Orkut

I thought that I would look at orkut because it has been mentioned in quite a few seminars and so I was intrigued, however my views on the site as a whole were not positive.

Orkut was launched early 2004 created by a google employee, from researching into the background of Orkut it was designed to be a social networking site i.e. meet new friends and maintain relationships (like all of the other networking sites) and users did not have to be invited to join the site. Even though the site isn’t that well known in the UK research tells me that it is very popular in Brazil and India.

On a positive note the site does function well and does the job that it was created for, it has used the same layout that most social networking sites use. There is good navigation throughout the site clearly labelling what each button does. I have not added any applications but browsing through them I can see the orkut is aimed at young professionals; the main applications I noticed were based around designing the users profile and ‘chatting’ to other orkut users. I feel that having the option to add a ‘chat’ application was a conscious idea because not every user wants or has the time to talk online, facebook has the chat application but users do not have a choice in this and I don’t like having consent pop-ups of people trying to talk.

A problem that has occurred to me since joining orkut is that I am finding it hard to get involved with the site. As I don’t know many if any people who are users of orkut and I don’t want to add random users I am not able to really gain an interest to the site. I have browsed a few of the different users because what I like about orkut is that you can browse anyone’s profile, with other networking sites you have to be accepted as a friend but with orkut you can browse everyone’s profiles, could this cause problems though? The internet is very well known for identity theft and with any orkut users allowed to view everyone’s profiles I believe that this problem could arise.

I can see why orkut can be popular as it is just like facebook, bebo or any other social networking site however it has not been recognised by UK users and so to people who use facebook it is just another site trying to compete, to be a more popular site; this makes me wonder do the main users of orkut think the thing for facebook.