Orkut, the Internet social network service run by Google allows you to post personal or professional information and link to friends and acquaintances.
The service which was available only by invitation was recently opened up for all users. Also unlike other services you don’t need a Google Account to access Orkut.
These are some of the things I have noticed about Orkut
- Google doesn’t market Orkut as a social network service. The services page has no mention of Orkut.
- Google Labs page also doesn’t mention Orkut
- There is no official blog for Orkut
- Orkut is one service which clearly shows the usage of a Microsoft Technology (ASP) – I am not suggesting that it should have used a non Microsoft technology 🙂
So why does Google not treat Orkut like many of its other services ?
- Is it because of the lawsuit which accuses Google of stealing Orkut Code ?
- Or is Orkut not a revenue generating service for Google ?
Google puts in a lot of effort to prevent spam entering their search results. (Again not suggesting that they shouldn’t do this). However when the same comes to Orkut there is no interest shown by Google.
For E.g. Check the snapshot of Eclipse Community in Orkut
I have seen this community grow from 4K to 7k members and it was quite a useful community, until spammers took over. The community moderator is supposed to take care of the spam posts, but not much can be expected from him.
Why can’t Google come up with a good spam filter for the communities ? When a small company like Akismet can come up with a powerful spam filter, is it too much to ask from Google ? (By the way Google does have a totally impressive spam filter in GMail )
Check the User Interface of Orkut Community ! It sucks big time and this comes from a company which boasts of introducing innovative user interfaces with GMail/Google reader/Google Docs.
From what I have seen Google really doesn’t care about Orkut, I am not sure as to what the reason is ! Jeremy Zawdony thinks otherwise !
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And the most irritating thing in orkut is the search feature.
If you are searching for your friends and if the names don’t “exactly” match, the results are not shown! Pretty elementary, how could google miss it?
I want to sarch old friends how could I?
Vasu you might also have noted that after you type something in the search box and press enter, nothing happens !. You can have to “Click” on the Search button.
Ashish, I didn’t get what exactly you wanted to do ! You can search for friends using the search page and you can provide a list of filters (place,age etc) as well
!
Venu,
Orkut is Now the Heaven for Spammers. It’s Not just Spam there is hell amount of Porn Communities also. Now i wonder why google dosent block all these Communities nor filter them? On an average i receive 50 mails from orkut users daily advertising their sites or other referral programs :).
Though Google has listed Okrut at http://www.google.com/intl/en/options/ but the orkut is living its life, it looks like its a third party entity that is paying Big G for having its name! Orkut is no doubt t good place for friends to get together but the communities made over it are a failure. There is nothing except spam over 90% of those.
I recently did notice an official blog of Orkut. Somebody in google did notice this post/similar posts.
And I agree on the communities, most of them are just filled with spam !