Orkut Mobile is Live

Orkut Mobile ProfileGoogle’s four year old social networking service, Orkut finally has a mobile version! There’s been no announcement, but m.orkut.com is up and running. InsideOrkut.com (mobile version) discovered it Saturday. Orkut (Wikipedia) never really caught on anywhere else but it’s huge in Brazil and India with 83% of Orkut’s traffic coming from those two countries, according to Alexa. In spite of only being really popular in two (very large) countries Orkut still manages to be the number three social network (after Myspace and Facebook) worldwide.

Orkut follows the open (or MySpace) model of social networking, profiles are public and searchable and membership is open to anyone with an email address. There’s been a pent up demand from users for a way to use Orkut from their phones. Currently the full PC version works very well in Opera Mini and other full-web mobile browsers but there have been issues off and on over the last couple of years with Orkut upgrades breaking the site in Opera Mini.

The new mobile version of Orkut should work on any modern phone with xhtml support. It has a useful subset of Orkut features including Profiles, Friends List, Profile Search, Friend Updates, Birthday reminders, the ability to accept and deny friend requests and Scrapbooking, which is what Orkut calls personal messaging. There are some missing features too. You can’t create or edit a profile, there are no videos or testimonials and Orkut’s extremely popular “Communities” (forums) aren’t there either. Maybe the reason why there was no official announcement is that Orkut Mobile isn’t finished yet!

More on Mobile Orkut:
Devil’s WorkshopOrkut Goes Mobile Silently – m.orkut.com!
WATBlogGoogle quietly launches mobile version of Orkut

4 thoughts on “Orkut Mobile is Live

  1. @nikhil

    I am seeing this too as are many other users. It’s being discussed on the Opera Mini My Opera Forum at http://my.opera.com/community/forums/topic.dml?id=246195&abc=&page=4&skip=150&show=&perscreen=50

    For now, the only workaround is to use Orkut Mobile (http://m.orkut.com or a country specific version of the mobile site like http://m.orkut.co.in/)

    I can’t believe the incompetence of Orkut QA. This is at least the fourth time recently that Orkut has made changes that broke the site for Opera Mini users. They obviously don’t test these changes in Mini in spite of it being one of the more popular browsers among Orkut users.

  2. i can’t access orkut tru phon ,am using operamini,initially 4 a couple of days i havn’t any problm wit bt aftr dat in sudden wen i login i can see only a part of evry page and its shws dat google hadnt reformat dis link for ma phon ,wat shal i do nw?????//

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