Tuesday, March 13, 2007

Personalized Forum Link Addresses On Orkut?


Some of you may have noticed this, but then again some of you may have not.

Over at the Google Blog, I noticed that the Orkut team had enabled one forum (out of hundreds of thousands on their server) to have a personalized link address instead of the usual eight digit number that is dealt to all community owners.

Here is the original paragraph:

(Official Google Blog) Cricket discussions that started in the elevator can spill over to the Orkut network. Especially this season, in association with us, cricket expert and former Indian cricket captain Krish Srikkanth has created his own community on Orkut to interact with cricket lovers, debate the latest happenings and just share cricket views.


It seems as if Google is playing favorites by creating a personalized link to Krish Srikkanth's forum (http://www.orkut.com/worldcupwithkrish) which not only redirects to the forum within Orkut (which can be viewed over here) but also is viewable to the public without the need of logging into Orkut.

It is baffling to me that a forum this small (660 members and counting) was able to receive this privilege when other communities much larger are locked into the "eight digit code" identifying the order of when they were created.

Hopefully Google opens this up to other communities on Orkut (whether for free or for a fee) as it would give a more personal touch to the forums, not to mention help separate it from its competitors (i.e. Facebook).

Exit question: If Orkut offered this to users for a small fee, would you be willing to pay for something like this? Or should Google simply offer this for free?

6 opinions:

Rupesh said...

That's because of popularity of cricket in India. Do you know about the revenue generated by ICC from India?

About your exit question, access to information should be free..

Anonymous said...

why pay for it when you can get more than that for free already at http://locaworld.com/

i don't think they make it available for everyone for a long time and if they do then i don't think users have to pay for it

Anonymous said...

The site PowerScrap.com already have a feature similar to personalize profile link of orkut users.

Example:
http://meu.powerscrap.com/laurocity
= http://www.orkut.com/profile.aspx?uid=7360218117041836544

Anand said...

I see it as a direct attempt to emulate what Yahoo answers did with the Indian president, Dr. Abdul Kalam and other Indian celebrities.

That was later used as a marketing tool..Maybe we will now see orkut ads soon on Indian roads as we did with Yahoo answers..I shall let you know if I see any of those soon..

Danny Piccirillo said...

Paying Google for something like that is silly and very un-Google-like. It's not like Google to charge for something like that.

VarunT said...

well this community is owned by google itself

it was created to encash excitement of cricket world cup 2007

Visit
Google Cricket World Cup 2007 Page for enlightment on this issue

also visit these two links

http://www.orkut.com/orkutnobrasil

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