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Orkut’s Founder Is Still Dreaming of a Social Media Utopia
In the mid-2000s, Google engineer Orkut Büyükkökten’s self-titled social network briefly took the world by storm before disappearing. Now he’s back, with a plan for a happier social media.
Orkut featured a digital Scrapbook and the ability to give people compliments (ranging from “trustworthy” to “sexy”), create communities, and curate your very own Crush List. “I was talking to a gay journalist from a small town in São Paulo who told me that finding all these LGBTQ people on Orkut transformed his life,” he adds. “It’ll leverage AI and machine learning to optimize for improving happiness, bringing people together, fostering communities, empowering users, and creating a better society,” he says.
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