed, possibly because it encouraged friend-collecting and hacking the system to increase one's friend count.

Growth of a friend network

Fig. 1: Most invitees have chosen to ignore the orkut invitation; only a small number can be considered active users who use the site at least occasionally.

My first observation is the response rate to my invitation to join the network (see Figure 1, above); the majority of the 60 invitees (55%) ignored the invitation (for reasons unknown). About 42% joined Orkut, and the remainder (two) actually sent me an email indicating that they would not join (details are withheld due to a lack of implied consent).

Interestingly enough, joining rates were higher among my business (50%) and online (43%) contacts than my personal (32%) contacts. This is consistent with the idea that social networks may be more conducive to supporting "weak ties" instead of strong ones (Garton, Haythornwaite & Wellman,1997).

Figure 2: Only two of the invitees have created networks of ten or more people; most have five or less.

Another interesting observation is the growth of my invitees' Orkut network over this two month period. Of the 25 people who joined, 21 had active friends lists, which are tracked on the chart below (Figure 2). User "P" was already an Orkut member when I joined, so P's friend count started at nine. Everyone else started with one friend (me), and slowly added more friends. Most invitees (over three-quarters) had five or less friends on the system after two months; nine (almost half) still only had one friend by mid-April, and one person had left the system or had been deleted. If we assume that users with just one "friend" are essentially not participating in the network, the total adoption rate for the original sixty invitations is twelve people, or 20%. This may indicate that the perceived benefit of the Orkut service remains relatively low, or that a social networking service like Orkut remains a relatively new innovation that still relies on "innovator" or "early adopter" personalities (Rogers, 1995). Adamic, Buyukkokten & Adar (2003) also observed this observation of a parabolic relationship of connectors in Club Nexus.

Figure 3: Average friends per user seems to approach four over time.

A different analysis of the number of friends in my invited network is the observed trend of the average number of friends per user to approach a constant (four). This has been the case with all three invitee categories, as initial averages were skewed by either a previous active user (online) or not having previous connections (business and personal). Over the course of two months, as more invited users joined the system, the average quickly approached four friends, and seems to be remaining there. A small number of heavy users continue to increase their network size, but the majority remains constant at one or a few friends. This seems consistent with Pareto's Principle ("80/20 rule") (Reh, 2004) where most of the network activity is performed by a relatively small number of people.

So far re-creating any semblance of my real "off-line" personal community on Orkut has been a failure: participation by most of my invitees has been sporadic, and there have been few examples of connectors (i.e., people I know who also know other people I know) signing up that would provide the Orkut experience with more depth and "stickiness" ; in short, the system lacks the critical mass to really reproduce the magic of the real-world social network. That being said, I have observed at least one fairly worthwhile community ("Vancouver"), where many residents and former residents of Vancouver regularly gather to discuss aspects of city life or to just chat. Given a common interest (geography) and a broad set of possible discussion topics (favourite restaurants, public washrooms, bookstores and the like), it seems possible for Orkut to create a bridge between the real-world social community and a new on-line space. Whether it will stick may depend on its ability to move beyond the new adopters and increase the overall size of the dominant 20%.

Orkut Statistics

Membership curve

Fig. 4: Total Orkut membership since January 23rd; male and female membership since February 19th.

One surprising aspect about the growth of Orkut membership is its almost linear progression. Since users can (in theory) invite as many friends as they like, one might assume the curve to be much steeper, even exponential. There are a number of possible reasons why the membership is progressing steadily. First, the site requires an invitation to join, which makes it harder for membership to grow just by word of mouth. While it seems as though invitations are getting out, it also seems that many members do not have the time or inclination to download their entire contact list into Orkut - many are just inviting (or finding) a small number of friends to join.

Another issue may be that Orkut could be capping the invitations. Earlier in February there were reported problems with the site's e-mail server, and some site members believe the administration could be purposefully limiting the number of invitations that go out in order to keep the server load from getting out of control. Downtime and server errors have been very common during March, and Orkut administrators may be wary of becoming 'too successful'. At Friendster (where the membership is approximately six million users comparted to Orkut's 200,000), the site sometimes becomes so slow as to be almost unusable. Perhaps Orkut's linear growth is by design, in order to reduce server load and attempt to manage the growth of the community.

Gender ratio

Age demographics

Fig. 5: The age demographics of Orkut members has remained relatively unchanged.

Orkut is primarily a young person's site at present, and shows no signs of changing that trend. 38.4% of Orkut users are aged 25 and under; 62.7% are aged 30 and under. Less than 6% of users report being aged 41 or older. Growth patterns in all age demographics are remarkably steady over the past two months, with less than a .5% shift in any one category. Age demographics can be attributed in part to Internet usage, which is predominantly more common among young people; and to the type of services Orkut offers, which may appeal more to people with free time and a lifestyle that includes visiting friends and dating.

Nationality

Fig. 6: Growth of major non-American Orkut populations: both Japan and Brazil are growing much faster than other countries.

