Orkut dating - a guide to finding love and romance on Orkut

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Orkut is a community – based portal created by Google, the brainchild of Orkut Buyukkokten. It is an online community of social networking where you can meet your old friends, associates and relatives. You can also reach out to various different categories of people who share your hobbies, interests and thoughts. The social networking website enables you to join new online communities where in you can discuss various events, reconnect with your old friends, exchange ideas, establish new business contacts, develop relationships, and reach out to people whom you’ve never met. Orkut enables strong social interactions between two individuals or groups and makes life more active and stimulating.

To be a member of the Orkut community, you can sign in with your Google Account. If you don’t have a Google account, go ahead and register yourself with Gmail.com. You can use the same user id and password to register yourself with Orkut. After signing up, fill up your personal details and upload your photograph if you want. Bear in mind that your personal details and photographs will be visible to everyone who is on Orkut as they have free access to browse profiles of other users. So, be cautious about providing information in your profile that you wouldn't want others to have access to.

Orkut has various options like private, friends only, available to friends, of your friends or available to everyone. Using these options you can restrict permissions to browse specific parts of your profile to specific segments of people. You can decide exactly how much personal information should be shared and with whom. It also allows you to choose the categories among social, professional and personal and specify how much information within these categories you want to share.

The very first feature of Orkut is searching old friends. There is a search bar on the top that you can use to search old friends by name or their e mail address. You can add new friends through your friend’s profile page. To create a network of friends it is important to verify and rate friends in the sequence of “Best Friends", "Good friends", "Friends", "Acquaintances" and "Haven't met". Ratings can also be done with smiley faces, ice cubes and hearts for trustworthiness, coolness and sexiness respectively. Orkut also reminds you the birthdates of your friend by automatically listing it. As a user you can prevent your friends from being reminded of your birthday. Once you've signed up, you can search by sex, first name and/or last name, by school, organization, city, zip and several other parameters. It's easy to locate singles staying within your zip code.

Each user has a 'scrapbook', testimonial and album. A scrapbook is more on the lines of a 'guestbook' from the days of Geocities and allows you to send 'scraps ' or brief messages to your friends even when they are offline. Scraps can be of various different forms. They can simple text or HTML enabling users to exchange photographs, videos, audio files. You can reply to the scraps by clicking on ‘reply’ under each scrap of your scrapbook. You can also add messages to other members' scrapbooks by visiting their profile and clicking on ‘view scrapbook’. Write your message in the space provided and then click ‘submit’. If you wish to delete the message, go back to your friend’s scrapbook and click the ‘delete’ link present next to your scrap. You can only do this upto a specific time after which you can't delete scraps you've posted. You can delete scraps posted by other people on your page at any time.

Orkut users can send testimonials to each other for expressing their views about each other. These testimonials appear under the user’s profile. Each user also has an album where they can upload various photographs that can be individual photos, group photos, holiday pictures or any other pictures of your memorable day.

Another most important feature of Orkut is communities, on the lines of message boards or forums related to a specific subject. Orkut has over a million of communities that target different people from all over the world to share a common goal or aim in life. Anyone with an Orkut account can create or join an existing community. These communities range from food lovers and beauty to fan clubs of actors, stock tips, business networking etc. There are several hate-communities or Orkut too. The motive of Orkut communities is to socialize people and allow them to share their views on a common topic, have a debate, discuss business issues or just have fun and play games.

In addition, to the above features, Orkut also offers a section for personalized message and an automatic transliteration option. Personalized message is generally used by the owners of the community to send a request to other Orkut users for joining their community. Automatic transliteration in the scrapbook is used to automatically convert Roman characters to the Devanagiri characters used in Hindi. Type the alphabets in English as you pronounce them in Hindi and the words will automatically convert to Hindi alphabets. To activate this option, go to ‘edit profile’ and choose Hindi from the dropdown menu of ‘languages I speak’ and then click ‘update’.

Orkut is a blessing if we think about meeting people and social interactions but there is a flip side to it too. With the increased use of Orkut dating, internet scams in terms of fake profiles, promote illicit stuff, smutty videos, human trafficking, flesh trade, viruses, spywares and pornography are rapidly increasing. With the advancement in technology, it has become possible to counter these nefarious activities.

We can’t do anything about the viruses and spywares but keeping into consideration various safety tips can help us enjoy the benefits of Orkut. While registering for the website, make sure that you do not upload sexual graphics and content which violates their terms of service. As per their terms of service, the account shouldn't be used for commercial purposes. However, a lot of people do get job offers or establish new business contacts through Orkut.

As a precationary measure, don’t share your user id, password and personal information with anyone. Do not to paste an URL into your browser or run a script when you are logged into Orkut. Don’t try to download or click on any link in your email that claims to be from Google or which threatens to shut down your Orkut account.

Always remember to log out after you finish using Orkut especially if you're accessing your account from a public terminal,a library or some place where you're sharing the PC. Change your password from time to time for security reasons. Make it hard to remember. Don't use easy names like the name of your partner or dog.

Visit http://www.orkut.com to sign up.