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| Picture this - Orkut goes photo blogging |
| Shivani Shinde / Mumbai Jun 15, 2009, 00:56 IST |
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Imagine you are having dinner with some friends, and in walks Shahrukh Khan or someone equally famous. You get a picture clicked with him and want to share it with the world instantly. But how do you go about it since you can’t possibly wait till you get home and transfer the pictures to home PC.
Google might just have a solution for you. The search giant has launched a mobile phone application for its social networking site, Orkut that allows users to update their profile pictures instantly via web by using their handsets.
So what’s new in it, you would wonder. Considering this feature is already available on other social networking site like Facebook. The company claims that the Java-based application, freely downloadable, can be accessed through any handset that supports GPRS connection. Rahul Kulkarni, product manager, Google India informs, “Photo blogging has been around for some time now, but then again it is restricted to the desktop. And among the handsets it has been restricted to the elite phones like Blackberry and Apple iPhone. We are confident that with this application will take photo sharing to another level.”
Google roots its belief on numbers. Kulkarni reveals that one in every 10 mobile web users is an Orkut user and the base is growing by leaps and bounds. “Mobile users is India have crossed the 400 million mark. Of this 15-20 million users actively use internet through their handsets. Our scraps (personalised posts written by Orkut users) from mobile phones have grown 7 times in the last month alone,” he declares .
Development of Orkut mobile application was a natural transition for the search giant who has been “talking” to its Indian users through Google’s Internet Bus initiative. “We figured that the younger generation was keen to do more with handsets than just capturing images. They also wanted to get the pictures to the web instantly,” cites Alok Goel, product manager, Google India.
Besides, allowing users to upload photos on-the-go from the handsets, Google has also built in options to interact with friends who are not on Orkut platform by integrating the phone’s address book with Orkut. This way, user can send a link of the pictures to a friend who is not on Orkut and they can check the pictures on the web.
Goel calculates that mobile-web is a much more cost-efficient way of communication, than text messaging. “One SMS costs about Re 1 or so but sending a scrap or picture through mobile web platform will cost much less than that. To upload a 10 KB photo, the user pays only 10 paise,” said Goel.
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