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August 24, 2010

Orkut Lets You Communicate with Groups of Friends

Orkut, Google's social network that has a lot of users in Brazil and India, has received a major update. Groups of friends are more visible and you can send messages to the members of a group directly from Orkut's homepage. Orkut also updated search results pages and application pages, while testing a new platform for communities.


There are a lot of changes and it will be interesting to see if Google tests these features in Orkut before launching Google Me, a social network that will compete with Facebook.

One of the major changes in Orkut is the focus on groups. "You love your grandma and you're friends with your boss, but that doesn't mean you want them both seeing the conversation you're having with your friends the day after a party. With orkut, you can now build separate groups of your friends reflecting how you interact with them in real life." This is one of the ideas from "The Real Life Social Network", a presentation by Paul Adams, Senior User Experience Researcher at Google.



Google's Rahul Kulkarni mentioned last year that Orkut will change a lot. "The new Orkut adopts the latest Google Web Toolkit platform and includes features such as built-in simultaneous chat, photo tagging with automatic face detection and private sharing of photo albums including new safety features. This is the beginning of a new direction for Orkut, where users will be able to increasingly share and communicate with groups of friends from their lives."

9 comments:

  1. It sure looks pretty. Its a shame most of my friends have moved to Facebook.

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  2. Maybe Google is planning to make Orkut and the upcoming Google Me based on the same platform.

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  3. OK, Google has been pretty busy with Orkut. These features tie directly into the Google presentation about the complexities of real life social circles. Many speculated that it was for the rumored Google Me, but I'm wondering if Google Me is really going to just be Orkut revamped and rebranded.

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  4. Orkut is total Bull shit , where is "SocialStream" Google's sponsored project at the Carnegie Mellon University’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute,

    http://www.hcii.cmu.edu/M-HCI/2006/SocialstreamProject/index.php

    SocialStream's UI is much Kooler then any social network

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  5. Hi,

    Thanks for sharing this information.

    Thanks Again

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  6. why would google launch a facebook clone called googleme, seems a waste of time and no doubt will lead to massive ridicule from the web community who will laugh hard at google. And this is exactly what Eric Schmidt hinted at when he said Googleme will not be a clone of Facebook.

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  7. The new groups function sounds great. This is the one area about facebook that I hate. I can't silo my friends and family.

    I look forward to switching to Google Me

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  8. Will Google consider making Googleme and/or Orkut interact with Diaspora* either just by allow exporting of your data (as many other Google products now allow similar things), or by being a full Diaspora* compatible server?

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  9. Googlers on Buzz now often speak about federated social networks which use common protocols to interact with each other. I have some doubts that Facebook will agree on such cooperation, but yes - it would be interesting to see such in interaction between Google Me / Orkut and Diaspora.

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