Google launches Orkut … or not?

There we have it. Just yesterday I commented on a post on Jeremy Zawodny’s blog about how we are starting to see Social Network Backlash and today, Google goes into the social networking field with Orkut and now Jeremy seems to have lots of friends.

More about the service can be found in _Google spawns social networking service_ on news.com and in _Google debuts Friendster-clone Orkut_ on The Register. I think it should be obvious who is running the slightly negative piece ;)

Interesting to note is that The Register reports that Orkut is done by Google employee _Orkut Buyukkokten_. News.com goes in a bit deeper noting that this seems to be a side project of Orkut, which he developed in his 20% of doing-whatever-you-want system Google has. Google even says that they do not see Orkut as part of their portfolio but it does own the technology, he developed it at work, that 20% system starts sounding interesting ey? ;).