Recently I was seeing a new craze in our college internet center, that of most people using orkut.com, the social networking site. So me being the person I am, i took a plunge into this to check out what it is all about.
The first thing I noticed is that Orkut is in affiliation with Google, and it accepts the google account id to login. I remembered that one of my friends had quite some time back sent an orkut invite or something like that and i had joined it. And had added him as a friend. But never used it since. So with that in my mind, I used my gmail id and logged in and hoped that this time around I would atleast last around till i completely try it out.
First I went through the list of friends of the friend i had mentioned above. I found quite a few of the degree friends in that list with whom i had lost contact. Proceeded further and added them to the list and so the hunt began to find more of the people I knew. In the process i discovered that Orkut keeps track of the relationship’s very nicely, for example when i clicked on one of the people through my friend’s ‘friends list’, and wanted to add it, it nicely showed how the person is relates to me(Something like: Nithin ->Friend 1 -> Friend 1’s friend -> Friend 2. It is a nice feature and makes life much easier. I am just wondering how the algorithm in the background works.
Then there are other features like scrap’s, testimonials, etc. It also has an option to message the friends or a ‘group’ of friends or just a person right from the site itself. Just now after a new friend was added I noticed that even Birthday reminders are shown.
I was adding more and more friends, so the next step was organizing them. So there was an option to create groups, which i happily did and create some groups and added my friends to the relevant group. Also there is communities, which I am yet to try, though i have joined a few.
It’s nearly two days since I entered Orkut, and I my friends list has 20 odd friends, some of whom I have not met for over 2 years now. Overall it is a great networking tool, the only thing that worries me is that how long will people continue using it and will take interest to keep the details updated, since that’s what will matter over time. For the time being, let me go slow on this, since I have already more than exceeded my broadband internet limit, so maybe try out more next month.
If you know me, and are not on my Orkut friends list, please let me know by posting a comment below, and I will add you in.
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trust me, you’re better off coding something than hanging out at orkut. many people i know are addicted. and more importantly, its a big breach of privacy. its good to find your old friends and stuff like that. but, stay off it. here is a sampler: anyone can know what you’ve been doing for the past week or so because your “scrap book” is public. at first, orkut seems a cool thing. infact it is. but, dont spend too much time in there
P.S: i delete all my scraps once i read them. i suggest you do the same.
Thanks for the advice Sharath, I will be deleting some of the scraps on selective basis, based on how intrusive it is. And even I think people are wasting far too much time at Orkut.
And Privacy was something which I wanted to mention in my post but somelost forgot when I started to write my post, thanks once again for reminding me. Well for the time being at least I will be once in a while hanging out there but not for much time, just like they say \’knowing the limits\’, and be within such limits and not waste much time.
Hmmm..
Not bad, if your intention is to keep in touch, to network.
But too much of anything is as bad as nothing!
Regards
Dp
[...] Some days back I had written about my initial experience with Orkut. Continuing from where i left off, I have been noticing that many messages that I receive through the messages option is just plain old chain mails. Here are two such examples: message: Dear user because of sudden rush of people signing up to orkut is come to an attention that we are vastly running our of resources so with in a week any one who does not receive this scrap will be deleted of our server . We know that you are still using this account We want to find out which users are actually using their orkut accounts so if you are using your then please send this scrap to every orkut user that you can if u do not pass this scrap to anyone then we will delete your account [...]