Orkut Review

Orkut, a online social networking site and an innovation by Google, which has surpassed many of it's rivals(like hi5, Friendster) by a big margin is the latest buzz word of today. First and the foremost reason why it's the No. 1(or maybe no. 2, next to MySpace) is obviosly, speed. It's much faster and simpler than hi5. You have all the tools that you need to stay in touch, make new friends or just pass the time. And that's why I call it a "complete" social networking service. Let's check it out.

Signing-Up:
It's easy. If you've got a gmail account(which almost everyone has), no problems, get going. If not, create one first, and that'll be the username-password for your orkut account too. Next, complete your profile and you're a member of the growing orkut community.
This integration, I'll say, is kind of uncool as signing out from either of them will result in a sign-out from both of them.

Finding Friends:
Check your inbox. There must be many a mails inviting you to join orkut/become friends. Accept them. Now you've some friends. Check their friends network and expand. In the rare case that you don't have any invitations, use their "search" option which is, in my opinion, is useless. Mostly, there are no donuts for us(that means search could not be performed at that moment). Hopes are on that Orkut will fix it ASAP. Anyway, one friend is enough to expand your friends list to several thousand. So, don't worry about that.

Scrapping:
Scrapping, the very "essence" of Orkut, is actually, chatting, with a few differences
- There's only one "window" for all conversations
- It's not private i.e. all the people can view what you and the other person is writing
- All the conversations are saved
- It's fun

Describing friends:
There are two ways to do so. Firstly, you can give them a fan, trusty, cool and/or sexy status. Alternately, or contemporarily, you can also write a testimonial for your friend which is second option.

Communities:
There are so many people on Orkut. Hence, wavelengths and interests are sure to match. To cater to the need of common interests and providing a platform, Orkut has provided an option for communities. A person can create or join a community, and therefore can communicate his/her ideas. You can be part of as many communities as you want. I'm a part of 74 of them!

Photos:
Upload your photo so that the world can see you, and leave comment(s) too. Same as hi5. Notable problem is, once you define a primary photo, or delete one, it takes 1-2 days for the changes to take effect.

Total Fun:
Join Orkut. You're gonna have the blast of a time. If you've ever been on hi5 and loved it, Orkut will be god-like for you. It's addictive.

Like everything else, this service also has it's share of Con's. As said earlier, it's "search" feature is not of much use. Also, changes in photo album take effect after a day or two.
It's "news" and "media" options don't make up for interesting matter and the worst about it is, you can only delete 10 messages at one time, a bane for those(which includes me), who have more than 1000 unread messages in their message box and want to get rid of them. Figuring out who's online and who's not is also a difficult task. Trend is, the person appearing first in the square friends list is online, but then, that's not a sure shot method.

But all said and done, Orkut deserves a 9 out of 10.

Regards
(Siddharth Razdan)

posted by Siddharth Razdan @ 11:10 PM