THE REAL ORKUT.(The Talk of the Town)(www.orkut.com)

Last month, the first e-mail asking recipients to join a Web site called www.orkut.com sped its way around the globe. The description of Orkut was a bit of a mouthful: "a community of friends and trusted acquaintances that connects individuals through a social network that grows person by person." Membership was, and is, by invitation only, and in the first days of its existence a horde of aspiring new friends and trusted acquaintances clamored to get in. By last week, more than a hundred and fifty thousand people had joined.

New Orkut members fill out pastel-blue forms: favorite TV shows, career skills, perfect first date, bedroom contents. They upload photographs of themselves in alluring or alarming poses. They find "Communities" to join: Photography (3,449 members), Belgian Beer (114 members), Kosher Roommates ("for coping or recovering roommates of Kosher adherents"; 3 members). If the right Community doesn't exist, they're free to found a new one. They can rate their friends, relying on an ancient system of hieroglyphs--smiley faces, ice cubes, and hearts, which stand, respectively, for trustworthiness, coolness, and sexiness. As for the origin of "Orkut," it derives not from the Finnish slang for orgasm, as many have surmised, but from the name of the Google engineer who developed the site, Orkut Buyukkokten.

"Trustworthy, cool, sexy--it's a good matrix for romance," Orkut said the other day at a high-ceilinged cafe in Palo Alto, not far from Google headquarters. A slightly built, well-groomed young man with an elfin face, Orkut has an accent that's hard to place--a little German in the vowels, a little Turkish in the consonants--reflecting his Ankara education and his family's stint in Monchengladbach. He wore pressed jeans, dress shoes, and a red-striped shirt with black-and-gold cufflinks--Silicon Valley semiformal. A visit to his personal Web site betrays a somewhat wilder side. "Call me Orkut," the site reads. "I have been told that I have a colorful personality, and perhaps that is why my friends have given me more nicknames than I can remember. O-Man, Big-O, Orc, ...