There we have it. Orkut is closed for a few days pending some fixes. This is why it is only affiliated with Google and why they say Beta. :)

_We’ve taken orkut.com offline for a few days as we implement some improvements and upgrades suggested by users. Since orkut is in the very early stages of development, it’s likely to be up and down quite a bit during the coming months. None of the data you’ve entered will be deleted, and none of the connections you’ve made will be lost. And, if all goes well, you should see some significant improvements when we come back online.

We’ll send an email once everything is ready and running again. Thanks for your feedback and for bearing with us as we work our way up the learning curve.

The orkut team

_ -> orkut — under construction

I am pretty sure that by now, this is not Orkut’s side project, which he develops on his 20% “do as you please” time that Google has for everyone per week. But hey, it likely never was only that much for him and he likely didn’t do all this alone in the end. At least in the last few days/weeks pending launch, he will likely have had a bit more time. Remember that as he coded this at least partly at Google, it belongs to Google if Google asks for it.

And Orkut.com just rose too fast and probably had way too many hits by now to even hold out. My guess would be that they have far above 5 Million hits a day at the moment and they help up pretty well for that. Let’s see what happens when orkut.com is back up. :)

Oliver Thylmann’s Musings

orkut under construction… again