Orkut - I am addicted. Review on Orkut

Orkut.com Review for Mouthshut One of my friends - Rahul invited me to join an online community called Orkut. This sounded like a strange name, so I was curious and signed up. Initially, it was a bit confusing, I could not understand the exact nature of this website.

Was this a dating site? That was my first impression. But I continued to surf for a while and realised the immense potential that this site had. Extremely functional and very good audience in terms of numbers and quality too. There were already more than 415 K members and 79 K communities on various topics. One good thing about memberships is that it is only by invitation. So an Orkut member has to invite you to join the community. You cannot just sign up - there is always someone who knows you on the community and this helps keeping the place relatively clean.

This site makes it easy to find people who share your hobbies and interests, look for romantic connections or establish new business contacts. You can also create and join a wide variety of online communities to discuss current events, reconnect with old college buddies or even exchange cookie recipes.

Some cool features are:

Detailed profiles divided into 3 main areas - General, Professional and Personal. You also have an option of selecting what details are visible to whom. For example, if you do not want to reveal your address or cellphone nos. to all, you can make them visible only to your friends or friends of friends.

Album: You can create a simple photo album which is openly shared for all to view.

Bookmarks: It allows you to bookmark certain sections of the website for fast access. This is really handy because the site is very vast and it becomes difficult to keep on browsing into frequently visited pages.

Hot List: Your hot-list helps you keep track of members whom you find attractive or are interested in dating. Your hot-list is only visible to you.

Crush List: Your crush-list helps to find out if someone else also has a crush on you. Your crush-list is only visible to you. However if you add someone to your crush-list and the same person adds you to their list, you both will get a message indicating that there is a match.

Teasers: Once you've worked up the courage to tell someone you're interested, try sending them a teaser. Teasers send an email from you to that person?s preferred email account. You can choose from a fun selection of pre-written teasers (''For someone so adorable, how can you be single?''), or write your own message.

Ignore List: Your ignore-list is only visible to you. People you are ignoring cannot add you as a friend or send you a message.

You can group and categorize your friends into various classes so that sending mass messages becomes easy. For example, I have created a friend group called colleagues - so I can sent a common message to them at a single click.

You also have a 'Karma' ranking for your friends. You can rate them at various levels as trustworthy, cool and sexy. These rankings are not visible to them, but if 5 of their friends give them karma rankings, those appear on their profiles without disclosing who has rated them.

Scrapbook: Scrapbook is a way of adding small bits of information to our own profile as well as to friends scrapbook. It can be deleted by the writer or the profile owner. It is fun using the scrapbook.

It has a community and friends finder which is handy locating information. It also have a messaging system with inbox, sent items, saved items etc. You have options to receive email alerts as per your choice.

Members need to be careful about their online behaviour. The system has been programmed to identify potential misuse and offending members are temporarily 'jailed' for mis-behaviour. You can also report bogus ids.

Overall, a very interesting and innovative concept. I am already an addict. Most of my colleagues too are addicted.

A few suggestions which I already sent to the Orkut Webmaster are:

Online chat system: It would be great to see which friends are currently online and be able to chat with them. This can be indirectly done as of now, but there could be a better interface to it.

Who is online on particular communities: Most discussion boards like phpBB or Invisionboards show the members who are currently surfing particular topics. This feature could be useful too.

Privacy: Some of my friends wished that their friend list should not be visible to others [to evade poaching of the chics that they have added to their friend list]. However, I think that is perfectly alright. After all, this has to be an open platform with Laissez Faire.

If you are inspired, write to me and I shall invite you there. Hope to see you on Orkut soon ! My ID on orkut is iamshishir.

Cheers,

Shishir