• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2051 0

information to an outsider. She was asked to leave. In January 2004, though, long after that first small leak had been plugged, a much bigger crack appeared in our wall of secrecy. The same month we hired our first corporate security manager, John Markoff from the New York Times wrote a series of articles in which he reported details of products in development and the results of an internal audit conducted in preparation for a possible IPO. The information had been extremely confidential and closely held. The leak was ultimately traced to a senior manager who had known Markoff for years. He left the company as well, though the true reason for his departure was not made public, leading to much speculation.

From that point on, I had to ask for access to the project information I needed to do my job. It felt odd, as if with each ironclad, password-protected gateway the company installed, it locked out a little more of its original corporate culture.

Shortly before going public, Google clamped down completely. According to SEC rules, every employee who had access to intimate knowledge about the state of the business would be restricted from freely buying and selling the company's stock. I, and most others, gladly traded ignorance about our bottom line for the bliss of being able to cash out whenever we were ready to do so. The days of innocence in the garden of data had officially come to an end.

The Antisocial Network

In February 2004, Yahoo dropped Google and began using their own Inktomi-based search results instead. We barely noticed. We stretched in the skin of our new headquarters and settled in to a new level of hyper-productivity. Everything needed to be done right now and everything was very important. New people were climbing onboard every week and taking control of projects in motion.

Cindy kept an eye out for any signs the news cycle was turning against us. She urged us not to let cracks appear in the shiny gold sphere of Google's public image, and every few months she sent reminders to all Googlers that when the press came calling, the calls should be forwarded to PR. "There is no such thing as, 'off the record,'" she cautioned us, because "reporters are fiercely competitive and will tell you whatever you want to hear just to get the story." The last thing she needed was a very public slip on something as important as a new product launch. But sometimes things go wrong.

Engineer Orkut Buyukkokten came to Google in the summer of 2002 from Stanford, where he had become intrigued by the idea of social networks—a way to connect with friends and acquaintances online. As a student, Orkut had written a networking program for his classmates called "Club Nexus," and once he settled in at Google, he requested to spend his twenty-percent time coming up with an improved version. It was December 2003 before his project, code-named "Eden" and later renamed "orkut,"* was ready to be tested with a broader audience than just Googlers. That's when the fun began.

Orkut built his eponymous service entirely on his own. It was a prototype to gather data, to try things out, to experiment. He wrote the code, designed the user interface, set up the databases. He didn't intend for it to be a full-fledged Google product, so to accelerate the development, he used tools that were commonly available outside Google. They came from Microsoft. The server running orkut wasn't even located in a Google data center, but at the home of the weather site Wunderground.com. Orkut knew his system would never support Google-sized audiences, but it should safely scale to handle two or three hundred thousand users. Membership in orkut would be by invitation only, so he would be able to throttle growth by controlling the number of invitations the system distributed.

Marissa was the consumer product manager. She saw orkut as a small startup within Google, operating autonomously to prove that a single engineer with a new idea could build and test a product without enduring the delays of Google's increasingly bureaucratic development process. Larry