Social Networking With Orkut

Orkut is a social networking tool designed to help you maintain your friendships and meet new friends. Orkut was named after its original programmer, Orkut Buyukkokten. You can find Orkut at http://www.orkut.com

Orkut is available by invitation only. You must be invited by someone with a current Orkut account in order to set up your own account. There are over twenty two million users, so chances are that you may already know one or two of them. Ask your online friends, and it’s likely one of them has an account and can give you an invite.

Orkut’s profile is divided into three categories: social, professional, and personal. Orket lets you specify how much or how little information you’d like to share on many categories.

You can specify whether profile information is private, friends only, available to friends of your friends, or available to everyone. Information that is always visible can just be left blank (with the exception of your name.) Areas that can be filtered are clearly marked with a key symbol and a drop box. Orkut also lets you preview your profile as a friend, friend of friend, or stranger.

The whole point of social networking is to create a network of friends. In order to list someone as a friend, you must verify that they’re your friend, and they must confirm it. You can rate the level of your friendship, from “never met” to “best friends.”

You can also rate your friends with smiley faces for trustworthiness, ice cubes for coolness, and hearts for sexiness. The number of smileys, ice cubes, and hearts someone has are visible on their profile, but not the source of the ratings. This is fun and a little silly, but it doesn’t seem to be very useful.

What is useful is that Orkut automatically lists the upcoming birthday of anyone on your friend’s list. You can even shop for a present, if they’ve linked a wishlist from Froogle to their profile.

Each user has a scrapbook where brief messages can be left by themselves and others. In addition, users can send each other “testimonials” which appear under the user’s profile. Each user also has an album, where they can upload photos.

Orkut has had some problems with users having their scrapbooks and testimonials “flooded” with bogus messages.