Google launched its Orkut.com portal in a very low-key way: it's supposed to be a Friendster-like community portal, but as of now it's on an invitation-by-members-only basis. Clever move: fear of being left out of the next "in" thing as a marketing tool. In theory this will also allow Google to restrict initial invites to highly friendly folks who are unlikely to flame them about a still-young product. Notably Orkut is not Google-branded, just Google-owned, so it's easy to walk away or turn it into something else. As Stefanie Olsen of CNET News put it, "The goal of a social networking service is a far cry from Google's long-stated mission of organizing the world's information." Well, perhaps Google is indeed hedging their bets even further should it choose to compete straight-up with Yahoo! as a portal, but it also wants to keep its elite programmers happy campers as well by giving them fun projects. As we've oftentimes mentioned here it's clear that Web-enabled social networks have very high potential for creating and distributing valuable content, potential that's largely untapped by major publishers but already well-exploited in professional circles. With services such as IBM's Web Fountain bubbling up, the rights to crawl these "gated communities" of content for meaningful patterns could prove to be an intriguiing scenario for marketers and lawyers alike to ponder.