One explanation could be sheer numbers. Brazil, for example, has over 20 million Internet users (approximately 11% of the Brazilian population) (InternetWorldStats, 2004). Japan has a huge population and a mature on-line presence. Other countries such as India are quickly gaining a computer-literate class with programming skills and Internet access. While a site like Orkut may be competing with many other ways to spend one's time online in North America and Europe, its novelty may be more compelling in countries that are less saturated by online media. Or it could attributed to social differences - the higher growth rates are seen in countries where community, family and socializing may be more highly valued.

Design issues: Law & Order

Discussion of this topic requires some more background on what can be perceived as the raison d'etre of Orkut: as a social networking service, it relies on some degree of authenticity of identity; as Orkut's opening page states, it is a "network of trusted friends". This emphasis on trust belies what appears to be a very literal interpretation of what online identity should encompass, namely: people should use their real names, and photographs/likenesses on Orkut. It is about real people, not creating a separate online identity. The myriad issues of what actually constitutes a "trusted" or "authentic" presentation of the self are is of course a huge topic and has been widely covered in many previous works on online community (Rhiengold, 1993; Donath, 1999 among others). Suffice it to say, after months of observing the behaviour (or lack of) of Orkut users and administrators, the philosophical aim of Orkut's administration is to maintain a system of "real" people using "real" pictures of themselves. This instrumental, literal attitude towards the presentation of self is important to understand the context in which choices have been made about the social design of control mechanisms within Orkut.

Models of community design

Therefore, social design is not something that can be constructed before users arrive. This is especially important when designing methods or systems to control or mitigate deviant or antisocial behaviour. Kollock cites Elinor Ostrom (1990) who indicates that most successful communities share some common characteristics, which include:

• A system to monitor and sanction member behaviour, where the monitoring is carried out by the community members themselves rather than an external authority.
• Successful communities use a graduated system of sanctions - small sanctions for first offences that escalate if the person continues to break community rules.
• Some conflict is inevitable - therefore having a conflict resolution mechanism is necessary (Ostrom, 1990; cited by Kollock, 1996).

Orkut's design model

Jail is ostensibly a 'time-out' area where someone who has been abusing the system is put for a limited period of time. While in jail, the 'offender' may not post or send messages on Orkut, but can view and read content. It essentially restricts users to viewing the site in a read-only mode. However, the rest of the parameters about jail are confusing, and are muddied by the fact that there is no official mention of Jail on the Orkut help page. There is no warning when you are jailed: you log on and instead of your picture appearing on your profile page, a shadowy image of someone in prison appears. There are no no phone calls, no lawyer, no judge, no jury... nothing. The closest action one can take to an appeal is to email "help@Orkut.com" and hope for the best. Usually most people are 'released' from jail within 24 hours, but this isn't always the case. Some report being in jail for minutes, some for days.

Elonka Dunin, an Orkut user, game developer and self-described "experienced moderator" summarized the feeling of having this mysterious jailing procedure as "living in an environment where you're expected to 'just know' how to behave, with the consequence of being punished or entirely kicked out without warning if you step over one of the lines that you don't know exists." She also described it as "emotionally exhausting [or] abusive" (Dunin, 2004).

Over time, users have managed to piece together theories about what constitutes a "jailable" offence. Orkut does have a codified "law", in that site administrators maintain Terms of Service (TOC) and Community Standards documents, which outline certain legal issues regarding using the service, such as copyright, ownership of content, acceptable use, non-commercial use, and so on. The Community Standards outlines many of these issues in plain language, and also acts as a 'bill of rights'-type document, with general standards for outlawing hate speech, harassment and discrimination. However, many instances of users being put in jail does not seem to come from contravening the TOS or Community Standards (the most common offence being the use of a psudonym or an obviously fake image, leading some people to use "real" sounding fake names and photos). Orkut also allows individuals to help "police" the site by having a "report as bogus" link on each person's profile page, where Orkut users can "tattle" on others. Clicking on "report as bogus" essentially places that person in jail until Orkut administration can review their profile. It also seems that the jailing procedure is at least partially automated to detect "robot"-like actions, such as joining too many communities at once, editing too many posts, or performing other actions in rapid succession (Dunin, 2004).

Part of many people's problem with the "Jail" design is that there is almost no user feedback - contacting "help@Orkut.com" almost invariably results in either no response or a canned email reply. Seemingly in response to this and other requests for information, the site administrators created "OrkutGuy", a persona who could communicate with users in communities directly. OrkutGuy is personified as police officer, which is interesting in light of Williams' (1994) warning to choose leadership metaphors carefully: Orkut apparently sees its leadership personification as a cop (and a white, male one at that). Ironically, OrkutGuy's profile violates the very terms of service and community standards that Orkut is trying to "police", since he is not a real person and his picture is a cartoon.

