*** Now why is an Indian gaming blog talking about technology, orkut etc? Because we
are passionate about everything related to technology. At heart we still remain a gaming blog with
an Indian twist =) ***

I used to be an Orkut addict, I used to spam my own scrapbook to increase scrap count, I used to flood friends’ scrapbooks just to make their life hell, Orkut used to be open on one tab of my Firefox browser all the time; but that was back in 2006. A lot has happened since then, Facebook came, saw, conquered; Twitter got free publicity in media every time there was an earthquake or a bomb explosion (continues to get); the term real-time and cloud became the new web 2.0. In Short, a decade has passed in ‘technology time’.

Orkut meanwhile, continues to grow and still manages to attract a lot of people who’re getting started on the web. But the latest set of updates announced a few days back, just might bring them back to the top again. I’ve tried to sum up some nice things in the interface which I liked.

To start with, the new interface was designed using Google Web Toolkit, the same toolkit that was used to develop the quite impressive Google Wave. Once someone invites you, you’ll see something like this on the top bar.

Click on it and you’ll be led to the new homepage.

The first thing that strikes your eye is the blue box on top, the colour of it can be set to red, orange, pink, green or black.The box also poses a question “What are you up to” now where have we heard that before. (Clue:answer it in 140chrs). On home page there’s nothing on the blue box other than the question and the captcha that pops up below it when you post a link in your status message. In profile page, the blue box also includes your basic details (contact, status, age, location) visible only to your followers.

On the home page, below the ‘blue box’ it’ll you’ll find friend suggestion, the scroller system of which has been improved upon.

You can minimise this element and the next element is ‘What’s new’, here you’ll see birthday updates, friend requests etc and below this comes ‘Friend Updates’ which is quite similar to Facebook; you can comment on everything.

The list of friends on the right has a search option with real-time results. Not like in Facebook where name of the person is listed. Here their profile pics turn up in real time. I like it!

Now hit the profile link on top and you’ll be find this page. Below the blue box there is ‘about me’ section, followed by ‘your updates’ and then testimonials you received. You can click to edit the about me section and also optionally set a gadget as default instead of the ‘about me’ text. The gadgets you’ve added will be visible as tabs on top of about me.

The Orkut logo on to left the page is much more than a logo. It’s also a jump list. Mouse over and ta da a nice list pops up

Now getting to the most used part of Orkut — scrapbook. Apaprt from the inline replies to scraps you can also reply to scrap via chat.. yup gchat right from orkut. You can also post video scraps by clicking a small video icon present in the scrap, paste the link from youtube and that’s that. Videos you uploaded will be shown with a small screengrab, clicking it’ll expand the video and it looks like this.

Another process which underwent a massive update was teh photo upload feature. Try uploading photos in bulk. It’ll show a thumbnail image which you can caption, rotate even as the images are uploading, You can also set who can see the photo from the same screen.

Almost everything else resides in the ‘more’ tab after the videos tab. I like what they have overall, but like @manuscrypts pointed out via a DM, it needs to be seen how present users use it. Will they like it? Will they graduate to Facebook after getting used to Orkut Facebook like interface?

PS: I think the blue box on home page takes up too much space. Wouldn’t it be much better if it was like this?

PPS: Character limit for comments to status messages