For those of you who don't know about Orkut, here is what Wikipedia stats :

Orkut is a social networking service which is run by Google and named after its creator, an employee of Google - Orkut Büyükkökten. The service states that it was designed to help users meet new friends and maintain existing relationships. Orkut is similar to other social networking sites. Since October 2006, Orkut has permitted users to create accounts without an invitation. Orkut is the most visited website in Brazil and 2nd most visited site in India. The initial target market for Orkut was the United States, but the majority of its users are in India and Brazil. In fact, as of March 2008, 67.5% of the traffic comes from Brazil, followed by India with 15.4%. By April 2008, Orkut's user base numbered at around 120 million, next only to MySpace.

Orkut is thus a lesser know (in Europe and the USA) social network. Like other networks a user first creates a "Profile", in which the user provides "Social", "Professional" and "Personal" details. Users can upload photos into their Orkut profile with a caption. Users can also add videos to their profile from either YouTube or Google Videos with the additional option of creating either restricted or un-restricted polls for polling a community of users.

The most popular features are :

"Scrapping" is popular among the Orkut community as a form of offline and online communication. In December 2007, the ability to pop up alerts immediately when a scrap is received was added, adding instant messaging-like capabilities to Orkut.

"Communities". Anyone with an Orkut account can create a community on anything. One can post topics, inform users about an event, ask them questions or just play games. There are more than one million communities on Orkut with topics ranging from pizza to pasta. The first five communities on Orkut were started within 24 hrs of the site's launch. There were a total of 47,092,584 communities on Orkut as per March 24,2008 4:25PM IST (+5:30 GMT). With the recent addition of the search topic feature in the communities, some Orkut communities become the de facto source for the website links to movies, e-books etc.

On the mobile

Like many Google mobile initiatives it is great and yet not enough. Great because we all want to see these guys, with their resources and energy, believe in and significantly enter the mobile web space. It is not enough because it is a poor relative of their web site. The main features are there but you can't create an account, you can't modify your profile on your mobile and it seems like communities doesn't work yet.



Nevertheless it isn't all bad news. It is a first step. What we hope at MobilOpen is that they will continue to work on this and make it truly mobile. There is now reason why they can't make Orkut's great features work 100% on a mobile.

Some other interesting articles about Orkut mobile :
Rahul Bansal blog : Devils Workshop

Darnell Clayton in Inside Orkut