Orkut... Chirkut... Mirkut!!!

“Are you still not on Orkut?” !!! What a funny name, the first time I heard it I was almost ROTFL [rolling on the floor laughing… that’s for those who are ignorant to the IMs and the Texting world]. Sounds like a hybrid between a coconut and Orko, the character from the He-Man and the Masters of the Universe franchise, btw one of my favorite tv cartoons growing up. So, the previous question was thrown at me by a lot of friends and I had to eventually jump in the pool of social networking rather unwillingly at first. Then came facebook and a plethora of other sites but there is still one thing that distinguishes Orkut over all the networking sites is its simplicity of use. l had never imagined that l would be able to stay in touch with my school buddies whom l hadn't seen in almost 17 years. I still haven't seen them but l do interact with them and that is immensely satisfying.

Before Orkut the only way of keeping in touch with friends was through IMs like yahoo and msn messengers, some times email and rarely phone calls. Agreed that other sites like Facebook and Myspace have a wider appeal here in the US but Orkut helps me keep in touch with friends and family back in India too. The earlier versions sure left a lot to be desired but now the site seems to me much more mature and stable. With close to 2,000 apps the number is set to balloon to 20,000 by the end of this year. Choices are good but a lot of choices just confuses the user. How the hell are you going to browse through so many categories of apps and find the right one that you need? Teen Patti has been my favorite app out of the few that I have managed to look at. I personally think that Orkut was better off without the Facebook style status messages. Does anyone care if you just got 2 hours of sleep and you want all your friends to know? Or does it matter that you are now going from one grocery store to the other? Anyway, just a personal opinion, some people just like to let others know how bad of a day they are having or how the 3 day old biryani has made their stomachs worse.

The security of the site still remains an issue as well as the legality of age etc. Even my ten year old cousin has a profile on Orkut. But it still has some features where you can restrict access to your scraps or photo/videos. Being a networking and a “personals” site as decided by our search engines and web crawlers, this site is blocked at work and for a good reason, sometime its really addictive. Just to guage the popularity of this website in other countries, primarily being Brazil, take a look at some of the stats below as gathered from their website.



So let me know some of the other good and bad things about this social networking, down time stress reliever, site with the funny name, that come to your mind.