Orkut were other social networking sites including Myspace and Facebook. Ning was a more direct competitor, as it allowed for the creation of social networks similar to Orkut's "communities". An Orkut user was also able to add videos to their profile from either YouTube or Google Video with the additional option of creating either restricted or unrestricted polls for polling a community of users. There was at one point an option to integrate GTalk with Orkut, enabling chat and file sharing. Similar to Facebook, users could also use a "like" button to share interests with friends. Users could also change their
Orkut interface from a wide range of colorful themes in the library. Themes were only available in Brazil and India. Orkut was arguably 'the only thriving social networking site' in India during 2005-2008. Orkut was quietly launched on January 22, 2004 by Google. Orkut Büyükkökten, a Turkish software engineer, developed it as an independent project while working at Google. While previously working for Affinity Engines, he had developed a similar system, InCircle, intended for use by university alumni groups. In late June 2004, Affinity Engines filed suit against Google, claiming that Büyükkökten and Google had based Orkut on InCircle code. The