With news coming hard and fast about the popularity of social networks lately, it’s not surprising that Google and Yahoo want a piece of the pie. Both search engines already have social networks in their stables, but they are lackluster performers. In this article, we’ll take a quick look at Google’s Orkut and Yahoo 360 and consider what both companies have in the works.
First, let’s take a look at Google’s Orkut. To all accounts, it only became really popular in Brazil and India. For a very long time, you could only join if someone invited you, which may have hampered its growth. Now, all you need is a Google account, which is available for free; anyone who has Gmail has a Google account, for instance. But this change was not very well-publicized.
Here’s a screen shot of the initial profile page you fill out when you join Orkut:
As you can see, certain fields are obligatory (name, gender, birth year and country). You can lock certain information to control who sees it: only yourself, friends, friends of friends, or everyone. And you can indicate your interests: friends, activity partners (whatever that means), business networking, or dating. The dating option includes a drop-down to choose your preferred dating gender – and “both” is a possible choice.
After you have filled out this information, you can check to see what your profile looks like. If you’re at all familiar with online dating sites, you’ll know that the small amount of information requested is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to putting together a complete profile; there’s a lot more information you can add. As you’ll see from the screen shot below, Orkut is no exception.
I’m sorry the screen shot isn’t clearer. Anyway, you’ll notice that there are tabs for “Social,” “Professional,” and “Personal” parts of the profile; as the profile owner, it can also be viewed as it would look to yourself, friends, friends of friends, and everyone. Right now I have the “social” tab showing; it can be edited to include a ton of information, such as sexual orientation, whether you smoke, drink, have pets and/or a web page, what your “passions” are, favorite sports, and more.
The other two tabs show information appropriate to those topics; for example, the Professional tab has a spot for career skills, while the Personal tab lets you edit information that would be appropriate to share with someone who might be interested in dating you. You can also add feeds, photos, video and more to your profile. You can join communities, search, add friends, and check messages; I didn’t see a way to start a blog however.
In some ways it’s a shame that this social networking site never caught on in the U.S. It has a nice interface that lets you do more than one kind of networking in the same place. That could be kind of risky though; do you want your business networking contacts to see what’s behind your Personal tab? And how easy is it to control that? But there are other issues, such as no possibility to blog and no easy way to interface with certain other Google products.
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