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You are invited to join Orkut
IT is an online community website designed with the goal to make the social life of users more active and stimulating. Orkut’s social network can help users both maintain existing relationships and establish new ones by reaching out to people they have never met before. Who they interact with is entirely up to the users.
Many people, specially younger adults, feel that their friends are the most important aspects of their life and try treating every single one of them accordingly.
Orkut’s “invitation only” policy creates a sense of mystery and curiosity, so that one wishes to join, without even knowing what it is. However, if you are able to manage an invitation, being on orkut is not a bad deal after all. After a bit of initial hesitation, one tries to reach out to new friends. Who does not need more friends? And you can always find some interesting people on Orkut. Some of the Internet’s most prolific and influential writers share their random thoughts with the world here.
The trend of social networking through technology started back in 1998 when Amzon.com acquired PlanetAll. That was a pioneer site having basic functions such as sharing of contact information, basic biographies, and expanding networks through friends’ networks. Following the phenomenon set by social networking sites Friendster, and followed by many others like Emode, Evite, Tribe.net, LinkedIn, currently Google’s Orkut is pretty hot with Web surfers. Joining orkut is near the top of the wish list of many web users and netsurfers, young and old alike. Orkut gained a huge popularity boost when Google integrated this service with its own brand name. Google, it seems, possesses a Midas touch.
Google started out as a modest search engine, but since its inception has come a long way. It is undoubtedly the most popular search engine on the Web, with many features that make it efficient and unique. It also offers some useful software tools and services as well, such as Google Groups (Usenet), image search, news, answers, Froogle, Gmail, blogger, catalogs and now Orkut.
Orkut was the hobbyhorse of Google’s User Interface Engineer Orkut Buyukkokten (orkut.com explains this in its FAQ page in the help section, under ‘how to pronounce “or-kut”?’, but I wonder how one can utter the tongue twisting Buyukkokten). The story is that Orkut was a project that Buyukkokten created in that 20 percent time that Google allows its employees for personal pursuits to encourage creativity. Good idea! Earlier, there was a rumour that Google is interested in buying Friendster, like it did Blogger.com — one ofthe most populous blogging sites on the internet. But Orkut was launched instead. Maybe Google will put an icon for Orkut and Gmail each on its already popular toolbar.
Orkut does a few things in different ways by trying to deal with different human emotions. It is faster then other similar social networking sites. It is not yet crowded with users or ads. Unlike most services focusing on promoting a single type of social connection, Orkut allows three aspects of users’ lives: personal, social, and professional. Killer features like karma ratings, communities or flagging through hot and crush lists make it very different (read cool). Perhaps the best thing thus far is the exclusiveness of the people in the Orkut network. Since the site is invitation only, it is still an exclusive and close-knit community where one finds “friends of smart and interesting people, well, smart and interesting.” The rest is almost the same: user interface with photo thumbnails and many other features are similar to those already offered by Friendster and its predecessors.
At first only 1200 invitation were sent out, mostly to Google staffers. The rest followed through invitation by initial members. Orkut, which now counts almost 1,727,500 members, like all social networking services, has been designed to promote a set of pre-determined behaviour traits instead of enabling users to do what is most interesting and useful to them. It is sort of weird to read which of your friends are your fans. I also wonder what to do with ‘friends of friends’ besides spamming them.
Exploring through search options one comes across many pages of people who, while writing their profile and character traits, seem to have borrowed some of the adjectives from others. Exceptions do exist, but cliches like “friendly, unique, fun, lovable, talented, cute, crazy, sexy, honest, romantic, elegant, likeable, smart, frank” are very common. Here too one may find people who have registered with invented names. It is a very interesting experience to send an invitation to a friend and then find out they have already added you to their orkut network under an asumed name.
Internet users seem to get tired of things soon. Other than email, which has not changed significantly over the last three decades, there have been many activity forums (Usenets, blogs) which rapidly gained popularity and then people started losing interest in them. For now Orkut is expanding every moment. Every time you refresh your Orkut homepage the number of people you are connected to through your friends will be increased. It is only a matter of time before it goes mainstream and the network grows to a point where everyone who wants to join is already in. Those who have closely followed the evolution of Google may know that sooner or later Google will find a way to include text ads on the site in some way. Their AdSense is very efficient in that.
But while the service is still invitation only and users are eager to join, it should be a good idea to make it more customizable, giving users more liberty. Communities’ updates can be shown on the homepages of individual users in some effective and unobtrusive way. More buttons on the individual home page will also help.
The writer
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