Case studies

The Martyrdom and Resurrection of Huy Zing

Huy Zing's Orkut "death" predictably prompted an outcry from many in the remaining Orkut community, with the creation of several communities discussing his disappearance, and the lack of explanation and continued deleting of communities on Orkut in general. Users created communities such as "Come Back Huy Zing", and also "Come Back Come Back Huy Zing" when site administrators kept deleting the original community in a remarkably authoritarian display of censorship. One user took Huy's photo and altered it to read "I miss Huy Zing", replacing their own photograph. Others followed suit in a display of digital solidarity for the fallen. Huy Zing essentially became a martyr for the cause of freedom to do whatever one pleased on Orkut, and spoke "from the heavens" using his blog, lamenting his treatment in a pensive, philosophical tone. Commenting on his demise he said: "ultimately, I only wished I had said 'I love you' more often." (Zing, 2004b).

The outcry against Orkut was deafening, as Huy's humility and good humour in his banishment made it obvious that this was not a person out to destroy, but to try and create community. Huy Zing was eventually re-instated a few weeks later, as an "Orkut-certified" member who cannot be jailed.

The biggest lesson from the Huy Zing incident is that online community requires personalities and leaders from within the community to help create the online social space, not the administration or the code itself. This was the first big crack in Orkut's attempts to design an algorithm for community.

Bait and Switch: The Orkut Loser Patrol

The very existence of the OLP was contentious: some thought the very idea cruel, vulgar and against the spirit of Orkut as a community; these people perhaps did not share the darker or more ironic sense of humour displayed by many of the members. After several weeks and a large number of users joining OLP (and during this time the original sarcastic nature of the overriding joke had been significantly diluted by the influx of new members, some of whom took the joke literally), the moderator played a cruel joke on the community members. He changed the community name to "Orkut Pedophile Society", along with switching the former community image of a deranged clown to an innocent-looking picture of a young boy in red sweater and the caption "let us touch your little bits just a little bit... LEGALIZE PEDOPHILIA, NOW".

The sick genius of this move was that the hundreds of members of the OLP suddenly found themselves members of a group that no-one in their right mind would want to be associated with; this information was also available to anyone who would look at their profile and see what communities they belonged to.

Not surprisingly, there was a massive outcry from members, many of whom quickly deleted the group from their communities list. Some thought the joke funny and absurd, while others found the whole situation utterly disgusting and beyond humour, saying pedophilia was a topic that could not be comical in any context. One result was that the moderator who had made the switch was most likely the subject of a barrage of "report as bogus" claims from angry users, and thus was banished to jail for almost three days. Since he was in jail, he could not edit the community name. The joke quickly became painful, and eventually "OrkutGuy" stepped in, changing the community name back to its original (although inexplicably, misspelled) and explaining that the moderator powers to change community names and images were temporarily suspended.

The result of this whole incident was a serious blow to the trust of many in Orkut. While the site was out to create a "trusted community", it was apparent that in some cases, some people could not be trusted to uphold the community standards and to take the whole experiment seriously. Others thought the incident indicated that the emperor had no clothes: while using a heavy-handed control system in one place, Orkut's design allowed for abuse on many other levels if one only used a little imagination. Eventually the moderator ability to modify community names and content was reinstated.

Summary and conclusions

Orkut, while being probably one of the most full-featured and powerful social networking sites, is being held back by the unimaginative vision of programmers and engineers with little sensitivity to the soft skills of building trust, community and diversity. Blood (2004) has compiled a laundry list of feature implementations that will supposedly save Orkut, but these are not the answer. To survive and prosper as a community and even as a competitive product in the social networking marketplace, Orkut must rethink its user strategy and Terms of Service model. In their paper on Stanford's Club Nexus, Adamic, Buyukkokten & Adar (2003) chose give a statistically-based analysis of the network, and ignored any mention of the stickier issues of community building and control (or mediation) of deviant behaviour. From this and the general approach taken on Orkut, it feels as if Buyukkokten and his colleagues have a certain uneasiness or unfamiliarity with the previous work done on online community building over the years. While not as easily quantifiable as user and network statistics, the messy work of community building and supporting users must be given equal if not greater attention by site administration in order to create an environment that fosters trust.

The first change must be to get rid of Jail. Having a one-level, binary system of punishment with no explanation or recourse constitutes cruel and unusual punishment. Even if Orkut cannot be expected to have anything approaching the complexity of a legal system, having a leveled system of sanctions to deal with destructive or inappropriate behaviour (such as Slashdot's rating system or eBay's reputation) is a must. The obsession with order, control and having "real" identities should be relaxed; enforcing rules such as these only encourages more deviance and subversion from those who seek to counteract controls. Start with an open area, encourage the efforts of the community leaders and participants, and slowly evolve methods for controlling deviant behaviour that most of the community can agree on. While it seems as though Orkut is focused on trying to create a more mainstream, middle-of-the-road social networking service than Friendster, it is difficult to truly foster community if users feel like they are living in a police state. Relaxing the controls and moving away from attempts to create an algorithm for community is necessary for Orkut to have a future worth believing in.

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Orkut at eleven weeks: An exploration of a new online social network community (c) 2004 Anthony Hempell