I do agree that Twitter's asymmetric model works. And Google + also have same feature. I don't have to be "friend" with someone to follow them. Having signed u

I do agree that Twitter's asymmetric model works. And Google + also have same feature. I don't have to be "friend" with someone to follow them. Having signed up on Orkut in 2004, and used that social n/w quite regularly for ~ 4 years. People forget the beauty of Orkut. In someways they were ahead of times - 1. Privacy: Privacy settings were impeccable. In fact, it would notify you if someone visited your profile too. So no more "stalking". Believe it or not, Orkut never allowed search engines to index their pages. 2. Communities: Facebook groups are quite popular now. But still, Orkut communities in 2005 were better. They were malleable. You could turn them into forums/boards for discussion. Group announcements. Group Polls etc. And most importantly owners/mods had ability to make any content public/private with simple switch. 3. Testimonials: LinkedIn started with this "recommendations" feature. But Orkut had "testimonials" since its beginning. It was fun reading testimonials once in a while. 4. Design: Orkut's design during initial years was the best any social network could have. Simple and clean! 5. Search: I've used majority of the social networks. Orkut's search engine was simply the best. It's search engine in 2005 could easily beat FB's search even today. What led to Orkut's downfall? I've heard form Googlers that there was no strong internal support to Orkut. In 2008 they started copying FB and it became unusable since it had worst UX due to this. And last but not the least, Facebook's Feed. Feed was game-changer for FB and it's eventual growth. Edit: Grammar