The application is still in its infant stages where the application has not been put to innovative and out-of-the-box use. Nonetheless we are starting to see some very creative implementations of the application.

Google just announced Latitude app integration with its most popular social networking service, Orkut. Once installed on Orkut it tracks your existing friends on latitude and shows their current location within Orkut.

If you are an Orkut user, click here to install the Lattitude App for Orkut.

Check this really cool Latitude video released by Google last week.

It’s good to see how social networking sites learn from each other .

Site:Orkut.com

I logged into Orkut after a LONG time and noticed an announcement about the applications which said "India Dekha" and said "Add applications and customize your profile"

The concept of applications on social networking platform is not new, Facebook introduced this concept about a year ago. I think applications on Orkut will be more extensively used when compared to Facebook applications because of its huge user base and its target audience.

Orkut has become favorite pass time for college going and other individual in the same age group which is why these applications will have more users than applications on Facebook. if you are an Indian company then this is the right time to create your application to use the power of social media to your advantage.

India Dekha – Add Applications and Customize Your Profile

A social networking kind of a concept was initially started with Classmates.com back in 1995 with the intention of brining classmates together. Later came SixDegrees.com followed by many others including the MySpace, Facebook, Orkut, Hi5, etc…

With so many names in the industry competition for attracting users grew and innovation and personalization in this space played a big role. Now the questions is how much of innovation or personalization is enough? How Social is too Social?

The kind of information Facebook shares within the community sometimes might cause problems to the people in the group (was Facebook created by a Women?), images are impersonated to cause embarrassment and distress, e-mails are being sent to unknown users without proper validation in place claiming their Son’s, Daughters or Wife has registered with the services.

For  example I received an e-mail from one of the upcoming Indian social networking services which claimed that my Son has registered with them. Now imagine if I were to be married already and my wife reads this e-mail then things will not be so pleasant.

Image from BigAdda

So decide where this innovation in the social networking space is taking us?

Google decided to go the Facebook way and I say what’s wrong with it? Orkut was one of the first social networking sites and is very popular in countries like Brazil and India. Starting this month Orkut will enable developers to create their own social applications and run on Orkut.

OpenSocial application developers can submit their completed applications by end of Feb 15th after which these applications will be rolled out to the users. Google plans to ramp more than 50 million people over next few weeks. It is also holding something called orkut hackathons for the same purpose; however, this is only for Mountain View and New York offices. 

E-mail hackathon.rsvp@gmail.com for more information.

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