Chain Emails - Ones that you keep receiving all through the day and wonder why don’t they just land up in the SPAM folder. This morning I received one another: About the Birth of Orkut! I am sure most of you must have read this email for the number of times it has been forwarded is quite large. For those of you, who haven’t, lets ponder over the contents first.

A guy lost his girlfriend in a train accident….but the gal’s name nowhere appeared in the dead list. This guy grew up n became IT technical architect in his late 20?s, achievement in itself!!. He hired developers from the whole globe and plan to make a software where he could search for his gf through the web..Things went as planned…n he found her, after losing millions of dollars and 3 long years!! It was time to shut down the search operation, when the CEO of Google had a word with this guy n took over this application, This Software made a whopping 1 billion dollars profit in its first year, which we today know as ORKUT .

The guy’s name is ORKUT BUYUKKOTEN. Yes its named after him only. Today he is paid a hefty sum by Google for the things we do like scrapping. He is expected to b the richest person by 2009. ORKUT BUYUKKOTEN today has 13 assistants to monitor his scrapbook & 8 to monitor his friends-list. He gets around 20,000 friend-requests a day & about 85,000 scraps!!!

Some other Cool Facts abt this guy:

* He gets $12 from Google when every person registers to this website.
* He also gets $10 when you add somebody as a friend.
* He gets $8 when your friend's friend adds you as a friend & gets $6 if anybody adds you as friend in the resulting chain.
* He gets $5 when you scrap somebody & $4 when somebody scraps you.
* He also gets $200 for each photograph you upload on Orkut.
* He gets $2.5 when you add your friend in the crush-list or in the hot-list.
* He gets $2 when you become somebody's fan.
* He gets $1.5 when somebody else becomes your fan.
* He even gets $1 every time you logout of Orkut.
* He gets $0.5 every time you just change your profile-photograph.
* He also gets $0.5 every time you read your friend's scrap-book & $0.5 every time you view your friend's friend-list.


Well, coming to the point, it was not this email that made me write this post, but the person and his background. I got this email from a J2EE developer with say 3+ years of experience. A person from the industry trusting such rubbish is really insane. A word with him and he was trying to convince me that we could do such a thing and earn millions and the next he was almost ready to leave his job. Foolish!

It is not about making choices, but about making informed choices. What is the point in studying so much if we start believing in such stuff, the origination of which lies in a totally-unoccupied mind.

Orkut was developed by a Turkish software developer, Orkut Buyukkokten, working with Google as a 20% project. What’s a 20% project? Google has a policy where-in every developer is allowed 20% of a week’s time to work on something of his own, the time which he can utilize for personal development. When Orkut stabilized internally it was released by the person as an independent entity. A few months down the line with the growing support Google took it over and provided the kind of infrastructure it needed. The terms of the deal (between Google and Orkut) were not disclosed as any other Google deal. The person is still with Google, and wrote the very first post for Orkut Blog.

Wanna feel the power of Google 20% - here we go - Orkut, Reader, Charts, Adsense, News, and our very favourite GMail. Google 20% is more of an attitude which the organization exhibits than a rule! I wish for a day when my employer would allow the same ;)