Orkut inventor's academic precursor

Google engineer Orkut Buyyokktoken and two collaborators published A social network caught in the Web, a paper about a social network Orkut created at Stanford University called Nexus, in a peer-reviewed web journal called First Monday.
In it, Orkut and his coauthors describe some preliminary findings about connectedness and attribute trends in the network which appears to have been a direct predecessor to Google’s already somewhat moribund Orkut YASNS.