Themes coming to Orkut?

Its Diwali today, one of the most exciting festivals in India. India is a country dominated by Hindus but still people from other religions can never find a better place with such cultural harmony. Every religion’s major festival is a national holiday for us. Diwali is the festival of lights, people celebrate by lighting candles and is now more of a multi religious festival with everyone enjoying the spirit. I will stop talking about Diwali here and you can find more about the festival at the Wikipedia page for Diwali.

Okrut today had a link in the top header when clicked toggled the theme to a Diwali theme which lookied like in the screenshot below.

Much attention has been paid to the footer to make it look more web 2.0

The logo has been slightly changed to belnd with the theme

Incase you don’t use Orkut, this is how the original theme looks like.

This Diwali theme just showed how ready the site design is to implement clean and blended themes. It might as well be an indicator that Orkut is getting ready to be themed. And the recent Open Social launch makes the okrut team more busy as they have to make it Open Social ready. Till now there is no sign of adding applications to Orkut.

Orkut does not allow customization like MySpace, but they have recently added many features like ability to embed media in messages, show updates from friends in the user’s homepage, ability to add feeds to user’s profile and more recently an Ask Freinds feature.
Orkut is one of the major social networks and is watched closely by analysts because its from Google. Intially Orkut was like a Brazilian social networking site but the scene is fast changing. It noew enjoys a strong presence in India. The Demographics page from orkut proves the point.

In India you can rarely find students who don’t have an Orkut profile. There are many home grown social networking sites trying to get a pie of this but most of their users overlap with Orkut. Online social networking is more a wild phenomenon among the youth and the college going crowd than with the working class. This might be more because of the censorship at offices than lack of intrest to network online. More schools and colleges are starting to block the use of social networking sites in India.