The integration of Google Talk within Orkut has been in news from quite some time. However unlike other Google products, there isn’t an official blog for Orkut which raises questions on Google’s commitment to this product !
One reason might be the lawsuit on Google by a small company which alleges that the Orkut developer Orkut Buyukkokten illegally took the code that he had written for the company ! Also Orkut is the only Google product I guess, clearly showing a Microsoft Technology (ASP) being used ! Anybody noticed that ?
From the past few months there have been some constant updates on the User Interface front like Message Handling, Reply to Scraps etc ! Also Google Ads have started appearing in a few community pages 🙂
Today Google Talk has been integrated into Orkut. Accessing/Enabling this feature is kind of done in a weird way which is anyway not untypical of Orkut. You are supposed to click on your friends list and search for the small status icon. (You can either click on the “Friends” link or the “View Friends” link. Both show your friends list in a different way ! Again Pathetic ! )
On clicking this you are taken to a screen where you can enable/configure this feature ! You can selectively add your friends into the Google Talk List. Truly an “innovative” way to enable an feature !
(I wanted to paste a snapshot of the configuration page, after loafing around for some 10 min I found out that there is no way to access that page again !! ).
Once you add your Orkut friends to the GTalk list
- You can get notifications when your friend scraps you
- You can view your friends Orkut profile from GTalk
- You can write a scrap your friend from GTalk (Again this feature is not that innovative, it just opens the Scrapbook page in your favorite Web Browser 🙂 )
To be honest, its not a great feature and I don’t see much value add in the integration. If you have read this post properly I have written more about the pathetic UI of Orkut more than the integration 😀
What do you like/dislike in Orkut ?
P.S. If you haven’t already noticed, offline messages is now supported in Google Talk. This was one of the top requested feature, if you want to suggest more features to Google Talk, click here !
Update : Official Google Blog does have a post related to this new feature, missed it !
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The fact that there is not an official blog is very annoying. I guess I’ll have to fill in the gap until then…
Wow cool site ! Lot of info on orkut 🙂 You just added yourself a RSS Subscriber 😀