Orkut.com, is a social networking site which is also the most popular social networking website of India, now enters into its 5th year since its launch in 2004. Orkut, which is the favorite online home for millions of people worldwide keeps his users happy and amazed with many new features it added consecutively through out its journey till now. On the other hand there are some websites and blogs which are related to orkut, like the one we have. But, not only us, there are many other very helpful and resourceful websites and weblogs that gives you all your orkut related news, tips, hacks and graphics. These websites are run by some hardcore techies and professional people who love orkut and know many things about orkut’s use which will keep your account safe and will also give a pinch of entertainment to your online life.
Here, we have selected such 7 top orkut related blogs and websites and asked 3 questions each to their respective owners/webmasters to know their future plans, their experience in 2008 and their expectation from orkut users and new trends etc.
Let’s see, what they have to say.
Gaurav Dua- OrkutPlus.net
How was the year 2008 for OrkutPlus?
The year 2008 was Fantastic. Coming to the end of 08, we were doing 1 million page views /month. This year saw the rise of Orkut Plus! and the traffic and viewer recognition defined the supremacy of the website amongst its competitors. 
We crossed 9400 feed subscribers mark. We Shifted to WordPress. We were doing a Million Page Views a Month by the end of 2008. In Short – It Was Nothing Less Than a Dream Run
Do you have any upcoming project or plan to enhance Orkut Plus?
Yes! I am planning to take this to the next level. 5 additions to orkut plus are just on the cards
1 – Orkut Plus! Brazil – Dedicated Portuguese Editors to Serve Brazilian Orkut Users.
The year 2008 saw one of my dreams come true. Orkut Plus! was recognized in Brazil (which, undoubtedly is the home of orkut). Tremendous surge in traffic from Brazil compelled me to be more dedicated to Brazilian Orkut Users than I ever was. It was time when i decided to start Orkut Plus! Brazil which should hopefully launch in Mid or Early Jan ’09 to break the language barriers.
2 – Orkut Plus! Forum – Dedicated Help and Support Forum for orkut users around the globe.
Orkut Plus! Forum will be a dedicated help and support central and a one stop forum for every question, query, problem relating orkut. I am pretty sure no one can answer their queries better than us
3 – Orkut Plus! Get’s into Orkut Apps – Very soon, you will see supreme quality orkut apps at your disposal.
Yes! We are finally working on Orkut Apps. It was high time and I really thought it’s time to reach out to the masses with our Apps. I am sure they will love our apps for its quality and exclusiveness.
4 – Recados Para Orkut – Orkut Scraps and Glitters for Brazilian Users.
Brazil Orkut Users are very special to Orkut Plus!. They defined Orkut Plus! as the best one shop for Orkut Hacks in Brazil and thus my dream of taking Orkut Plus! beyond language barriers was served. Orkut Scraps and Glitters are a very important part in making Orkutting Experience more fun. Why not serve Brazilian Users with that dish too? 
5 – Taking orkut plus tools to the next level. Possibly adding a ssl security encryption..
Though our PHP based tools are very exclusive and very safe, some users still have their reservations of entering their account details in order to make the tools work. I really appreciate their concern at the same time i wish they can enjoy the exclusive orkut hacks and bots we have created at their disposal. In order to make it more secure for our users, we may add ssl encryption certificate to our site which will ensure the users that the information entered is totally encrypted and no eavesdropping can be possible. I cannot confirm this since we are yet to check the compatibility issues but I assure you, this rank too high in my To-Do list.
We are also planning on some extraordinary things for orkut users. Those are still in our sandbox. But the 5 probable additions I discussed are on our top priority list and you will get to see them very soon
What new trends or advancement you are expecting from Orkut related traffic on your blog, in 2009?
I plan to maintain 1 million page views a month goal. I am sure if the 5 plans I just discussed above are executed as planned, I see Orkut Plus ranked under top 15K in alexa by the end of 2009.
Orkut Users are so passionate about anything that could enhance their orkutting experience. I wish i could please them more with more interesting stuff and orkut hacks. I see, very soon, feed subscribers for Orkut Plus! would cross that of the Official Orkut Blog. That surely says something of it’s own..Isn’t it?
Ambitions and Goals keeps me focused and dedicated. Rest, the love and awesome scraps and emails I receive as appreciation for Orkut Plus! makes me feel proud of doing something great for others. I hope I can carry it for long and take this Baby to the upper level Blogosphere.
……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
Rahul Bansal - DevilsWorshop.org
How was the year 2008 for DevilsWorkshop?
