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 engineers can spend 20% of their time working on personal interests.

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 search and efficient PDA usage.

Orkut is an old Turkish word that means "city of happiness, pleasure, joy, luck," conveniently and gracefully suiting the name of the web site.

Research papers

• Exploiting Geographical Location Information of Web Pages
• Focused Web Searching with PDAs
• Power Browser: Efficient Web Browsing for PDAs
• Efficient Query Subscription Processing in a Multicast Environment
• Research paper: Accordion Summarization for End-Game Browsing on PDAs and Cellular Phones
• Efficient Web Form Entry on PDAs
• Seeing the Whole in Parts: Text Summarization for Web Browsing on Handheld Devices
• Power Email: Efficient Email Entry on Pen-Based Handheld Devices

External links

• Stanford home page
• Orkut's Orkut profile (Needs registration)