It was more than a decade ago when all of us were Orkut-stricken. It was the first social media unleasher which engrossed our interactive energies with its scraps, its themes and its personalized outlooks. It was when Orkut Büyükkökten and Githin Jose came together in 2004 and the social network Orkut came into existence. It was an independent project working and powered by Google and involved around 300 million people increasing the number of their scrapbooks.
Now after so many years with quite a lot of time taken by Büyükkökten to think, he is back with his latest effort and has designed something “a little bit friendlier”. It’s called Hello.com! This new venture will work to inspire hope worldwide by connecting everyone and their passions together. With its headquarters in San Franscisco, Büyükkökten has 20 other team mates who are also ex-Google employees, Hello is being seen with a potential to make it big in the tech world.
Through his blog post, Büyükkökten assertively expressed, “I’m confident, the more we connect, the more beautiful it will become. I created Orkut with this in mind. The focus is less about people you follow and more about what you love doing. Fear and hatred have no place when you make such a simple and friendly gesture to someone else.” He communicated Hello.com as” the successor to my original social network.”
We believe Hello will face some issues in making its individual identity in a social world currently dominated by Facebook and Twitter. It is available both for Android and iOS devices and doesn’t require more data than just your contacts from the address book. Its starting with three languages initially, English, French and Portuguese and the first countries to have it are France, the U.K., Australia, U.S., Canada, New Zealand, Ireland, and Brazil. But there is good news for Germany, Mexico and India because Hello will launch over here in the coming month.
Hello has an interesting orientation for us once we sign in. After logging in, we are given some choices of ‘personas’ to select 5 of them showcasing our interests. For example we can choose to be interested in as a clubber, photography lover, animal lover, art lover, actor, foodie, geek, traveler, parent or even a vampire among many others. This limitation of 5 personas won’t bother us because we can switch from one to another as and when our interest gets low in any community we first selected.
All your postings done in this new app will have to be assigned to any of the 5 selected personas you chose to follow. Also an option to follow others with similar interests is an option. For this Hello with its learning algorithm helps you to connect with both potential and personalized personas.
Being a more visualized application, simple text based messages or posts cannot be done. Instead you have a creative option of sharing pictures which you can edit with vivid filters. As far as video postings are concerned, this facility is not available currently.
Hello also introduces a new aspect of gamification meaning, with good number of jots (Posts), comments, likes etc, you will be awarded with rewards. There are 40 levels of this internal game and as you progress with your scores, coins, gifts and all, you will get moved to higher levels.
Büyükkökten said that, “Focusing around common interests is what Orkut was all about and can help bring people together as a vision that changes how the world does social.”
