Google Inside

Orkut — the Google social networking site — has officially been released to the public. While before you could only sign-up with an invitation, it is now open to everyone.

With the new release of Orkut to everyone, Google has also integrated Google Talk into the platform. This makes it very easy to communicate with anyone using Orkut.

So what makes Orkut stand out from other social networking sites like Facebook or Myspace? One of the big factors for me is that it works. Myspace was written in Cold Fusion. While by itself it is a great platform for building websites, it’s not meant for such a large scale as they are using it for. Facebook is great, but it’s limited because of the use of PHP and how they started very small — which was good at the time.

Facebook turned into something it wasn’t intended to be. It was meant to be a college portal and now it’s been opened up to the world. Orkut is different. To me, Orkut just looks a lot more organized and a better developed website. According to Alexa, it’s ranked #11 already while Myspace is ranked #6. Orkut isn’t too far behind Myspace in becoming another major player in the social networking world.