It seems that Google is no longer requiring invites inside of its social networking service, Orkut.com. Users can sign up now by using their Google accounts or simply creating one and linking it to their Orkut account (which sounds redundant if you ask me).
Mitanshu was one of the first bloggers who came across this discovery after a friend of his got rebuffed by the “you need an invite to be cool” paragraph. He soon discovered that Google was allowing anyone with a Google account to sign up, and has provided some nice screen shots for all to see.
Although there is no official word about this from the Google Blog, Orkut News or even the googler Ellen (who works on the site), this may be a response towards Facebook which previously began allowing open registrations of their site.
Orkut currently has around 30 million registered users, although 63% of them hail from Brazil (with America approaching 14% and India climbing up to 10%). Although not a favorite in the US, Orkut seems to be (ironically) gaining ground abroad and perhaps is Google’s way of cementing its position overseas.
Update: Orkut seems to have opened this up to some countries, but not others (which is really strange of Google). For more info regarding this, the Internet News Blog has more (scroll down to his update).
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I couldn’t get it to work.
Maybe it’s because it ain’t workin’ or just because I didn’t do it right.
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I tried to sign up for Orkut this a.m. It is still requiring a invite for me.
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Really? That is strange. It is working for me (as well as a bunch of Indian users).
Perhaps it is a couple of bugs in the system.
See if you can try again (and if not I’ll post an update on this post).
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Viva el grande Google! More spam to come…
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Darnell; it is true that this new feature is not available worldwide. I have just made an update regarding this on my blog.
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I cannot join Orkut neither.It said you need an Orkut username & password and a google one.I have a google account and gmail with free gmails to give people,Right now I am interested in trying Orkut but nobody can help me get an invite.
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Angel, if you had read the post on my blog, I guess you would have known the way out. Anyway, let me explain it to you here.
Goto kproxy.com , type in http://www.orkut.com.
Now, look into the address bar. You will have an URL of the sort server*.kproxy.com/…
Change the * to 8 so that you get into the Indian server where you only need a gmail account to open.
If you feel this is to much, then please send me an email(in my blogger profile), I shall send you an invite..