Saturday, March 17, 2007

Look what ORKUT does!

Orkut, the new craze for all online netizens. Yahoo is good will always be, but Orkut seems to have induced some freshness into the whole idea of communicating/synching-up/networking/ etc. Interesting...very interesting!

Today, apart from my Yahoo or MSN chat friends list. I am talking to various other folks. My 6th, 7th grade classmates from one school, my 9-10th grade folks from another, my college mates, most of my ex-work places, and almost all of my current friends. The message on top of my Orkut profile saying “You are connected to 46,915,167 people through 90 friends" is proof enough and I bet some of us have triple the figure I have.

Ok now I agree that not all talk, but then the knowledge of each-other being around sort-of gives the feeling of being in-touch. You are free to message anyone, without being worried about disturbing him/her... and same for you replying back. You have the freedom of checking them whenever and replying whenever. However, we have to be responsive enough to make this two-way communication work.

This whole concept is just so wonderful. There are communities you can join and further collaborate personally, professionally or just for fun. Fan clubs, hobbies, and topics of interest everything can be done. If you remember names of you long lost friends go search them, but warning you might make friends or find ten others with the same name :)

Then there are provisions of photo sharing ( limited), video sharing, building up a detailed profile ( which 99% of us don't complete). You can post scraps (the term used for a message on Orkut) which are public, or send individual messages or messages to an entire group/community. We can configure it to get alerts on a selected email on receiving any scrap and also on receiving individual emails. You can add friends, sort them and maybe lots more that even I haven't explored. There are profile visits listed on you home page, so that you know the last 4-5 people who visited you. That’s one way of making friends too. You could end up visiting a friend’s scrap book and getting lined on to few more friends (new or old) who would have left messages there. See didn't I tell it was interesting!

Of course, we have to follow those basic etiquettes of being online, be responsible, responsive and behave. We need to exercise caution not to promote any illegal activity or harass or get harassed. Well as long as its fun there’s no problem. Hope no one ever gets into trouble here or causes trouble, but you cannot say for sure. There is so much to make use of there in a positive sense. Why would someone want to spoil the party? Best of all its FREE ;) All you need is a email ID to link that with.

In all this baby, a personal project of a Google engineer Orkut Buyukkokten is a sure hit among us. Read more about this and him on these links. Thanks Orkut! (both the person and Google's site) for making the net some more fun.
Link - http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=3302741
His personal website - http://www.stanford.edu/~orkut/

(Note: I also got to know that there might be iisues with the actual ownership... Google seems to be facing a lawsuit from another company in CA. Read...http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,64046,00.html )

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