Google Orkut Now Lets You Group Your Colleagues, Family and Friends

With Google's well documented failures in the social web department, it's easy to forget that the company does actually own a, somewhat popular, social network, Orkut. While Orkut is relatively unknown in much of the world, it is particularly popular in Brazil and India and the social network is now getting a major revamp.

"Starting today, we will change the core function of orkut so we can share and interact with different groups of friends on the Internet just like we do in real life," Victor Ribeiro, Orkut product management director, wrote.

"[W]e all maintain different groups of friends (or 'social circles'), and the Internet was not able to reflect that. Until now, social networks treated people from different groups like they were all the same: they were all 'friends'," he explained.

What's interesting is that the feature doesn't exactly come out of the blue. The need for separating friends in groups was explored in a research paper by Google which was circulated inside the company but also made it online.

The main idea was that there needs to be a way of creating groups of friends just like in real life. Nobody wants to share the same things with their mother, their boss and their drinking buddies.

Now, with Orkut, you can bundle your friends into groups enabling you to manage your social interactions on the site a lot more easily. The way Google implemented the groups feature is rather flexible.

Users can create groups and assign their friends to any of them. These groups are only visible to the users that created them and they can easily modify the groups and the settings, as well as add and remove people from them.

In essence, the groups act as filtering system. When you post something, selecting a group will ensure that the update or photo will only be visible to the people in that group. But other users have no way of knowing in what groups they are.

Google is also said to be working on a completely new social network, dubbed Google Me, to compete with Facebook, something that Orkut has failed to do. But Orkut could serve as a testing ground for any new feature planned for Google Me and the new groups feature is a perfect example of this.