Orkut.com is a social networking site created by an Google engineer in his spare time.
Before Orkut.com, I have never been a member of any ''social networking'' website. But I jumped onto the orkut bandwagon when I found that it was an invite only place. This invite only approach is quite elitist, isnt it? But it sure attracts a lot of people there.
I am going to narrate my experience from signup onwards.
First of all there is a very extensive signup procedure where we have to give them lots and lots of details about us. All these are optional, except your name, but this has raised a lot of controversy on what Google is going to do with all this info about the tastes of its members.
Unlike Yahoo! and other free email providers, Google.com does not have a sign up procedure for its search engine. So it is possible that Orkut can be used to get tons of data about its users and then this info can be sold to marketing people who could send tons and tons of spam and ads.
Orkut's privacy policy is crapped up too. It says that whatever stuff we post on Orkut is owned by them. I have seen many original poems written by members, in the ''scrap book'' provided for each member. Doesnt this mean that Orkut owns these poems and if the poet publishes these poems, Orkut.com could sue them? This is outright crazy!! Maybe they could use my photo for a fairness cream if I upload it to my Orkut profile. :-D Also I wouldnt be able to sue them if I didn't find that amusing.
Update : Orkut launched a new Media section which contains articles and photos submitted by members. So I read through the submission guidelines and here is what I came up with.
You acknowledge that orkut has had, and will have access to and/or may independently create, or may have created, ideas, images or music similar to those contained in the Materials, and You agree that You will not be entitled to any compensation by reason of the use by orkut or its affiliates of such similar material.
By submitting Materials to orkut, You grant orkut and its affiliates a transferable license to use, copy, distribute, publicly perform and/or create derivative works of the Materials, including a license to authorize republication, reproduction, and syndication of the Materials in any medium. You agree that orkut and its affiliates have the right to edit any text that you submit as they deem appropriate for publication.
The above text really spooked me. I am not going to submit any of my original work there!
When we signup, we notice that only U.S. zip codes and states are supported. There is no option to manually fill out the name of our state and the manual zip code entry field is not long enough for Indian zip codes.
Ok. Signup part and terms of service over.
Now we come to the innards of the website.
Simliar to a free email service, there is a home page where you get to see a partial list of your friends and the communities you have joined. The interface is clean and loads very quickly.
Now I am going to tell you on what Orkut contains and my take on it.
Other than your homepage, you can search for people, see their profiles and add them to your friend list.
There are lots of communities where you can join and participate in discussions on various topic. Each community is like a mini-forum. When you visit a community, there is a partial list of members on the community main page. This is usually the popular crowd(the most active members). This hierarchy is wrong and motivates bad behaviour.
Your friends can write testimonials about you which are displayed on your home page. There is an option to accept or reject the testimonial also.
You have a scrap book in which u can post bits of text. Other people(anyone) can also post bits of text in your scrap book. There is NO option to reject a scrap which was put by someone. I find that quite unnerving.
There is a photo album where you upload photos. There is a limit to the size of the individual photo (500 kb) and you can upload a maximum of 12 photos.
You have an inbox there which contains messages from friends and communities. U have the options to send messages to friends or to communities. This is a big source of unsolicited messages......
Update : In order to reduce inbox spamming, orkut removed the option to send messages to friends of friends. Also community messaging has been turned off by default when creating communities. This has resulted in almost zero spam in my inbox lately.
There is a friends tab where you see the entire list of friends you have and send invitations. You can rate their karma on basis of 3 factors. Their trustworthiness, cool factor and sexyness.
This is downright lame. Since when has people started rating their friends on just these 3 factors?
Also you can become a fan of someone and other people can become a fan of yours. But this is possible only if the persons have added each other to their friend lists. U can see the fans list of other people(anyone) and others can yours in the same way too.
That is pretty lame too. People who we are fans of, are idols. We don't have to be their friends to be fans of theirs. For example, I am a fan of Beckham. But he doesnt know me. But in Orkut, if I wanted to be a fan of someone, I would have to add them to my list!!! So Orkut has miserably screwed in implementing the fan feature.
Also Orkut quite lamely tries to be more of a dating site as there are a lot of features for that. There is a crush list. You can add people to your crush list without them knowing about it. But if someone on your crush list has added U to their crush list, then both get a notification about it.
There is nothing to DO on this site other than add friends, rate them and post in the communities. A social networking site needs a long term community in order to succeed. If new features are not added soon, the orkut craze will surely die out and other websites like friendster and tribe.net will have the last laugh....
Update : Orkut is now one of the slowest websites on the internet. It is very hard to login during peak times, and a lot of infamous error messages are displayed. One such message is ''Bad Bad server. No Donut for you''. Also there are other errors like the 502 Server Error. This means that people in charge of orkut has done nothing to optimize the website to match the ever increasing traffic.
There was an accusation against Google that they stole the code used for creating Orkut. When I observe and see that the google engineers havent done much to improve orkut in all these months, this accusation could be true. They could still be trying to figure things out!
They are removing features to speed up the service. They removed the profile views feature claiming that they couldnt get it to run fast enough and then they removed Friend of Friend messaging.
Inspite of all this, Orkut is quite enticing and addictive and I still would recommend it. If you don't like Orkut, you can always cancel your account.
If you want to experience Orkut, but have no way to get in there, please email me for an invitation. I will be happy to send you one.
