With all of Orkut’s failures, there’s still nothing that Google is doing to drive its visitors to the site. Obviously, the plan is to give it a slow and painful death.
With my 5 friends and inactivity on my account, I’ve received a flurry of emails in the past 2 days notifying me that someone (unnamed, usually just a hyphen) has signed my wall. I decided to sign onto my inactive account and witnessed a bunch of unnecessary (and, in most cases, not even in the English language) spam with links.
I deleted the spam, but I’m certain there will be more as time progresses.
I’m surprised that Google, which is so good about combating (or at least acknowledging) spam on Gmail, decided to let their social networking site suffer this fate. There is no requirement to be someone’s friend to sign their wall, which is a prerequisite to post testimonials on Facebook and MySpace. And it’s also a shame they did nothing to make it popular, because Orkut is pretty fast (unlike MySpace) and would have had potential back in the day.
Well, at least some people are utilizing it for personal gain.