Its been a long journey for Orkut and orkuters. Orkut has grown to be a popular networking service worldwide with about 12.95% of its users in India in the last 3 years of its net presence.

Google has constantly strived to maintain and augment the quality and value of Orkut, often integrating it with some other services in its pack.

Google has already integrated Google Talk into Orkut. Often when you login, a list of friends online on GTalk appears in the sidebar. It wont take time for Google Talk to be the most popular chat client with this addon. The only glitch in it is, you cannot integrate your Google Talk id into it until you have configured it with orkut.com. You have to register a new one. :(

Also while visiting profiles, showing mutual friends list was a welcome change. Replying back instantly to any scrap without visiting the scrapbook of the person who scrapped you saves so much time. Earlier while scrapping back one would tend to follow scraps to newer profiles. Ok now saves a lot of time! :lol:

While the above features have been around for quite some time now, Google is integrating new and interesting features into Orkut.

NEW FEATURES:

Google Video/Youtube: You can now add your favourite videos from Youtube or Google Video (both services owned by Google) into your orkut profile. As India is becoming broadband ready, this add-on will certainly pick up fast amongst the Indian Orkut users.

Local Timezone integrated into Scrapbook: Thank goodness! I have been craving for this since long now. It was such a pain to calculate the time when someone scrapped you. And you often got confused with the birthday reminders still running of the ones past. Now you do know the exact time and date someone scrapped you and also of how many hours ago or days ago the scrap was logged if you are too busy to remember the present date or time :lol:

Google Maps: Check their help section and you will know that they have plans for integrating Google Maps also. If you are logged into Orkut, you can view its working here: http://www.orkut.com/Map.aspx. Right now it lists my friends in US and UK only. I am waiting for the rest countries to be added in. Have a look at it and you will realise the power and spread of google!

Suggest Changes: Orkut users get a chance to vote too. Click here to vote for some suggested changes on Orkut. Listing them below:

Friends

  • Display friends in alphabetical order
  • Allow more than 1000 friends

Scraps

  • Allow only friends to view my scrapbook and send scraps
  • Set scrapbook to local time zones

Communities

  • Display my communities in alphabetical order
  • Add ability to search for users in a community

Photos

  • Restrict the copy and paste function for photos
  • Allow only friends to view my album
  • Allow posting more than 12 pictures in album

Profile Settings

  • Add a language to the list of languages
  • Add a religion to the list of religions
  • Allow me to change colors and layout of my profile
  • Add option to hide email address

My Profile

  • Add blog features
  • Add option to hide or show online status
  • Increase number of recent visitors shown
  • Keep profile out of search results

Restricting copying of photos, hiding online status, etc are the ones I voted for. If you have an idea yourself, use the same page to let Orkut hear you.

What more can you expect?
Google has a big list of free services. The most probable one being integrated into Orkut, can be its premiere blogging service – Blogger. While I am a wordpress fan, if they plan to integrate RSS feeds from blogs, I hope they do not exclude other blogging platforms. Also maybe they will include Google Calender some day. But all these inclusions will certainly have a cluttered orkut interface someday! :(