Social Networking Website: Orkut

Orkut is a social networking website which allows users to interact as well as make new friends on the Internet. It is very popular in my part of the world(read: India) as well as in brazil and claims to have more than 67 Million users worldwide. Orkut was founded by Orkut Buyukkokten; a Turkish software engineer while working at Google as a personal project. Orkut was later bought by Google.

Orkut offers several features which are very effective and has helped me a lot to find old friends with whom I had lost contact as well as make new friends. The scrapbook feature of Orkut has proved to be the most beneficial one for me as it is the most effective and the easiest way of communication between Orkut friends. Some of the other most effective and efficient features of Orkut are as mentioned below.

1)      Scrapbooks: Scrapbook is one of the most used feature on Orkut. People can send scarps to other users. Earlier people were able to send scraps to just about anyone who has an account with Orkut but Orkut recently introduced new security features which allow users to decide who posts scraps and to whom.  

2)      Friends: Users can add friends either by searching for them or by looking up in their email contacts. Currently you can search your email contacts on Gmail, Hotmail and AOL. You can also browse different Orkut profiles and send requests to other users to add you as a friend. You can also alternatively invite others to join Orkut.

3)      Communities: Communities in Orkut are according to me a little primitive; although very helpful. These communities have helped me a lot when I needed to search for universities in the US for my Masters as well as helped me a lot while giving my GRE and TOEFL exams. These communities create a forum like environment where in people can create threads to post questions, comments or any information. Orkut communities also have a feature to create polls to get public opinion. Although these communities are very helpful they are often subjected to abuse by create hate communities related to a particular country or race or religion. There are several legal cases on Google(owners of Orkut) in this regard.

4)      Photos and Videos: Users on Orkut can post photos and videos. These feature was also quite primitive for a long time but recently the developers at Orkut has realized this feature and hence has improved the photo sharing abilities to a greater extend. Now users can upload photos and organize them in the form of albums. The video functionality on Orkut is still primitive and users can only share videos either uploaded on Youtube or Google Video and still cant upload video from their Orkut account. So, according to me, interoperatibility with respect to videos on Orkut and google’s video sharing site needs to be improved.

5)      Other features: Orkut has several other fun features where in people can post testimonial of their friends, people can rate their friends as sexy, cool and hot as well as people can add their feeds or feeds of sites that they very often read.

 

So, here is what I like about Orkut and in the weeks to follow I will cover more tutorials on Orkut for the absolute beginner!