Orkut added to Google products

And finally Orkut! has been added to Google products and now you don't have to remember seperate login/password for Orkut. For those who didn't know, Orkut was not a Google product yet. It was a part time project of a Google Engineer, Orkut Buyukkokten. Although it used resources of the Google Inc. it was no where mentioned on Google product list(not even as beta).
Now Google has finally adopted it and made it a member of Google account and now one may log onto Google account and automatically log on to Orkut and host of other services such as gmail. So far so good!

But what more we can read into it ? How this is going to benefit Google ?
I think I ve written this in this blog before about it but not in this much detail. The major advantage of this for Google is that now it knows which Gmail users are friends to which other Gmail users! It suddenly knows a lot more about it's Gmail users, there prefrences, their sexual orientation, their birthday, how they describe themselves, their religon, political view, fashion habits, hometown and what not!!! Just imagine the kind of data they can process now.

Okay again! so far so good! They know a lot about us...so what ? What is the use of this data for them ? They are not spammers or stalkers or FBI!

Well the biggest use of this data is going to be in their AdSense technology. If you don't know, Adsense is the technology Google uses to earn money. Infact it's almost the only source of income they have today. This Adsense reads our mails, sniffs our searches and other behaviour and comes up with relevant advertisments on the right side of search window, gmail mails etc. And believe me they are making small businesses go ballistic in America and elsewhere. Small retailers and vendors are the one who are benefitted by this the most. As Adsense shows only evry relevant ads on these links, it is made sure that a large number of users that actually follow that link ARE actually interested in these advertisments(products/services). And Google charges peanuts from these retailers (something like $0.05 -$0.5 per click). There have been cases where retailers or businesses have got 50-100 new customers by spending only $100!. So Orkut is now going to further strenthen that Adsense technology as Google now knows much more about us!

What else could come out of this integration?
Well for a lot of us Orkut is very effective social tool. It helps us stay in touch and a lot more than that. Google is building it's homepage services which is supposed to have very personalized items like news, mail snippets, weather details, search history etc. I hope this service will now include Orkut also and a lot of things like scrabook etc will be integrated seamlessly into it.
Just wait and watch.