Orkut Members Respond To Terrorist Attacks In Mumbai

(CNN video of Mumbai attacks. Click the image to watch).

By now, everyone has probably heard about the terrorist attacks in Mumbai over this Thanksgiving holiday. I can say that my prayers and thoughts are with the families of the survivors, as well as those who lost loved ones during this tragic event.

There has been a lot of chatter about this event over on the Bombay and Mumbai forums (hat tip: Orkut Heros), as well as on Twitter (which I have been following on my iPhone).

Here is just a small sample of the chatter that is emerging from Orkut:

• Over in the India-Pakistan Friendship Club, MrNiceGuy is reporting that Pakistan is reaching out towards India and condemning the attacks.
  
• In the India forum, members are posting minute by minute updates regarding India's fight with the terrorists, with latest news (as of this post) mentioning Indian helicopters shooting at terrorists.
  
• Over at the Future-India community, their is news that the people of Mumbai are holding their heads high and returning back to work in order to defy the terrorists (as Mumbai from what I hear is the financial capital of India).
  

If anyone has any other information regarding the situation, feel free to post in the comments below (or link to discussion threads on Orkut).

Note: If anyone reading this is from Mumbai, please contact your friends, family and co-workers if you have not already to let them know that you are safe. As for everyone else, stay safe!!! (and do not let terrorists of any religion/creed bully you and tell you how to live your life!)

Rumor: Google Launching New Ad Platform On Orkut?

Rajiv Dingra over at the WAT Blog is reporting that Google is working on a new advertising platform for Orkut.

So far there is not much information to go by, aside from the fact that it will not be like AdSense (which Google rolled out on Orkut not to long ago), and it will be used exclusively by Orkut (and no other site).

While it may seem odd for Google to roll out a premium service for Orkut (after all, they just purchased Double Click earlier this year), Google may be trying to find a way to make Orkut profitable (as hosting all of those images, apps and keeping every bodies scrapbook alive can be quite expensive).

My theory is that Google may be launching some sort of Orkut classifieds (in order to target local markets), although we will have to wait until next year when the service goes live to the public.

Note: I wonder whether or not Google will roll these out on Orkut profiles? (since they probably receive more traffic compared to Orkut forums).

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. :-(

Will Sunoh.fm Become The Social iTunes Of Orkut?

Although there are plenty of music apps on Orkut such as iLike, My Music and Vaga-lume Music (which is huge in Brazil), most simply convert their website within Orkut, with a few others requiring you to create an account with their main site (which is an extra hassle if you ask me).

One site called Sunoh.fm has launched an Orkut app that not only plays your favorite Bollywood music (most who seem to be independent), but also presents your play lists minus the clutter that is becoming increasingly common with many Orkut apps (at least as far as music goes).

According to their press release, Sunoh.fm has integrated very heavily within Orkut, which means if you favorite an album (or song) within Sunoh.fm, your friends will be able to check out your favorite songs on your Orkut profile (as long as they have installed the Sunoh.fm).

Besides the user friendly layout, one thing I really enjoyed was the ability to listen to a song without having to watch a YouTube video (which can often disappear due to copyright claims).

While I enjoyed using the Orkut app in general, I did find the Sunoh.fm to be "slightly buggy" as a few songs did not work at all (at least in Google Chrome, Firefox and Opera--I'm avoiding IE as it's tooo sloow for me).

I was also disappointed over the fact that you can not purchase most of the songs that you hear on Sunoh.fm.

According to my scrap conversations with Vivek, this may be due to the fact that many of the songs are from independent artists from India and are not listed on either iTunes or Amazon (which means ordering albums/tracks is currently not available).

Hopefully Sunoh.fm finds a way to resolve the latter issue (perhaps by teaming up with Google Checkout or TuneCore) as it would allow them to easily position themselves as the iTunes of Orkut (with a Bollywood twist of course).

Needed: Email Subscriptions For Orkut Forums

After relaunching a shiny new version of Orkut last year, Google has done an incredible job of rolling out features across the orkutsphere (not to mention allowing third party access as well).

Although Google has done an excellent job in the realm of scrapbooks, Orkut albums and friend updates (note: I'm still waiting on my Twitter/Jaiku hookup for Orkut status), they have yet to realize the full potential of their Orkut forums by  not providing a way for users to subscribe to their favorite communities (a common mistake I am seeing across many social networks--especially the big ones).

While geeks may be able to get around this via Orkut Feeds (note: see the review over here), non-geeks may not be as motivated to engage their friends, foes and family on an Orkut community forum (as it is hard for you to know when someone responds back to you).

Instead of outsourcing subscriptions to the realm of geeks, Google should instead hook up with FeedBurner (which Google bought last year) and allow everyone to subscribe to their favorite forum thread (key word is thread, not the the entire forum) via email.

In order to keep the spam down, Google could only enable email subscriptions in moderated Orkut forums, as well as allow users to decide how frequently they want to receive updates (example: once a day, immediately or a general summary--similar to what they have in Google Groups).

This would benefit everyone as users would receive an email if someone responded to a thread, and Google would have a lot more active forums online (which would benefit their advertisers).

Note: While Google could always include RSS feeds within forums (something other users are asking for), RSS has yet to go mainstream (at least in America).