Nithin Kamath’s Weblog

Orkut has in the last 24 hours added some new features and this list features one of the most requested feature that many have been waiting for, that of being able to delete multiple scrap’s at one go.

Here are a list of new features that I was able to notice today:

• Option to select multiple scrap’s at a time and deleting them.
• Option of being able to view either 10/20/30 scraps at a time.
• A new Reply button for each scrap means that you can reply to scraps from your scrap book itself. This was a a feature which was until now enjoyed by firefox users with the Orkut ScrapEasy extension.
• Now one can choose to get friend requests from everyone or only from people that speak the languages that one has set in the profile.
• In the messages sent to communities, i now find an option to ‘Ignore this person’, which means you can block messages from reaching you when the ignored person posts to the community.
• Here is something which i have not tried but may be of help if more coverage of India is done in Google Earth, visit http://www.orkut.com/Map.aspx when you are logged in to Orkut.

Though these may not represent all the changes that may have been performed, I am still wondering why Orkut does not have any mention of these in the ‘news’ of the site. Strange!.

In the past two days I have received many copies of this message:-

IIT Bombay student Anupam Biswas 5th Year Mechanical Engg is suffering from Colukabki (caused due to excessive nabad and depression) a disease very rarely found (3 in a billion). His condition is very pathetic and the treatment is very expensive, obviously his parents are not able to afford his reatment. Orkut has agreed to pay 1 paisa after each time this message is forward. So please pass to all ur friends.

So first though that came to my mind is, how true is this? I did a search on Google, Yahoo!, Ask, MSN and Wikipedia and did not find any reference of the so called disease, I am surprised that it is so rare that it is not mentioned on any of the billion odd pages. The only places this is being referred to are the message groups or discussion forums where the exact same message is shown with changes in the names of the person and Orkut being replaced by Yahoo!

One more sentence say “Orkut has agreed to pay 1 paisa”, well when did Orkut announce this, and whom did it inform this to. I do not find any press releases or any details about this anywhere. Also why would Orkut announce this, the only valid intention I can think of is to make more people use Orkut. But why would they do that, the servers are most of the time overloaded and offer donuts, so why would they want more load of these messages ???

So friends this message is a Hoax, and please do not forward this message to your friends. If you think this is true, please let me know the reasons for the same.

Just An Online Minute reports:

GOOGLE THIS WEEKEND DECIDED TO turn over records to the Brazilian government about users of Orkut, the company’s social-networking service that has found a large fan base in Brazil. Or at least, that had a large Brazilian fan base before agreeing to roll over. The Brazilian government is investigating people who’ve allegedly used the service to participate in Web groups that it deems illegal. The groups allegedly encourage racism and homophobia, among other objectionable stances, according to The Washington Post. But, at least as far as we know, members of the groups have only expressed opinions on the forums. Nothing has come to light in the press to show that members of the groups have acted on whatever beliefs they’re accused of harboring….

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Well that’s an interesting piece of news, but a good one, since it will help in keeping the site clean as well as at least make people stay away from posting things which are against the general public interest. Happy to know the Brazilian govt is serious in these matters.

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

Just follow these simple steps. 1. Click on the “Messages Tab” in your account. 2. Click on the “compose mail” option which is the last one of the four icons you see together. 3. Select “all friends” 4. Cut and paste this message

When u r online …whose name do u look for first? when a slow song comes on the radio-whose face comes to ur mind first? when u hear ur phone ringing who do u hope it is calling? whose name makes ur heart skip a beat? in the next 60 seconds send this to all the people on ur list and the person that u are thinkin of will do something special to show how much they care about u! if i dont get dis back i guess ur not my friend. If u have alot of love for someone copy and send to ur whole list in 5 mins ur true love will call u!!!!! Just try

By looking at the above messages we can directly know that the message is pure chain mails, just waste of time and bandwidth. Just considering the first message, anyone new to web or orkut will directly send the message to all the people in the friends list. What this does is just increases the traffic as well as the load on the server and nothing else. Seeing how many times the Orkut server was overloaded in the small number of visits I made, one can say that it can live better without the additional unwanted load.

On a totally different note, there is a Orkut toolbar for Mozilla Firefox browser, those interested can install the extension.

And on a totally different note I don’t understand the concept of writing a scrap to a person whom you meet daily, is it that we are slowly getting socially disconnected and require an on-line medium to tell our friends what we wanted to say. Well there are many interpretations that can be made. I believe using a blog will be a much better option, people write what ever they require and other can comment on it, helps everyone, the writer (writing experience) of the blog, the visitor (comes to know more about the blogger) and the general public (can find information which sometimes may not be easily available on the net). Please do leave a comment to let me know what you feel. Plz. do not interpret that I don’t like receiving scraps…i like them…so please do scrap.

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.