Rumours are that google would soon integrate its Google Talk instant messaging and VOIP service into Orkut. Apparently, google talk and Orkut development teams are busy putting the finishing touches on the integration. The announcement will likely be made sometime next week.
This would mean orkut members will be able to text message and voice chat with other members of the community if they choose to communicate in that way and not scrap each other. In other words, this means that orkuters would no longer have to keep asking each other in scraps for IM ids to make their conversations private and one to one.
Another tactic my google to promote its conked Gmail service 
. Gmail these days has become highly unreliable. I missed few important mails and not just that but also the sender wasn’t even notified about the undelivered messages! At least yahoo informed me regarding it. Gmail is much slower as compared to yahoo mail beta and most of the time I get the default message that gmail cannot be loaded because of slow connection. And there are no in-build smileys on Gtalk. The editor needs a revamp and include a lot of things like superscript,subscript and various other symbols. When Gmail first came in the interface was highly appreciable but the present yahoo mail beta’s interface is far better with drag & drop feature and flexibility of window size and it also includes RSS feeds. Perhaps the only thing that can now google boast off is the search engine. I must confess that Yahoo and MSN search are weird! (especially MSN) I never use them.
Just search for orkut on MSN (click here) and the first result you get is his profile! There is no orkut.com in the first page and perhaps many pages to come.
But I wonder how will this move affect members. I don’t want to add all those 300+ people in my friends list to gtalk! I am someone who logins to orkut only when someone scraps me. I generally aviod as they call orkutting. And then if i login someone or the other scraps me, “if you are online then why don’t you tell me”. The first thing I do is logout. I am not as social as orkut expects me to be 
Garima Dhiman further goes on to say (and I love this line 
)
Social networks are almost like living legends now, only if some of them could sustain around 10 more years, i would actually be able to tell my kids something like – “oh! OrkuT – son i actually met your father there”.(PS: this is just an example, infact maybe of the worst case scenario
)
I have known few who have actually met on orkut and perhaps will end up together. Orkut is still young and time will only tell how many such online contact will lead to long term relationships.
Amit has more on the integration
