It's a social network:
About orkut For Alrik and others who sometimes share essays, stories and other creative works, you should be aware of this extract from their "Terms of Service" --
orkut.com's proprietary rights
By submitting, posting or displaying any Materials on or through the orkut.com service, you automatically grant to us a worldwide, non-exclusive, sublicenseable, transferable, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable right to copy, distribute, create derivative works of, publicly perform and display such Materials. The only other complaint I've seen about Orkut (from an admittedly "obsessed" user) is the encouragement to rank friends using "karma points".
As Annalee Newitz posted at AlterNet.org:
"The friend-karma system is quite simply hideous. I like the idea of naming people my friends, but I don't want to rank them in terms of anything. Friendship is not about hierarchy. It's about exchanging ideas and saying hello once in a while. Only a creep would rank his or her friends, and making those rankings an explicit part of the social network encourages the worst kind of cliquish, competitive behavior." 
