With 2008 coming to a close and Orkut celebrating the new year with a
few new themes, some are probably wondering what the future may hold for Google's original social network.
This past year alone Google added a bunch of features to Orkut ranging from chatting (via
Google Talk) to mobile (for
regular cell phones,
the iPhone and
Symboan smart phones), to finally enabling
private forums (a feature police may not like) as well as the ability to
easily share images with your friends.
While we can only imagine what the boys and girls at Google will do as far as Orkut is concerned, here is my educated guess as to what Google will have accomplished by the end of 2009.
10,000 20,000 Orkut Apps!
Google has already crossed the 1,000 app thresh hold (they are at 1,668) and at this rate I will be surprised if they have not passed 20,000 Orkut apps (let alone 10,000).
Hopefully by then we will
have categories to make it easier to sort/locate/organize apps by our tastes.
Forum Subscriptions (via Email or RSS)
Now that
FeedBurner is apart of
the Google family, I think we may finally see email subscriptions
for forum threads (which will help keep community conversations--and forums--alive much longer).
I also predict that Google may enable RSS feeds for Orkut forums (similar to what
Rahul has done
with Orkut Feeds).
Raising the friend limit to 5,000
Google currently limits the number of friend connections you can have on
Orkut to 1,000 (although their are
various hacks to get around it). Expect Google to bump this up to 5,000 (or even better, provide no limits).
Video Chat in Gtalk (With VoIP to-go?)
With Google recently
launching video chat within Gmail, I would not be surprised if Google decided to add this feature within Orkut as well (after previously
adding Google Talk not too long ago).
Google may also try to experiment with
VoIP on Orkut for Brazilian, Indian and American users in order to find another way to pay for the hosting/bandwidth fees of running Orkut (as simply
slapping AdSense on
everything probably does not pay all of Orkut's bills).
That is assuming
GrandCentral (which Google
purchased last year) is still alive.
A native Orkut Android App
For those of you who are new to the world of "mobile geek," Google has recently launched
Android, a mobile operating system that can turn regular smart phones
into iPhone killers.
Since the iPhone is ridiculously priced
at 31,000 Rupees (or $640 USD) in India and
1,089 Reals (or $470 USD) in Brazil (
note: its $200 in the US), Google will probably push for more carriers in both Brazil and India to adopt more affordable Android phones, which could result in the search engine giant creating an Orkut Android App.
Longshot: AdSense Revenue Sharing (for large forums)
Google will probably being experimenting with sharing AdSense revenue
with forum owners, which could help entice owners to keep their communities not only active, but spam free as well.
While I do not think Google would (or should) roll this out to the masses this year (as they have to improve the security situation
regarding hacked forums), I believe they will test this with some of the large forums on Orkut, and may eventually roll this out to the rest of the orkutsphere (if their experiment proves to be successful).
Any other predictions?
These are a few of my predictions regarding Orkut for next year, and if you have any other guesses, tips, etc. feel free to post them in the comment section below (and if you have a link, simply paste it below for the rest of us to see).
