Interactive Marketing Blog

Finally, Google realized that it should give its social networking site, Orkut which is more famous in India, Brazil and other emerging markets a small changeover, at least for the mobile frenzy audience. So it launched its first Java based mobile app.

It does almost everything required for a mobile based apps like uploading & sharing photos, view scraps, updates from friends, and photo albums in offline mode, writing/reading scraps, updating your status, searching for users, viewing/accepting friend requests etc.

But was wondering why did Google took so long a time to do this?

On the hindsight, Facebook had dedicated apps for a long long time and even I’ve seen Indian telecom service providers showcasing their network capability (sort of) as a point of differentiation (PoD) with Facebook being accessible through their network.

Google has always been very lax in terms of giving any sort of changeover to Orkut which is quite popular here and not much innovation to its users.

Personally, I’ve more or less stopped using Orkut for a very long time, except for occasional Hi’s & Hello’s for my not-so-into-facebook type friends. But still I’ve seen most of my Orkut friends shifting to Facebook and for status updates what better than Twitter which helps me to stay connected 24X7.

So does it really make much sense to develop mobile app for Orkut after such a long time? I guess you guys are better judge of that!