Recently Darnell and Gaurav posted about Orkuts limit of 25 Orkut Apps. Many users who always want unlimited things might be surprised to know this limit. But if you look carefully this approach have a good side and for the first time I feel this limit is something, Facebook should have copied from Orkut.
Good for users…
- Each Orkut App can eat up some space on Profile page. While this is optional, almost every app developer want maximum visibility for their app and thus use profile box no matter if its essential. Its sort of advertising!
- So each Orkut app you add, clutter your Orkut profile pages. Which makes your profile page so heavy that it takes forever to load them on slow connection. On facebook, I know some profiles which takes more than 10MB data transfer to load completely.
- Since you rarely check your own profile, this may seem fine to you. But this is surely a big turn off and it may create bad impression. It makes you look like highly disorganized person.
Good for app developer…
- I observed on facebook, there are atleast 10 duplicates of every popular apps. And as facebook have no limit, also a spammy invite friends option all duplicates get some exposure.
- Users have no app limit so they never bother about removing these apps even though they rarely use them. This way low quality apps manage to survive, even though their better alternative already exist.
- On orkut as every user has limit of 25 apps, they will only keep apps they really use. So when a new developer joins open social, he will think of creating quality app so that his app gets a place in a users favorite 25 apps.
Well, this is my opinion and I don’t think it will be acceptable to majority users and specially to orkut apps developer community. But if you look for longer run, you will wish such limit to exist forever.
Like others, I do think that this limit will be changed or removed completely in future by Orkut, mostly owning to commercial reasons.
Let us know what do you think!
Happy friendship day to all our readers… 🙂
3 Comments
I agree with you. I have many friends pestering me to join facebook, and I’m afraid to tell them that I already have a profile there. Why? With just about 3 friends, my profile gets flooded with requests and all that. What will happen when 30 of them join me?
This ‘commercial’ thing is a necessary evil. Necessary for the Social Network and app developers, and evil for some extent for Social-Network-oholic users, and their friends.
Facebook is the worst social network when it comes to clutter, but this fact has alone helped in its explosive growth. I don’t like apps, nor do the majority of my friends on orkut. That is why, we enjoy a clutter-free orkutting!
You know what, these social networks thrive on the craze of its users to install applications. The more apps that get installed, the more cash-happy the network gets. Isn’t it?
@Rajat
Nice opinion Rajat… 🙂
Its obvious that Facebook allowing apps to clutter and spam users just for monetary gains.
Hi Rahul,
Just stumbled upon this old comment of mine. Time has changed matters, isn’t it? If we were to complain Orkut and Facebook now, there’s no denying the fact that FB will come out to be a better. I myself have been a convert, and hardly use Orkut now. The Facebook redesign changed it all, isn’t it? 🙂