Orkut Theft
Word is out that Google's Orkut SNS might have come to them in something more than a night vision of creator Orkut Buyukkokten. Apparently, before signing on with Google, Orkut (the man) was partners in another venture, Affinity Engines. According to their site, "Affinity Engines is a technology company that provides a secure infrastructure for private-label online social networks."
It seems that Orkut may have possibly borrowed large, or possibly, all of the code he created/worked on while at Affinity Engines and used it as the basis for Orkut (the SNS).
The origins of the orkut code dispute arose, the lawsuit claimed, when Buyukkokten, a Turkish citizen, decided to take a job with Google to solve his visa problems. He continued to work on inCircle, however, and signed agreements in 2002 and 2003 stating that any social-networking technology he created belonged to Affinity Engines, the company said.
But, the suit alleged, Google soon became interested in owning a social-networking service. When its $30 million offer to buy Friendster was spurned, it turned to Buyukkokten.
"In July 2003, based on oral statements and written assurances from ... Buyukkokten, AEI was led to believe that Buyukkokten was not involved in any software development efforts related to social networking at Google," the company claimed in the lawsuit. "Buyukkokten copied and otherwise used inCircle source code still in his possession," Affinity Engines claims. "At no time during his communications with AEI prior to Jan. 22, 2004, did Buyukkokten reveal that he was developing ... orkut.com."
Stowe raises an interesting question: What's this mean for the Google-Social Search Machine? The idea is simply that the true value of Orkut.com has been hypothesized to come from the intergration of search and social networks. If Google's current SNS is torn out from under it, either by scandal or otherwise, how hard would it be to simply substitute another?
I've given a lot of thought to this topic over the few months, especially in the last couple weeks. Most of that consideration, however, has been related to the SPAM issues and I hope to address those soon. As far as the Search-SNS bridge, the value is there and Google is going to be motivated to secure an SNS backbone they can leverage.