The speculations have proved to be right. Yesterday, Google integrated Google Talk with its social networking site orkut, and it automatically adds all your orkut friends in Google Talk. However, if you do not want any of your orkut friends in your Google Talk, you can now choose and add your orkut friends in Google Talk. Besides this, if you do not have a picture/avatar in your Google Talk, your main picture in the orkut profile becomes your avatar by default.
Among other features added are scrap notification alerts if any friend scrapped in your orkut scrapbook. You can now use your Google Talk to write a scrap in your friends’ scrapbooks.
Along with this integration comes a policy change too. Until now, you could become a member of orkut only if an existing orkut member invited you. Now they have done away with this invite only policy and open for all those with a Gmail account to signup. Your Gmail address is the username for signing up. Before Google took over orkut, orkut provided its own user ID to new signups. They will continue to sign in using their old IDs.
Already orkut is becoming an extremely popular social network site in South America and India with numbers rising in the exponential curve. With the free for all (Gmail users) policy now, it can only grow faster.
Comments
ya good news , i know i had many difficulties in getting a friend to send a invite and open a account in orkut. but what i am afraid of is that now every person can open the account and will decrease the novelty of the social community the question and the answer to which we find in near future is will google be able to handle the influx
Ashutosh:
The invite-only policy meant putting shackles in the process of natural growth of the social network. Google no doubt will monetize orkut soon. As orkut is one of the fastest growing communities, it can hardly afford not to do so.
As far as the ’influx’ is concerned, well, Google is no Friendster. It is more than equipped to handle surging traffic and number of users.
So, the millions of Google users have got a reason to cheer up. With the integration of Gtalk with Orkut, we now no need wait for a friend to invite to get the membership. Though I am one of the members of Google’s social network. I rarely use it. The reason: privacy concern. The next big challenge before Google is to ensure privacy for the registered users to make orkut an effective tool of social networking.