Orkut has launched a promotion campaign which is by far their best attempt to promote their new design features to their dissatisfied users who are gradually losing all hope and strong loyalty bias towards orkut which they had previously held. Promotion activity includes a community linked to their sub-domain “The New Orkut Community” which hosts contests which would be providing invites to the declared winner termed as “Orkut Champ”. Frankly speaking the members activity is motivated with the sole intention of gaining invites to tryout the new interface (and not out of passion or interest). From our experience of community management, this community would have moths and cobwebs after they officially release this feature to everybody.
There are very limited invites provided by Orkut team themselves to famous Orkut Members, Orkuteers and Orkut Bloggers thus generating hype and at the same time engineered scarcity which has triggered a massive response of desperate members wanting to try out the new interface which Orkut promises to make their social networking easier or rather less painful.
Verdict:
Many famous bloggers like Orkut Plus and Orkut Heroes have provided their review on the new orkut.
What’s new on Orkut ?
- Added scroll bar for Communities & Friends List
- Ajax color changer added for profile wrapper
- Accepting members to the communities done with ajax, you can accept many people. at once
- Accepting friends request done with ajax. you still have to accept individually.
- Recent visitors and recent birthdays shown with profile picture.
- Icons changed for chat availability status.
- Adding comments to status updates of friends. (You cannot hide or delete status messages which is vulnerable to spam.)
- Drop down CSS menu made for different tabs like profile, photos & videos.
- More updates load below with ajax loader.
- Link to other google services added on top.
- Drop down menu added to orkut logo (useless)
- Friends suggestions are in ajax ring like loading
- Manage button added to friends & communities link.
- Basic formatting options added to scraps with google chat smileys.
- Video chatting enabled just like gmail.
You can look back to see how far we have come by seeing the rare screenshots of the first version of Orkut. After using this new interface for last 3 days for all our Orkut activities, we do not deny that few activities have been made simpler, For Example browsing through friends list from profiles and communities list or adding members to your community but we are still not very happy as the changes because most of the changes are cosmetic in nature. It was a bit slower to load as reported by our invited team members who had slower internet connection. Sadly there were almost no changes in the Orkut Communities interface. It’s just like the saying goes “Same wine in a different bottle”.
We doubt that this new interface by itself would keep the user’s from rapidly losing interest. More changes and updates are urgently needed as the web technologies used and features provided are inferior to the competition. Users are demanding more features everyday in the help forum for more interactivity and ease of use. Most people are satisfied with the overall security and privacy features. Orkut is now at the crossroads and its destiny would soon be clear to everybody. New Orkut is just like your ex-gf trying to patch up with you but her same old problems persist.
Thanks to the Orkut Team for the privilege inviting the Blakut Team to preview the new orkut version, but this was just our opinion, we hope that it would be taken constructively. Users please don’t ask for invites we do not give them for promotional purposes/ money, we only give them to the deserving volunteers who have been helping others out consistently for a “long time” in our communities as a gift.
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