Orkut sucks!

Orkut is a good community website alright, but the functionality sucks in a whole variety of ways. There's something called the Scrapbook, which is as the name suggests, Scrap.

It is something which you can write notes and other stuff and post it for others to see and others can write in your scrapbook too, but of late, it has become a convention of sorts to 'scrap someone' as it is called and then, the reply has to be 'scrapped' in the scrapbook of the person initiating the conversation!!

Crap!!

Small messages are good, but people who I believe either do not have any work to do or Google is paying them to scrap, they just start chatting right in the scrapbooks. There is absolutely no privacy, anybody and everybody can track what you are talking with one another. Replying is another pain if you follow the convention of replying in the scrapbook of the person who initiates the conversation. There is no "Reply" option. You have to Click on the person's name, migrate to the person's profile, click on his scrapbook and then scrap!! Crap again!! And there is no way to easily track what you are talking about if a person is late to reply and your original message drowns under newer messages!!

The community feature is another pain. Yeah, Anybody can create communities, but there is no way to search for posts within a community which is not very good news. In a large number of support related communities and other similar communities, people ask you to 'search' for posts before posting a similar one.. And with over a 1000 posts and an even larger number of replies, it isnt easy work and we'll be better off asking someone directly instead of through the community and being at the receiving end of the Orkut Experts who can somehow search for entries magically(as they ask you to do).

Orkut is good at networking friends and having contacts, but other than that, it sucks bigtime. I do occasionally hangout there, but everything for courtesy's sake to reply to people who 'scrap' me and to prevent myself from going to the dumps by not replying to friend requests. Eventually.