1/26/2017 Social media, which now divides us, doesn’t have to, Hello founder Orkut Büyükkökten says - Recode

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Conventional wisdom holds that technology, and our addictions to it, are making usmore isolated. But Orkut Büyükkökten says that’s wrong: Tech can actually make

Recode Decode, hosted by Kara Swisher

Can social media bring us together again after ripping us apart? (Orkut Büyükkökten, Founder, Hello)� SHARE

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Büyükkökten, who started Google’s first social network, Orkut, says his new social appwill help you make friends.BY ERIC JOHNSON @HEYHEYESJ DEC 27, 2016, 6:30AM EST

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Social media, which now divides us, doesn’t have to,Hello founder Orkut Büyükkökten says

Courtesy Hello Network

1/26/2017 Social media, which now divides us, doesn’t have to, Hello founder Orkut Büyükkökten says - Recode

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friendships easier, and we just haven’t found the right app yet.

“My biggest passions in life are people and connecting people through technology,”Büyükkökten said on the latest episode of Recode Decode, hosted by KaraSwisher. “If I look at society today, I believe that 99 percent of us need to connectmore.”

Büyükkökten founded his first social network, Club Nexus, while he was a gradstudent at Stanford during the first dot-com boom. Its pre-Friendster success ledhim to Google, where he founded that company’s first social network, which wascodenamed Eden but was ultimately named after him, Orkut.

However, Orkut “wasn’t ready to scale at launch” and only took off in a handful ofcountries like Brazil and Estonia. Now having left Google, Büyükkökten is back with anew social startup called Hello Network, which promises to make it easier to findnew friends.

“If you look at humanity, it’s a complex network with 7.4 billion individuals,” he said.“We have such a huge need to connect and connecting is getting harder and harder,even though there’s a lot of technology that should enable us to connect easier.”

The problem with today’s social media sites, Büyükkökten argued, is that theyreduce people to “highlight reels” rather than encouraging them to be authentic withone another.

“I could have two friends who are about to get divorced, but they would post apicture on Facebook where they are having a picnic happily,” he said. “I know it’s notreal, and everyone who’s looking at it thinks that it is.”

“We create trust within each other by sharing,” he added. “We need to be able toshare our true selves, and that’s how we dissolve the walls between us that separateus.”

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1/26/2017 Social media, which now divides us, doesn’t have to, Hello founder Orkut Büyükkökten says - Recode

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