No matter how much people may rant against the applications on Facebook, the developer community keeps coming up with zillions of them every day. And now the most popular social networking site in India – Orkut too has announced the opening up of the site for them real soon. Soon we will find Orkut too flooded with applications.
While this may provide a great advertisement opportunity to many companies and a showcase for the enthusiastic developers, I just hope this doesn’t turn out to be another means of spamming people with hundreds of requests and invitations (Mayank recently wrote about the sorry state of spam in social networks).
Orkut is already accepting the applications for submission and the best ones will be featured on its blog. Google code has a page ready to help those coders who are new to the arena and want to venture into application development. A separate developers blog too has been readied for related updates. That’s not all! There’s an Orkut Developers forum too! Seems there’s a related page on every other service that Google offers. So all in all, the orkut Sandbox is ready to hit your profiles soon and it seems it will hit hard indeed.
It may attract more people towards the site, especially from the facebook loyal’s but for some it may well become a reason to say goodbye to Orkut. But then a lot depends upon how Orkut uses and manages the applications. API clustering on the UI, spamming, content filtering, content policies and security are some of the concerns and it remains to be seen how Orkut handles them. One can just hope that the move adds value to the site and people come up with some really innovative applications.
I would surely like the time I spend on Orkut to yield more. However all said and done, one thing is proved with this step from Google – that it doesn’t leave a single stone unturned on the net.
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You don’t need the new apps to make orkut spammy – its already spam infested. Or don’t you get that ‘put this javascript in the address bar’ messages?
@ Binny : Well, I’ve already written about it in my last post. This post was written by shashank and he’s mentioned the link too. I think he is talking about the application and invitation spam which you get in facebook.