Talk of the town.

Ask any young Brazilian Web surfer if they've heard of a site called Orkut, and you'll find that--10 for 10--they'll say yes. A social network named for its creator, Orkut Buyukkokten, it was developed for U.S. Internet users as a way to organize social contacts. Yet it turned into a runaway success among Brazilians instead.

Little-known in most countries, even in the United States, the success of the site in Brazil was such that Google, which operates the service, quickly launched a Portuguese-language edition, the first foreign-language version of the site. Based on that success, Google soon decided to open an office in Brazil.

The project originated as a way to build a business community in order to coordinate efforts in specific sectors around a common interest. "In the beginning, the idea was to make a site around business relationships," says Jack London, a Rio native and Internet pioneer in Brazil. Instead, Brazilians went for the social side of the interaction, creating virtual networks of friends with Web pages based on their personal lives, sending messages and participating in group discussions online according to interest groups.

"What I like about the site is being able to make contact with people I haven't seen in a long time. I took a trip 10 years ago and managed to speak again with those people," says Isabela Diniz, a film editor who logs on to Orkut every day.

The site is ranked No. 5 of the most searched terms by users of the Google News service during 2005. Currently, 73.2% of Orkut members are Brazilians, 10.1% are from the United States and 2.8% are Iranian. According to figures from Nielsen/Net, 8.3 million Brazilians used community-oriented sites in 2005. Of those, 6.1 million spent time in Orkut, nearly a quarter of all Brazilians online.

"It was a surprise for me," says the site's builder, Orkut Buyukkokten. "I'm very happy that Brazilians like the site. But I have no way how to explain why this is so."

Nor can Brazilians themselves quite explain the phenomenon. Cora Ronai, editor of the technology journal for Brazilian newspaper O Globo, says that no one knows exactly why Orkut was such a success here. "I suspect it's between two things: Partly it's the communication and partly it's just because we like the Internet. Brazilians are very curious about the Web. We are very much like people in the United States in this respect, thus if you add the technological interest with the sociability of Brazilians, the desire to gossip and chat, that could be part of the reason."

Whatever the reason, the fact is that the site has grown so much that it is now used for different purposes. Some companies use Orkut as a quick way to vet hiring candidates. Upon logging in, one can get the name of an applicant and know quickly his or her tastes, habits, what kinds of people they associate with and how they might behave on the job.

Even politicians are discovering uses for the service. The city of Santa Cruz do Rio Pardo, in Sao Paulo state, has a community of 2,375 members, nearly 5% of the local population. One of the site members invited the mayor to participate in a discussion and opened a topic called "Talk to the mayor," wherein the official has daily debates with the citizens.

Reality. Along the margins of these communities, some members have used the site to make racist commentary, sell drugs--even schedule fights between gangs.

There are some communities that make no apologies about their topics of choice, and in which the price of the club drug ecstasy, for instance, is openly discussed. In one highly publicized case in July 2005, a police officer arrested a ring of 14 upper middle-class students in Niteroi, in Rio de Janeiro state, who sold drugs via Orkut. There was even a death after a fight between fans of rival soccer clubs, a fight scheduled on Orkut.

As a result of these kinds of happenings, the site has been criticized. Ronai rejects that kind of talk. "The site is a mirror of reality."

Since so many people log in, it's not hard to imagine that, for Google, Orkut is a gold mine waiting to be fully exploited. Despite the search engine's statements that information gathered on the site would not be used for commercial ends, it nevertheless seems to be planning to do so in the future: Millions of users are involved and Google has a very good idea who they are, age, sex, personal tastes, preferences and communities.

"This is the largest database of people that has ever existed. And it's a database in which people submit voluntarily and for free," says Ronai.