It was really popular in Brazil, too. It would be cool if they just open sourced it, or launched Orkut the 2005 edition with security patches today. I would use it if it was web only.
The 2005 version is pretty trivial: each profile has friends, a scrapbook (known on FB as wall), and up to 12 pictures; Communities (forums) have topics and topics have posts. That's it. Any junior dev can build it on Rails/Django.
The tricky part is scaling it. The original version as a .NET app and it couldn't handle the number of simultaneous users.
The tricky part is scaling it. The original version as a .NET app and it couldn't handle the number of simultaneous users.