orkut is a social networking website that is owned and operated by Google Inc. The service is designed

to help users meet new and old friends and maintain existing relationships. The website is named after its creator, Google employee Orkut Büyükkökten. Although orkut is less popular in the United States than competitors Facebook and MySpace, it is one of the most visited websites in India and Brazil. As of October 2011, 59.1% of orkut's users are from Brazil, followed by India with 27.1% and Japan with 6.7%.
Originally hosted in California, in August 2008 Google announced that orkut would be fully managed and operated in Brazil, by Google Brazil, in the city of Belo Horizonte. This was decided due to the large Brazilian user base and growth of legal issues.
As of October 2011, Alexa traffic ranked orkut.com 126th and orkut.com.br 128th in the world; the website currently has over 66 million active users worldwide.
Over the years, orkut has also found great popularity in Estonia as witnessed by a survey conducted by the independent research center GfK Custom Research Baltic which showed how orkut is the most used social network platform in that country. Its popularity however faded in 2010, when most Estonians switched over to Facebook.