Year 2008, has been amazing year for Devils Workshop. It started with around 200,000 visitors count on sitemeter and out of the blue a thought crossed my mind – Can I make sitemeter counter cross 1 million visitor count! Surprisingly, at the end of year we were very close to 1 million mark… 970,585! We fell short by just 30K or in positive words; 1 million mark will be crossed in second week of Jan, hopefully! Devils Workshop received 744905 unique visitors in year 2008 according to sitemeter. Figures are slightly different as per Google Analytics which are 742,208 unique visitors and 1,339,403 page views.
Do you have any upcoming project or plan to enhance DevilsWorkshop?
Talking about Orkut specifically, we just launched Orkut Diary as you know our 3rd service for Orkut. We are also working on 7 projects for Orkut whose details can not be revealed as of now.
1) As we are busy doing lots of things, right from expanding our blogging network as well as web-development business, we anticipate a need to re-align our focus areas and organize our daily activities in a better manner.
The two main areas where we will be focusing our efforts are:
A) Devils Workshop and Blog Network
It is worth notable that Devils Workshop published 423 posts with the help of 20 authors in the year 2008. These figures are good (we feel so) but they do not count many non-technical posts of various domains that were sent to us by different authors.
We started expanding Devils Workshop’s editorial team in Q4 of year 2008 and within few weeks we realized that we need lot more space on the Internet to accommodate for our rapidly growing family of co-authors and visitors. We have decided to start a full-fledged blog network under its own identity.
As per the current plan we will be formally launching our official and registered blog network by mid February. We have already drafted the list of blogs and the list of probable bloggers that we would be inviting in our expansion.
The entire project plan for the process also includes an exhaustive training session program for people who love to write but are not familiar with the nitty-gritty of this new age media!
rtCamp (our parent company)
In the process of re-aligning our focus areas in this year:
- We would be setting up a “Say No” cut-off limit for the projects that we undertake, for operational efficiency.
- Focusing more on complex WordPress, Facebook and OpenSocial related applications.
What new trends or advancement you are expecting from Orkut related traffic on your blog, in 2009?
I am expecting more traffic from Orkut but for our new blog OrkutDiary.
Devils Workshop will not post much about Orkut in future so I am expecting decline in orkut related traffic for DW.
……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
Darnell Clyton, InsideOrkut.com
How was the year 2008 for InsideOrkut?
2008 was a pretty good year for Inside Orkut, even though I was not able to focus as much attention to the site (as my time was divided to posting upon other blogs).
Revenue remained consistent throughout the year, although traffic was slightly down in December (due to the holidays–although revenue basically remained the same compared to previous months).
Do you have any upcoming project or plan to enhance InsideOrkut?
I actually have a few projects lined up, one of them involving a collaboration between the major Orkut blogs (more on that on a later date). I’m also planning on redesigning the site again, although I have not decided whether I’ll hire someone else or do it myself (the former if I do not have any time).
What new trends or advancement you are expecting from Orkut related traffic on your blog, in 2009?
As far as Orkut itself goes (not to mention their various fan blogs) traffic will probably increase as more Americans hear about Orkut (as I am now seeing Google promote Orkut instead of being ashamed of it’s existance–that’s another story).
I am already starting to see more traffic from the US, although India and Brazil are where I am receiving the most traffic (according to Google Analytics).
……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
Prashant- OrkutFans.com
How was the year 2008 for OrkutFans?
Its was great started on 15th august. In 2008 orkutfans.com added own orkut application named Seasons Greeting link HERE
In Year 2008 orkutfans.com ‘s image database was more than any other glitter website.
Do you have any upcoming project or plan to enhance OrkutFans?
In order to enhance orkutfans.com experience we have added wish friends tab to send e-greeting to your friends. We added this feature via our web wishfriends.co.cc site. And adding more and more up-to-date contents as per seasons.
To make orkutfans up-to-date we are going to add new glitter images in orkutfans.com
What new trends or advancement you are expecting from Orkut related traffic on your blog, in 2009?
Hard to say but we are waiting for new ideas and implementation of ideas which are in test phase and pipeline!
……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
5. OrkutPix.com
Ishtpreet Singh – Orkutpix.com
How was the year 2008 for OrkutPix?
Year 2008 was really good for OrkutPix, as it was its 1st year, and become really popular and people’s choice in a very short time, and we are really thankful to our customers, clients and users to make our site their favorite one.
Do you have any upcoming project or plan to enhance OrkutPix?
Yes we have many upcoming projects, that will launch shortly, we’ll launch 2 main ventures in the coming 2 months and we hope that our users will really like them, but we cannot reveal the upcoming features here as per our policies. You will be able to see at the time of there launch very soon.
What new trends or advancement you are expecting from Orkut related traffic on your blog, in 2009?
As we are a relating site to orkut, that provides greetings, music and graphics for Orkut users, we’ll continue adding up new features to make our website more favorable, and maintaining the old features as well and also making the old features more fine, we expect more traffic in this new year, and expect that our users will continue using Orkut and our services on OrkutPix.com.
