Brazilian here. I miss Orkut a lot, enjoyed much more than FB. I had the sense that Orkut lost a lot of users in Brazil right after "The Social Network" hit the brazilian movie theathers. Everyone jumped in the hype then.
It was really popular in Brazil, too. It would be cool if they just open sourced it, or launched Orkut the 2005 edition with security patches today. I would use it if it was web only.
The 2005 version is pretty trivial: each profile has friends, a scrapbook (known on FB as wall), and up to 12 pictures; Communities (forums) have topics and topics have posts. That's it. Any junior dev can build it on Rails/Django.
The tricky part is scaling it. The original version as a .NET app and it couldn't handle the number of simultaneous users.
