Downfall of Orkut

Now orkut is under pressure, its alexa rank is decreasing. Competitor social networking sites are taking lead from orkut. Orkut has lost its position in alexa ranking. It is now behind other giants like myspace, facebook, hi5. Above all, the possible Microsoft-Yahoo Combo will create havoc inside orkut. Why this is happening? Will orkut die? Let’s discuss this.

Unfortunately, flooding of Orkut scrapbooks and forums is becoming out of control, the orkut developers implemented some new features in order to stop this like not allowing two or more verbatim topics or scrapbook entries to be submitted, forcing the user to wait before posting another topic or scrapbook entry, and the usage of captchas, whenever a scrap entry is hyperlinked, giving rights to community moderators to ban spammers. But still orkut is facing problems.

In December 2007, hundreds of thousands of users accounts were affected, using another cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability and a worm developed by another Brazilian hacker, Rodrigo Lacerda. A user’s account was affected when the user simply read a particular scrap containing an embed which caused the user to automatically become a part of a community on the site, without approval. The affected user’s account was then used to send this scrap to everyone present in the user’s friend list thereby creating a sort of a huge wave.

The java script code which helps the users to send scraps to all the friends with just few clicks is causing the real problem. Now the scrapbook of most of the users is flooded with spams. Also my scrapbook is flooded with unwanted messages.

The basic problems with orkut are scrapbook is open to all (now a user can lock his scrapbook), misuse of pictures from various profiles especially of female profiles(You can find many photos which are uploaded on orkut on porn sites), reported abuse with their orkut accounts, slow orkut server, java script hack codes like scrap to many etc.

Now google should come with some definite plan to protect orkut otherwise they will definitely lose the social networking battle to myspace, hi5 and facebook.

Abhishek Kumar is a computer science graduate.