So I quickly checked my email last night, and lo and behold and email from someone inviting me to join Orkut. I was intrigued. Yes I’d heard of it, but I hadn’t really dug any further.

So I did. I eschewed Google as they created Orkut, and used alltheweb instead. Thankfully it threw up just the answer I needed.

Orkut is named after the engineer that wrote it.

Phew. Thanks to Mr. Hunt for the following:

“A Google representative said that the site is the independent project of one of its engineers, Orkut Buyukkokten, who works on user interface design for Google. Buyukkokten, a computer science doctoral candidate at Stanford University before joining Google, created Orkut.com in the past several months by working on it about one day a week – an amount that Google asks all of its engineers to devote to personal projects. Buyukkokten, with the help of a few other engineers, developed Orkut out of his passion for social networking services.”

So, if you want ‘in’, let me know and I ‘may’ invite you. But only if I really, really like you.