Trying out Orkut videos

I may be quite late on catching up on this side of technology curve and adoption. The thing with uploading videos is that, well, one should have a video worth uploading. Not adding to the woes of YouTube by deciding not to upload Copyright content doesn't leave much choices. However, that doesn't stop me from relishing some videos which are related to my taste of entertainment.

So, today I decided to compile all the various videos I have watched over a period of time into one place - my Orkut profile page's video section. It took my around 2 and a half hours to search out the relevant videos on YouTube and Google Videos, edit their description and sit back to beam happily at the result.

During the process, I realized couple of things:

1. Its an instantaneous connection others can make to you on a social networking site by looking at the kind of videos uploaded by you.
2. Orkut is allowing only Google owned videos to be linked here. The flexibility and power of the feature could have been greatly enhanced if other online video content could also be linked. (But, cant blame them after the Viacom lawsuit fiasco).
3. I guess MySpace has a similar feature. I am not a MySpace subscriber so can't say how the features measure up against each other. My social network is currently being well served by Orkut and I am happy for now.
4. The video content is uploaded on YouTube servers. This allows Orkut to virtually accept unlimited number of video links. However, the Orkut albums section has photographs uploaded on Orkut servers. So they put a limit of 12 photographs to save space. It wouldn't be surprising if they extend the videos concept here by linking album to Picasa. Maybe it will help in further integration of the Google services, not to mention about possibilities for AdSense.
5. My two and a half hours of effort would need to be replicated if I want to post all my video links (along with the descriptions) to my blog. Its high time the social networking sites exposed framework for data export. When IMs can link up together and Google Chat is already being hosted inside both GMail and Orkut, this should be around the corner.
6. Like blog services (or better, like Twitter), Orkut should provide facility to add comments on the album photographs and video collection. It will be more pertinent at that point than having a comment added in the scrapbook.

I will let Orkut worry about these. For the time being, I am hoping that others will enjoy the show at my profile page.

Update #1: 22/03/07

Adding new video links pushes the older links to later display pages (like the scraps). However, the idea of videos is not akin to the scraps, where it makes sense to keep the latest scrap at the top. I want to arrange my video list to give a sense of priority to the videos I consider best. Orkut doesn't support manual sorting of the video list.

Update #2: 24/10/07

This is a bit late but still. Orkut has been introducing new services over the past few months. Some are addition of Blogger and Picasa feeds, removing the limit on album size, allowing to scrap directly next to video and Picasa feeds and "Friends Update" feature (which alerts when your friends edit their profile). Removing the limit of album size and integrating feeds had to come in as part of the bigger picture of integrating all Google services. However, still, Orkut has to do a lot to catch up with Facebook. Facebook has slowly and steadily started gaining the critical mass in the college/university networks. I was forced to open a Facebook account when the number of Facebook invites from my existing friend circle became a regular feature. I haven't yet filled in my profile details there. In fact, that is the more tedious part. I can still live with a rich Orkut profile and sparsely filled Facebook profile as long as my friend network does not stop using Orkut altogether. A similar migration experience example is that I now use GTalk primarily for instant messaging. Though I log on to Yahoo, I don't receive any pings. However, I am still tempted to keep using Yahoo because of one very important feature which GTalk still doesn't have - "Stealth Settings". Its a faux-pas when I log on in the middle of the night to chat with a particular person, receive pings from others in the list whom I don't want to enter into conversation at that time and then have to either give excuses or ignore them.