Wednesday, July 30, 2008
Social network service
A social network service focuses on building online communities of people who share interests and activities, or who are interested in exploring the interests and activities of others. Most social network services are web based and provide a variety of ways for users to interact, such as e-mail and instant messaging services.
Social networking has created powerful new ways to communicate and share information. Social networking websites are being used regularly by millions of people, and it now seems that social networking will be an enduring part of everyday life. The main types of social networking services are those which contain directories of some categories (such as former classmates), means to connect with friends (usually with self-description pages), and recommender systems linked to trust. Popular methods now combine many of these, with MySpace and Facebook being the most widely used in North America;[1] Bebo,[2] MySpace, Skyrock Blog, StudiVZ, Youmeo, Facebook and Hi5 in parts of Europe;[3] Orkut and Hi5 in South America and Central America;[4] and Friendster, Orkut, and Cyworld in Asia and the Pacific Islands. CouchSurfing is a new type of social network called hospitality exchange networks.[5][6]
There have been some attempts to standardize these services to avoid the need to duplicate entries of friends and interests (see the FOAF standard and the Open Source Initiative), but this has led to some concerns about privacy.
Criticism
Flooders and fake profiles
As with any online social networking community, a number of fake and cloned profiles exist on Orkut.[9] Due to the large number of users, and the deactivation of the jail system, the profiles were often left unremoved or, when removed, recreated easily. These profiles are normally created to troll, to spam, to flood or just for fun. It is not hard to find users owning more than one profile, with some stating they own hundreds.In 2005 invisible profiles, communities and topics started to appear in Orkut. This could be achieved by using HTML escaping codes and 1x1 pixel photos to fool the engine behind the site.[10] This hole was later fixed, and currently there is a lower limit on profile image dimensions.
In August 2005 a freeware program was made in Delphi called Floodtudo ("tudo" in Portuguese means "everything" - this was developed by a Brazilian) specifically for flooding Orkut. It quickly spread through the users and was easily downloadable (the most common Floodtudo versions were 1.2, 1.5, 2.0 and 2.2). As this program was massively used by thousands of spammers, a big spam wave struck Orkut in September and October 2005.
As the flooding of Orkut was becoming out of control, the developers implemented some features in order to stop this. These features included not allowing two or more verbatim topics or scrapbook entries to be submitted, forcing the user to wait before posting another topic or scrapbook entry, and the usage of captchas, whenever a scrap entry is hyperlinked. They gave more rights to community moderators as well, so that users can be banned outright instead of relying on the developers to remove them.
Orkut Redesign
On Friday, August 24, 2007, Orkut announced a redesign. The new UI contains round corners and soft colors including small logotype at upper left corner. The redesign has been announced on the official Orkut Blog.
By Thursday, August 30, 2007, most users on Orkut could see changes on their profile pages as per the new redesign. On the 31st, Orkut announced its new features including improvements to the way you view your friends, 9 rather than 8 of your friends displayed on your homepage and profile page and basic links to your friends' content right under their profile picture as you browse through their different pages. It also announced the initial release of Orkut in 5 new languages: Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Tamil, and Telugu. Profile editing can take place by clicking the settings button under your profile photo (or alternatively, click the blue settings link at the top of any page).
On September 4, 2007, Orkut announced another new feature. You can now see an "Updates from your friends" box on the homepage, where you'll get real-time updates when your friends make changes to their profiles, photos and videos. Moreover, in case you want to keep some things on your profile private, Orkut has added an easy opt-out button on the settings page.
On November 8, 2007, Orkut greeted its Indian users Happy Diwali in a very special way, by allowing them to change their Orkut look to a Diwali-flavored reddish theme.
On April Fools' Day 2008, Orkut temporarily changed its name on its webpage to yogurt, apparently as a prank.
On 2nd June 2008, Orkut has launched its theming engine with a small set of default themes.[7] along with this PHOTO tagging has also finally arrived at orkut.
Scrapbook
Scrapping" is popular among the Orkut community as a form of offline and online communication. In December 2007, the ability to pop up alerts immediately when a scrap is received was added, adding instant messaging-like capabilities to Orkut.
History
Orkut was launched in January 2004 by search company Google, as the brainchild of Orkut Büyükkökten, a Turkish software engineer, who developed it as an independent project while working at Google. In late June 2004, Affinity Engines filed suit against Google, claiming that Orkut Büyükkökten and Google based Orkut on inCircle code.[4]
Originally, its membership was by invitationOrkut
Orkut is a social networking service which is run by Google and named after its creator, an employee of Google - Orkut Büyükkökten. The service states that it was designed to help users meet new friends and maintain existing relationships. Orkut is similar to other social networking sites. Since October 2006, Orkut has permitted users to create accounts without an invitation. Orkut is the most visited website in Brazil and second most visited site in India. The initial target market for Orkut was the United States, but the majority of its users are in India and Brazil.[1] In fact, as of May 2008, 53.86% of Orkut's users are from Brazil, followed by India with 16.97% [2] and 23.4% of the traffic comes from Brazil, followed by India with 18.0%.[3] Like hi5 and Friendster, it is not a popular website in the United States of America and Canada.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)