Orkut Embraces Google Talk (But Is Video Chat Included?)

After hearing rumors about Orkut launching Google Talk over at Orkut Plus, it looks as if the search engine king has confirmed the sightings with a post over at the Official Orkut Blog.

(Official Orkut Blog) That's why we are excited to announce a fully integrated version of Google Talk that works seamlessly from within orkut, with no install or separate window required.

I'm sure many of you (especially you social butterflies with hundreds of orkut friends), are concerned about being bombarded with chat requests every time you go online. Not to worry! To get you started, we've come up with a formula that automatically predicts which of your orkut friends you probably want to chat with, and only tells those people that you're signed into Google Talk. Our formula takes a bunch of things into consideration, giving preference to people who you've labeled as 'best friends' or written scraps to recently, and people who have friends in common with you.

We realize that no one knows who you'd like to talk to better than you do, so we've also made it easy for you to add and remove people from your list of orkut chat friends.

Google is slowly rolling this feature out over the next few weeks, so you will hopefully see it live before Christmas. ;-)

While I am excited that chat is finally launching within Orkut (as I was underwhelmed over their "half-hearted" attempt earlier) I am still wondering whether or not this feature includes video chat? (a feature that is now live within Gmail)

Semi-related note: For those of you who keep scraping/emailing me, my Gtalk ID is HiddenNook. Unfortunately I do not yet have this live in my account, so I can only talk via Gmail. :-(