Tryst With Destiny

Orkut is one product of google that has not been a universal success story. It has found only limited acceptability. Having said that it is a craze in India and Brazil. Yet Google has made little effort to improve its functionality. Last major update that was made was when google adopted opensocial. It is a product which has been left far behind by other social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook.

In this series of post I'll try to shed some light where Orkut has gone wrong. Orkut is synonymous with scrapping. Infact it is the "only" functionality that is nice.

Even here people suffer from the Houdini scraps. These are those scraps that were sent to them but somehow they have disappeared. More often than not they are links send to them. We all know that Orkut is being used by people to promote their sites and even viruses. I have reports of numerous people whose accounts were hacked because they clicked on links promising them some goody or the other. This lead google to tighten up their message screening policy. Now if you happen to send the same link to a number of people chances are they will be deleted by Orkut's spam filter and put in spam folder which is located in the left hand panel on your home page just after settings.

So far so good but where google has goofed up is that they give you no notification of when some message has been deleted. Leading to unnecessary problems to users. Most orkut users are naive and would never figure out where spam folder is located let alone check it out. Given that orkut has become such a important way of exchanging information this may lead to important information being lost.

My suggestion to google would be to do two things. First include a spam counter as the have in GMail so that we can keep track of number of messages in spam folder and secondly to inform users when certain scraps have been removed