Orkut – Googles answer to Yahoo 360 degree and Hi5

Orkut Google comes up with its awesome rival product to yahoo 360 degree, Hi5 and lots of other such network building portals. If you do not know about yahoo 360 degree and hi5 read my previous article on yahoo 360 degree and hi5.
As usual google has come up with a crisp strait forward and intuitive interface compared to any of its competitors.
You can build network of your friends and view their network too. All your visits to other’s orkut page are tracked and they know who came to their site.



Some cool features of Orkut

Orkut testimonials option lets your friends write about you. This feedback is shown to all your visitors.

Orkut scrapbook is like your note pad where others can write messages for you. Scrap book is the most common option that everyone uses to talk to each others.

Orkut private messages can be sent your friends individually or to the whole group.

Orkut birthday alarms informs you about birthdays of your friends in your network (so you wont miss any one whos on your network).

Orkut rating lets you rate your friends how trusty, cool and sexy they are ;) In addition you can declare yourself as a fan of your friend(s).

you can export list of your friends to excel (CSV) format.

Recent visitors to your orkut home page. It gives you clickable profile link.

Orkut album lets you add your photos to share with your friends on your network.

Orkut works on invitations, so some one needs to invite you to create an account in orkut. Ask me for a free orkut invitation.

How to Log in to orkut in invisible mode
I am finding lot of people coming to this post searching for logging in to orkut in invisible mode, so thought i will add a few words on this topic too.

1. If you'd like to check out orkut members anonymously, you can prevent other users from knowing you looked at their profile by visiting http://www.orkut.com/Settings.aspx and checking "Disable Profile Visitors."

Note that this will also prevent you from seeing who has viewed your profile. To add this feature back to your profile, you will need to allow orkut members to see that you have viewed their profile by un-checking "Disable Profile Visitors" in your settings.

2. You can create a another temporary id which should be used only for browsing invisibly. Do not add any of your friends or yourself to this new id. do not accept any friends and you will remain anonymous. Others who see this new id on their recent visitors list, can send you message. But its up to you to decide whether to reply/ignore or delete.

There are lots of groups like orkut India, orkut Satyam etc, virtually every possible group. You can create your own and participate in the discussions and events.
Visit my orkut page at http://www.orkut.com/Home.aspx?xid=10672691803081804255

Have a great bonding with your friends :)