Orkut was quietly launched on January 19, 2004 by the search company Google. Orkut Büyükkökten, a Turkish software engineer, developed Orkut as an independent project while working at Google. Orkut as you know is by invitation only. Meaning that you have to have either an invitation by a person already using orkut, or you have to be a Gmail user. Basically you need an invitation for either Gmail or Orkut. And then you set out to fill in a long list of details.
*The Details to be filled in
You write something about yourself, give your nationality, the languages you speak, your birth date, whether you smoke, drink how often, whether you like or don’t like pets, what are your hobbies, what have you joined orkut for, dating, making friends, what kind of humor you like, what languages you speak, what is your religion. The details go on. The name and birth date are compulsory but you can pretty much skip the rest. In my case my friend took all the efforts to fill in all the details.
If you believe that orkut will help you make new friends(especially girl friends), just forget it. There are only three reasons why people will communicate with you.
1. You are already friends but you have not met for years, months.
2. You are friends and keep meeting and trust each other
3. You have joined a community and eventually through a lot of posting on
the community found that you have something in common. But it takes a lot of effort. Sometimes things click though. One of my friends found her could-be-boyfriend on Orkut…
4. You have mutual friends.
A Few reasons why Orkut is so popular(according to me)
Orkut has a scrapping feature meaning you can type out a message in anyone’s scrapbook even if that person is not on your friend’s list. And everything typed out by anyone in the scrapbook is visible to anyone who visits your scrap book. It has become a kind of a fad in fact, the more the number of scraps the better. Your scrapbook is basically a page assigned to you where people can leave public messages to you.
It has this concept of communities. Anyone can make any number of communities and invite any number of people in their friend’s list or give a person a link to the community to have a look. It is however not very easy to get people to come to your community. And among the people who join the community not more than 20% ever post on the community. Every community has an owner, who is the default moderator, he also has the right to delete or rename the community. He can transfer ownership to other members of the community, or can assign moderators to the community. The moderators can firstly delete any unwanted topics in the community, secondly they can accept, decline, ban, remove members and their posts from the community. This functions under secondly are only possible if the community is moderated and not public. Meaning that your entry, into the community is in the hands of the owner/s and the moderator/s.
It has the concept of testimonials. Basically people can write a description of you and after it gets authorized by you, it will appear below your profile. It’s similar to scrapping in the sense that the more the better.
- You are able to find your old friends **through orkut. You can do this by either joining the community opened on your school, or by simply searching for your friend. Since orkut has such a following there is a high probability your school mates, college friends, sweet heart, crush, are on orkut.
How it works.
Basically as I have already said you need an invitation.
You either
Get an invitation for Gmail; you then open a Gmail account and then using your gmail account open an account on orkut.
OR. Get an invitation for Orkut itself. Wherein, you will have to use your entire email id every time you want to log in to orkut. Example you get an invitation on your mailing address, abc@yahoo.co.in you will have to type the entire thing down on your log in, on orkut.
If you have your gmail account and you are entering into orkut using it, you do not have to type out your entire address just your user name, i.e. only abc. Also you will have the same password as your gmail account. And you will be able to switch between orkut and gmail simply by typing the address in the address bar. Meaning if you have logged into orkut through your gmail id, you can just type https://gmail.com in the address bar on the window where you are logged in orkut and it will open your gmail account, you will not be required to re-enter your password.
Flaws
- If you are a girl on Orkut you will at least get 1 or 2 friend requests from guys you have never seen ever before, everyday. They will also keep trying to scrap you. You just got to ignore them. What you do is you go to his/her profile and there is an option of ignore which you need to click on.
2. Communities do not let you advertise, so if you want to gather people for your own community tough luck.
Orkut is very addictive. People sit on it for hours. If you have not got hooked on to it, you might not. Because people tend to do excessive orkutting
The server seems to be down quite often. Sometimes you try to scrap someone or post something or community or try to open a page and you get an error page. The message on the page is quite entertaining at first, but you will sometimes want to suck the blood out of the people maintaining the servers!
Lots of people with fake profiles.
Lots of Spam is created by the users itself. You get all the spam from users in your messages, which is sepearate from your scrapbook.
Accounts get hacked and links containing viruses are put in other people’s scrapbook. So you never open any link which has something written in Portuguese or any language which does not look like english.
All in all if you want to keep in touch with your friends and find old friends and join communities this is the place for you. If you want to make new friends and create your own communities, you got a tough time pal.