CNET News.com reports that Google has taken Orkut offline. What is Orkut?
And I quote:
Orkut is the independent project of one of Google’s engineers, Orkut Buyukkokten, who works on user interface design for the search giant. Buyukkokten 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. Still, Google owns the technology developed by its employees.
What that quote doesn’t tell you, but the rest of the article does is that Orkut is a social network like Friendster, but you can only join if you are invited by someone who is already a member. Memberships are already being sold on eBay.
That isn’t what I find so interesting about this article, the best part is that Google encourages people to work on personal projects one day a week. That is a fifth of the time spent at work, devoted to a personal project. Granted Google owns all the rights to anything that is created, but it is still a very cool thing.
I bet those Google programmers are happy little code monkeys.