……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
6. Orkutrix.com
Ravi Kiran – Orkutrix.com
How was the year 2008 for Orkutrix.com?
I must say Orkutrix has passed all the phases in only year 2008. We changed the template to the present one in Dec 2008 and since then we started recording real time traffic. At one stage, we have seen 1500 unique visitors per day. But as the days passed, the mods and me became less active as we got busy with other aspects in life. Thus the visitor count fell down by the end of the year. As of now, we are getting around 600 visitors per day.
Do you have any upcoming project or plan to enhance Orkutrix?
I do not have any immediate plans of enhancing Orkutrix. But definitely I would love to do so if I had enough time in near future.
What new trends or advancement you are expecting from Orkut related traffic on your blog, in 2009?
Well, I think the present traffic continues for few more months. I have been actually thinking to introduce something new into the site again as I am a bit free now a days. I might come out with some new stuff on orkutrix soon after which Orkutrix will stand no.1 again.
……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
Meetul – Orkutting.com
How was the year 2008 for Orkutting.com?
Launched on 07-Sep-2006, Orkutting.Com was the first ever website of its kind, offering tricks, tips and tools for the Google’s Social Network – Orkut. The feedback illustrated that the concept was very much appreciated by the users, probably that is the reason for the rise of websites with the “same” concept. Many came up with the copied content, some with fresh ones too to give a tough competition. However, as the time passed, the traffic on Orkutting.Com increased with a little zig-zag flow of the graph making the year 2008 the best for us in terms of traffic and popularity.
Do you have any upcoming project or plan to enhance Orkutting?
Yes, we do have something special to surprise our users
A bit of suspense always add to the spice, the users won’t have to wait too long.
What new trends or advancement you are expecting from Orkut related traffic on your blog, in 2009?
First thing that I would like to highlight is that Orkutting.Com is not a blog, it is a full-fledged website. Well, day-by-day users are increasing their Internet bandwidths. This would probably deviate the text-based content traffic to high-end multimedia traffic, and we are ready to serve the both. We are also expecting to get a major share of Orkut’s users in the year 2009. When you reach for the stars, you may not get one, but you won’t come up with a handful of mud, either.
…………………………………………….^All The Very Best! ^…………………………………………….
{ 11 comments }
Amazing article Zaheer…
Nice to see efforts you have put in writing this…
Thank you for appreciating Rahul. The credit goes to all of you technos for providing such wonderful websites to all of us.
Cheers!
@Zaheer
Remarkable job. Looking at the amount of hard work you have put in, I wish Orkut Heroes Goes a long way.
Thanks for giving Orkut Plus! that prestigious spot in your rankings. I feel honored
@ Mr. Zaheer
Really a nice piece of work and I really appreciate your hard work on your website… Wish you luck for your future… and thanks for selecting our website and giving me such a honor.
Thanks
Gaurav and IshtPreet,
I tried my best to showcase your all work. Still, I know I missed many good sites like yours but its not so easy to convince people online
You all deserve more than this.
Nice job man. You forgot one more website on the list… Orkutheroes.com!
Your site should also be there on the list!!
nice article …
orkutplus is my favorite…
orkut heroes shuold be der .. instead of orkutting ..
orkutting is very poorly designed , n not at all worth in this list ..
meetul should work on that … all the best ..
Unfortunately,
Or they do something amazing with Orkut or it will desappear becuase even on its great markets areas (Brazil and India) there is a great competitor, even more growing and growing…
nobody says that if Orkut continues focusing on only Brazil or India countries, it will die, absolutely!
Nowadays, for any European citizen, it si completely impossible to maintain an Orkut profile, simply due to the lack of contacts!!! Nobody are there. The majority of the profiles are brazilians or indian people.
Let us take a tour in Facebook… twitter… for example…
I am an appasionnate of Google products but I have to recognize that speaking about social networking, Google is so far away from the top!!
Rafa
Rafa,
Thanks for writing down, I agree with your points but I can only say that Google always knock it last but manage to get first. About orkut, I think Google is very less concern about it, its keep on introducing new features but nothing very interesting so far.
But if you go more deeper into orkut, you will find many different social circle divided in two main groups, one is of those who use orkut just for fun, fake and entertainment reasons but the other group is too serious about social networking by engaging themselves into really very big and constructive communities.
You wont see such group on facebook and in my opinion this particular group if survives killing that other fake entertaining group than Orkut can get a fresh and new people only interested in joining and contributing on those social communities instead of joining only one message board.
Facebook is nothing but a trend people are following nowadays and will one day become history like classmates.com.
Orkut did some mistakes in its very early days but he got a chance to clean it as well.
hey i would also like to feature my site on this arena …… u can check out my site – tukro.blog.co.in .. waiting frm u
{ 2 trackbacks }