November 8, 2006

orkut: Free to All and Integrated with Google Talk

As written before, orkut's plans to become available for everyone are closer to reality. Now everyone can join orkut. This information is confirmed in orkut's help.



orkut's integration with Google Talk is also live. You just have to go to settings and click on "enable Google Talk". You can automatically add your orkut friends or only some of them. You also gain new options in Google Talk for orkut contacts, like sending scraps.


5 comments:

  1. Orkut is hideously buggy, and surprisingly shallow, for something associated with Google. Besides, it is virtually taken over by Brazilians, and is filled with spam beyond control.

    This is one of the worst resources I ever used.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I just spent about 15 minutes looking around there. (New user, just checking things out).

    I'm not sure I'll spend any time there again. I see way too much spam!

    ReplyDelete
  3. What ORKUT is now isn't important to Google. We can rest assured they'll clean it up and then "internationalize" it aggressively. ORKUT, just like Yahoo 360 and MSN Live Spaces, remains in BETA for an important reason - it's not ready for primetime. Google purposefully bought a very popular foreign Social Networking Site (ORKUT) as an investment towards the day when they'll combine Orkut, Blogger, GVid, YouTube, GTalk, GEarth, GBooks, Picasa, Firefox, OpenOffice(?) etc into a seemless network with a single sign-in and p/w. The reason they selected ORKUT was strategic - first, they didn't want an American SNS with all the legal crap that constrains MSN & Yahoo; second, they wanted a SNS that was already hugely popular in a part(s) of the world that supports Linux over Windows and Firefox over Internet Explorer. For Google, cleaning up ORKUT when the time's ready will be no problem. One of the first things they'll do is replace all existing spammed-up ORKUT Groups with the new GOOGLE Groups that's still in BETA (e.g. not the old usenet ones), and so forth. Anyway, I reckon that's what's going on with ORKUT.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Google didn't buy orkut. The social network was created by a Google employee.

    ReplyDelete

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