How Orkut Developed

Orkut Büyükkökten

Orkut Büyükkökten is a Turkish software engineer who developed the social networking service called Orkut while working at Google. He developed Orkut as an independent project while working at Google, the outgrowth of a company policy whereby all employees at Google can spend 20% of their time working on personal interests. Google follows the principle where each employee can divide his time in 70:20:10. 70% on his/her core business, 20% on matters of their interest but related to Google's core business of search and 10% time on absolutely anything.

While previously working for Affinity Engines, he had developed a similar system, InCircle, intended for use by university alumni groups. In late June 2004, Affinity Engines filed suit against Google, claiming that Büyükkökten and Google based Orkut on inCircle code. The allegation is based on the presence of 9 identical bugs in Orkut that also exist in InCircle.
Originally from the Turkish city of Konya, Büyükkökten obtained a B.Sc. degree in Computer Engineering and Information Science from Bilkent University in Ankara, and earned a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University. His research at Stanford focused on Web search and efficient PDA usage.