Orkut Refreshed, but Where is SocialStream?
Orkut (Google’s Social Network) announced a new look yesterday. They haven’t had much success in North America or Europe (Bebo is hottest in Europe) but are pretty hot down in Latin America and Asia. Most of the invites I receive on Orkut are from my buddies in India. So after few years of service they are moving (according to their blog) towards cooler Web 2.0 like style. Here is a screenshot for your pleasure.
Well, quite frankly, that don’t impress me much. I am glad that they are bringing new features in like feeds and video. However smoother look, curvy edges and bluish coloring scheme ain’t cutting it anymore.
Although they have had a lot of success in Latin America and India, they are trailing behind likes of MySpace and Facebook. Based on a recent analysis from ComScore Orkut hasn’t really grown over the past year.
The Alexa chart below tells the whole story. Both MySpace and Orkut have flattened out for the last year. Facebook on the other hand has had a solid growth and is set to take over the race pretty soon.
Now, quite frankly I wouldn’t have cared much if this was a news about Hi5 or Friendster or many others. The reason I am somewhat disappointed is because of Google. As I have posted before, Google has been sponsoring a very cool project at Carnegie Mellon called SocialStream. The idea behind that project was to simplify our Social networking lives. The project blog mentions the following:
Directed to help improve the online community orkut, the project’s scope was not to simply redesign the interface. Our team considered how online social networking could bring greater value to users, especially for ages above twenty.
So inspite of this promise we haven’t seen any of the SocialStream features coming over to Orkut. Yeah I can see the blue color and smooth edges, but cmon…
Also looking through the list of SocialStream team members, it looks like most of the project team has been disbanded and have taken up jobs in other companies. This paints a disappointing picture from my perspective.
So in conclusion, I wish much success to Orkut with the new design. However I am really hoping that someone within Google is listening and can bring the SocialStream features into the mainstream. I do believe that Orkut’s success as a social network lies in incorporating SocialStream features.
