Google seems to have had enough of Facebook's meteoric rise and has now sprung into action with a host of new design changes to its social networking website, Orkut. Google seems to have had enough of Facebook's meteoric rise and has now sprung into action with a host of new design changes to its social networking website, Orkut.

The website, which has been in the decline for the past few months, will see a lot of new features and a drastic change in the looks. The "refreshing new look" of Orkut is based on the Google Web Toolkit (GWT) infrastructure and will include the ability to discover friends automatically, video chat integrated with Google Talk, ability to upload photos in bulk very quickly, add/view photos and videos in-line, and a more interactive activity stream, says Google.

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Google has added new features to its social networking site Orkut to gain a momentum in today’s networking business. According to Google, Orkut has been revamped by modifying its user interface. So the homepage has been made faster and easy to use.

Google India Head Vinay Goel said, "With the new user interface (UI), the user does not have to visit each page for viewing videos, or say posting scraps. He gets to see all updates and respond to his friends from the homepage itself,"  Among the other modifications, uploading photos will now be easy and there are other features like video chat, automatic face detection and scroll down option to view the friends in the same page.

"We have about 80-100 million users globally and India is the second leading market for Orkut after Brazil. India is a crucial market and we would continue to drive innovation for all our products," Goel said. Google said that the new version would be available in coming weeks.

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The mission statement of the Google data liberation front reads as follows: “Users should be able to control the data they store in any of Google’s products. Our team’s goal is to make it easier to move data in and out.”

However it seems that all this was nothing in the prospect of losing consumers. Sometime back ago face book launched their export tool, which enabled users of Orkut to export their contact information including their email ids to facebook, however as soon as this happened, the feature developed a bug, which according to Goggle happened as they were upgrading the feature to offer enhanced security.

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Orkut continues to undermine Google’s Data Liberation Front, whose singular goal is to “make it easier for users to move their data in and out of Google products”.

Earlier this month the Orkut friend exporter, which makes it easy to export your friends’ contact information to a standard CSV file, was mysteriously broken due to a bug.

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Of late, there has been a lot of talk regarding the social networking war underway in India. For as long as most people will recall, Orkut was THE place to find your old friends, contacts and associates if you happened to be in India.

Yes, there were the others like MySpace, Hi5 and the homegrown ones like Yaari.com and some really interesting ones like Hikut, which was an Orkut and Hi5 alternative for users who had these two sites blocked. Eventually, all of them seem to have outlived their fanciness and only the most appealing ones now survive and boast of an active and ever increasing user base.

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Orkut and Facebook  has been a favourite topic for most of us here. Who’s winning? Who WILL win? What’s the future of social networking in India? Recently, there was a huge furore over Facebook promoting itself in India by urging people to add their Orkut Friends.

Then Orkut blocked their nifty little tool, so on and so forth. Look at any mention of Orkut news that we’ve covered, you’ll find subtle or obvious comparisons with facebook. With Facebook dominating almost EVERY other country, India and Brazil were Orkut’s last bastion.

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India's and Leading Social Networking Website orkut now presented new logo for indian orkut users as special attraction for this diwali 2009.

Small note about orkut: Orkut is a free-access social networking service owned and operated by Google. The service is designed to help users meet new friends and maintain existing relationships. The website is named after its creator, Google employee Orkut Büyükkökten.

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Orkut, which is by far India's largest social networking website, has a huge follower base in distant Brazil too. However, in recent times, Facebook has managed to usurp quite a few of Orkut's dedicated users - thanks to its UI and features.

In fact, over the past few months, Orkut has been seeing a dip in traffic both in India and in Brazil while at the same time, Facebook growing rather fast in both these traditional Orkut strongholds.

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With more than half of India’s 47 million online population active on social networking sites, a battle for increased market share has sparked a war between the top two social media portals. Facebook Inc., which runs the second most popular social networking website in India, rolled out an application that helps poaching users off its rival, Google Inc.-owned Orkut.

The application, placed prominently on its home page for at least 10 days now, allows users with dual accounts to transfer their Orkut contact list to Facebook in five simple steps. As many as 34% of Orkut’s 14.4 million users are also active on Facebook, according to ViziSense, an Internet research firm. The number of Internet users in India is estimated by JuxtConsult, an online market research agency.

Industry experts believe the easy migration option could give Facebook, which has half the number of users, a much-needed edge over its rival in India.  “Orkut certainly faces a clear and present danger from Facebook in India,” said Sidharth Rao, founder of Webchutney Studios Pvt. Ltd, a digital marketing firm. “Facebook, which was considered elitist a year or two back in India compared with other social networking platforms has managed to grow exponentially.”

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Orkut is Google’s social networking attempt. The basic idea was created by one of Google’s engineers who quickly adopted the idea and created the social network Orkut from it. Orkut is one of the most popular websites on the Internet even though it does not receive all the media coverage that networks like Facebook or MySpace receive.

Orkut login problems are reported by many users of the service. Some say that the page is not loading at all after logging into Orkut, others say the page that is loaded is completely white or loads that slow that they have to cancel the Orkut login attempt.

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