The Hindu Business Line : Orkut promises new look, feel

Social networking is gearing up for a wave of evolution. Not just in terms of features and functions but in the very way it is being used, if recent attempts by Google to revamp its social networking site Orkut are any indication.

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.

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

Rahul Kulkarni

“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. We will wait for the video to download however long it takes and, in the meantime, go have a cup of coffee,” says Kulkarni, adding that the uptake of video on the PC and mobile phone will only increase as broadband penetration increases and 3G becomes a reality.

For invitees only

The revamped Orkut site is by-invitation only. Google has sent out initial invitations to a set of active users and engineers who will, in turn, invite others to the network. How soon the migration from the old Orkut to the new one happens could well be the acid test for the revamped site.

The make-over has come at a time when competition in the social networking space is heating up with many players such as Facebook and LinkedIn. But what took Google such a long time to give a facelift to Orkut, which was launched in 2004? That’s how it is with Google, which believes in intense research before action so that there are no glitches, says Kulkarni.

For the past year or so, Google had been researching behind the scenes, understanding all pain-points, to provide an “enriching” experience for its users. Google says it is not interested in just “putting up a pretty picture out there. And we are not concerned with what competition is doing,” he asserts. “What we have done with the new-look Orkut is a complete revamp of the front-end architecture. We have created an infrastructure online that enables us to add features easily. Going forward, you will see a lot of action and features in Orkut in terms of the product and what the users can do.”

The revamp has been done using the Google Web Tool Kit, an open source application that leverages the power of the Web browser. A large part of the engineering behind the revamp has come from India and Brazil, which account for a chunk of Orkut’s global user base.

Kulkarni keeps statistics relating to Orkut’s total user base close to his heart. What he would give away is this: Orkut has 80 million active users (those who log in at least once every 30 days). And a major part of that is from Brazil and India, thanks to the large youth population in these countries.

swethak@thehindu.co.in

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