WebProNews

Orkut was getting pretty elderly - Google’s social network suffered from a design that was several years old (and not even impressive when it first debuted).  The company’s promised to address the issue with a new update, however.

“The change isn’t live yet,” admitted Narayan Kamath, a software engineer, on the official Orkut blog, “but starting soon, we will start rolling-out the new look.  To start, we will roll it out to a small group of users randomly selected, and will continue to do so until everyone is on the new site.”

Ionut Alex Chitu has a screenshot of the redesign.  What’s slightly ironic, or at least odd, is that Orkut just won the title of “Youth Icon of 2007” (in a contest sponsored by MTV India and Pepsi).  One might imagine that a youth icon, as designated by those companies, would be an attractive object, no?

But Orkut wasn’t.  Muhammad Saleem writes, “[T]he lack of a well-designed user interface was exactly the reason why i signed up for orkut and gave up on it after 15 minutes of use.”  Saleem then states that the redesign “might bring it out of web 0.5.”

Hmmm.  So the facelift isn’t likely to make Orkut much more popular than it already was.  The social network’s existing users should be pleased with the update, though.