Facebook, the $15 billion social network is supposedly tinkering around with an instant messaging service within their platform.  If this isn’t a challenge to Google and AOL, I don’t know what is.  Google’s social network, Orkut has a feature to connect Google Talk within the social network as well.  And now that AOL owns Bebo, it won’t be long until AIM is integrated into that social network as well.

TechCrunch also pointed out that this will not be good for the instant messaging applications built around Facebook such as Social.IM.  Facebook already has a wall, a message system, a poking system, and thousands of applications to probe a reaction from your friends.  Will an instant messaging system make a huge impact?  I doubt it.

Yahoo! Messenger, AOL Instant Messenger, Windows Live Messenger, and Google Talk are the oligopoly players in the messaging space.  Taking these players on is definitely a David and Goliath situation.  But if there’s anything I learned while writing about Web 2.0 companies is not to underestimate the underdog.  Perhaps Facebook has a steady slingshot.

Abhishek Surana, Software Engineer at Orkut announced that Orkut now supports 1,000 photos for uploading into albums.  And they made uploading photos in Internet Explorer easier.  Simply click on “New! Upload multiple photos” on the Photo Albums page.  Then you will need to approve Google to install an ActiveX web application.  Click on Add Photos and select all the photos you want to upload from the Explorer window.  Then click upload and the selected photos automatically go into your selected album.

To log into Orkut, Google user IDs work.

Orkut is named after Google employee and Orkut founder, Orkut Büyükkökten.  Orkut is the most visited web site in Brazil.  Users can also add videos to their profile from Google Video and YouTube.  As of August 2007, Orkut claimed to have 67 million users and roughly 45 million communities.

On Orkut, users had the ability to upload photos in an unorganized fashion.  But now, Orkut officially introduced photo albums.  For those who already had pictures uploaded, they are now placed in a default photo album.  To add photo albums, click on Photos within your Orkut profile:

Write down a title and description, then click on Create:

The crappy part of the whole photo upload feature is that you have to manually select each image, one at a time.  Not fun.  The Facebook photo album upload feature is a lot more streamlined.  I do not know why Orkut would force their users to upload photos in such a manual manner.

After completing the photo uploads, Orkut users can select an album cover.  Given photo albums is a new feature in Orkut, I’m sure that there will be further improvements as more more users add photos and provide feedback.

I just noticed that on my Alexa.com toolbar (owned by Amazon.com), Google’s rank looked a little different.  The web information company’s toolbar was telling me that Google is no longer glazed in bronze.  It had a silver spoon in its mouth.  Oh for crying out loud, If you don’t get my metaphor, what I’m saying is that Google is now ranked #2 and MSN is ranked #3.

Alexa’s Global Top 10:
1.) Yahoo!
2.) Google
3.) MSN
4.) YouTube
5.) Live.com
6.) MySpace
7.) Orkut
8.) Facebook
9.) Wikipedia
10.) Hi5

Looking at the top 10 web sites, Google has the most presence on Alexa.  They are ranked #2 and they own #4 and #7.  Whereas, Microsoft only owns #3 and #5.  Google also has a presence on #6 because they have an exclusive advertising partnership with MySpace.com.  Microsoft counteracted that move by signing an exclusive partnership with #8 website, Facebook.com. It seems like both companies were playing with their domains a little bit over the last year or so.  We saw the rise of Live.com this past year and GMail.com shifted over to the Google.com servers.  Below is a chart comparison from Alexa:

Notice the instant growth of Live.com?  This is perhaps because Hotmail.com shifted over to Live.com servers.  Seeing as how Live.com is constantly growing and MSN.com is slipping a little bit, I’m curious to see what Microsoft will do with MSN to ensure it doesn’t slip more.  And also, what will Yahoo! do to maintain #1.  Over the next couple years, we should see some interesting changes in the Top 10, especially seeing as how it felt like YouTube and Wikipedia came out of nowhere and claimed their current spots.

Google Talk and the Orkut development teams are currently working on integrating features into Orkut that encourage advanced communication between Orkut users. Users would literally be able to “talk” to each other and instant message each other. Although I may stand corrected, I believe that this will be the first social network in which instant messaging will be integrated as well as VOIP.

“We noticed that a lot of people that were using Orkut also had their GTalk client open at the same time,” stated Courtney Hohne, a PR manager at Google. In the free standing Google Talk client, Orkut friends will be able to look at each others’ availability status on their Google Talk buddy lists. Google Talk has already been integrated into GMail and Docs & Spreadsheets.

“In typical Google fashion, we started out building GTalk out as a downloadable application,” stated Mike Jazayeri, a product manager for Google Talk. “With GTalk we want to build a real-time communications infrastructure that enables new user scenarios in other applications.”

Orkut was launched in 2004 and is named after its founder and Turkish Google software engineer, Orkut Büyükkökten.

Article Source: [Light Reading]