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Orkut adds 'Ask Friends' feature

Google's social media site Orkut has added a new feature called 'Ask Friends' which enables its members to ask questions to their friends

Google's social media site Orkut has added a new feature called 'Ask Friends' which enables its members to ask questions to their friends. The feature will benefit Orkut members seeking suggestions, recommendations or advice on various personal, professional or social issues from the list of friends.

Orkut's ask friends feature also provides privacy for such interactions. One can even direct the question one wants to ask to specific friends or allow the system to automatically route the questions to a set of friends who have answered similar questions in the past.

Orkut adds 'Ask Friends' feature
Orkut members can ask a question in two ways. One, by typing out a question and sending it out to some friends via 'ask among friends' feature, which seeks friends based on their answering history and interests. The second way is by asking 'individual friends' which lets the user select the friends that he wants the question to be sent to.

The Orkut system also provides some 'Suggested Labels' that seek to be relevant to the question being keyed in. One may choose one of the suggested labels offered by the system and tag the question with it or even enter a label on their own. These enable the system to route the question to friends who may have some useful responses to the question.

In another development, Google on October 30 announced the roll out of an 'OpenSocial' function, a set of common API (application programming interface) that will allow third-party developers to create applications that will work on social media sites like LinkedIn, Hi5, Friendster, Orkut, Plaxo and Ning. This follows the success of a similar strategy by Facebook. OpenSocial is a set of three applications that will allow developers to access user profile information, friends information and activities happening on social networks. As Orkut opens its source code on November 5, it will become easy for developers to create universal applications for all the mentioned social media sites.

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