Google's Orkut prepares for face-off with Facebook

With rivals nipping at its heels, search giant Google is breathing fresh ideas into its social networking site Orkut in a war to win back eyeballs from Facebook.

The new user interface is slick and colourful, with a lot more spunk, but not everything is hunky-dory.
Though Orkut may have more subscribers, Facebook has more active users, pointed out Deepak Goel, founder and CEO of the social media and branding firm Drizzlin. Moreover, Facebook, which started off as an urban phenomenon and is seeping into tier II cities, shows more promise.
To add exclusivity, the new Orkut experience is now available only by invitation.
Orkut has leveraged on its group properties to muscle the interface. For instance, users can add scrap video clips that were earlier restricted to text.

The Orkut experience also integrates video chat with Google Talk. Users can also post video testimonials, change skins and personalise the 'about me' profile with personalised 3-D avatars like Buddypoke. They have also borrowed from Twitter's 140 character limit to spruce up the status tag. Users are posed a question 'What are you upto', similar to 'What are you doing' on Twitter.
The site is a shutterbug's delight; with 30 million photo uploads daily on Orkut, Google is betting big on this feature to generate traffic. It comes bundled with a host of exciting features like the photo-slider, which displays mugshots of friends. Uploading pictures in bulk is easier with the new interface.