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I kept working on language for orkut's interface pages, user notifications, and community descriptions, so I was ready when, a day after Jonathan's reassuring news, Sergey sent word from Davos that we would, in fact, launch orkut that afternoon. Sergey had made a commitment to support a rapid implementation and he was standing by it. We would compromise by putting on orkut.com a small tag saying, "In affiliation with Google."

An hour before launch I sent Orkut text for his homepage: "orkut is an online community that connects people through a network of trusted friends. Join orkut to expand the circumference of your social circle." I included a disclaimer: "Great relationships begin with honesty, so we'd like to let you know up front that orkut is still a beta service. That means that it may appear a bit flaky at first. It may even require quiet time alone to work out some issues. We hope you'll bear with orkut as it strives to better itself. After all, that's what good friends do." At one in the afternoon, the first twelve thousand invitations to join orkut started going out via email.

In the social networks Orkut had built at Stanford, the users had been polite, respectful, and courteous. The users of orkut.com, however, were not. They immediately began looking for ways to break the system and to fill it with porn and spam. They found them. It was possible to search for every user in the system and then send them all email with hundred-megabyte attachments or write a script to add everyone as a friend. Orkut the project's creator had never seen problems like those before. He had to take the site offline almost immediately to fix them. I wrote an error message saying we were making improvements. It was to be expected given that orkut was just an experiment.

Google engineers didn't accept that excuse. They peeled back the skin of orkut's architecture and picked every bone they could find. Why hadn't orkut received a full security review? What was driving the rush to push it out the door? Wasn't it evil to place our need to launch before the security of our users? Why had we even tried to conceal Google's involvement? The questioners piled on. Marissa gamely defended the decision to move ahead by describing a startup-within-a-startup mindset that meant taking risks and patching things up as you went along. If decisions had been made differently, she indicated, and the Google name not attached to orkut at the last minute, everything would have been fine.

Engineer Howard Gobioff disagreed. "Don't be evil," he said, was a core value, which meant we needed to protect user privacy with any service we launched, whether it bore our name or not. It would have been no better if orkut users hadn't known Google was behind the service that was exposing their personal information.

Some defended the decision to prototype and launch quickly—to experiment and keep innovating. But their voices were drowned out by the angry mob clamoring for an explanation of why orkut had been allowed to go out with underweight technology, draped only in a thin association with Google that hid none of its problems. The criticism was not directed at Orkut himself or his admirable desire to try something new. The anger coalesced around the launch process. A number of engineers told me they had agreed with my original proposal to launch orkut on Google labs. I was glad to hear it, but their affirmation left a bittersweet taste.

When I first arrived at Google, I felt strongly about things and was often wrong. Fortunately, Larry and Sergey ignored my ideas. I had learned from that experience. Now I felt strongly about things and was often right. Unfortunately, my ideas were still being ignored. I wasn't sure which slight was more painful, but I suspected it was the latter.

Despite its rough start, orkut became a smash success—in Estonia, India, and Brazil.* Especially Brazil, where, Orkut informed me, a third of all the country's Internet traffic is still on the site that bears his name. When he visited Rio de Janeiro, he was recognized