Nov. 8, 2009 (The Hindu Business Line) --
Swetha Kannan
Google believes social networking is not about meaningless interactions with thousands of people. One may have several friends online, but it is really just a few people you really care about on a given day. And this is the direction in which networking online is headed, says Rahul Kulkarni, Product Manager, Google. (NASDAQ:GOOG)
The new Orkut will now take into account the ‘care’ factor and prompt users to touch base with friends they are close to. Whether it is ranking friends in some order of importance, filtering comments, or sending updates and alerts from close friends, the new Orkut hopes to make interactions as personal and meaningful as possible.
“The new Orkut is driven by user feedback and research on how people use social media and the kind of interactions users have on networking sites. Our research insight shows that people don’t want to interact with a stream of thousand people but want to interact with 15-20 people they really care about each day.”
New features
“The new Orkut is also about leveraging on Google’s existing strengths. For instance, the site integrates Google’s video site youtube seamlessly so that users can view videos within the Orkut environment without opening new pages. One can also upload and share photos using Picasa faster than before. G-talk is also embedded in Orkut to provide users a seamless experience. The entire process of ranking and filtering is based on Google’s basic strong point — search techniques.”
So what else does the new Orkut, which promises a faster and easier experience, have?
Apart from a new look and feel, of course, the site has a prominent ‘user bar’ on top which displays the user’s status and other personal details such as e-mail. Video chat, video testimonials, automatic face detection and typing text in various colours and fonts are other new features. If today social networking is predominantly about text messages (‘scraps’ as Google calls it), photos are also getting to be increasingly popular on the media.
“Especially in India, people love to take photographs and share them with friends,” says Kulkarni.
He also bets big on video in the days to come. “The marriage of youtube with Orkut makes it possible for video to grow big on Orkut. And as youtube expands itself, all that will be automatically delivered onto Orkut.
“People say India has slow network connection, it’s still relying on dial-up and video won’t become big, etc. But that’s not true.
