We covered Vakow earlier and I am glad to see that the service has got stickier with the Orkut integration.
Vakow + Orkut: Post jokes as scraps
For those who don’t know about Vakow, it’s a cool sms forward service where you can add/store/forward jokes to friend’s mobile. Orkut integration has just added an “icing on the cake” to this cool service. Using the “Post as Scrap” feature, you can send jokes to your Orkut friends (as scraps).
All you need to do is:
- Click on “Post as Scrap”
- Enter your orkut credentials (i.e. Google account, in most of the cases)
- Vakow will present you your list of friends, select the ones you want to forward the joke and you are done.
What’s really commendable about this feature is that Vakow can easily piggyback on Orkut’s success and that will eventually lead to viral adoption of the service.
Do try this feature. And do share your comment/feedback on Vakow. What are the features you would like to see in the service?
tags:vakow
Of course, you hear it here first!
Interesting idea … this is surely against the orkut TOS. That’s why you don’t see this feature on more sites.
Mandar
Are you really sure about your statement againse Orkut’s TOS violation?
Will I use this feature? – No, not in this form.
Is this a cool feature – Yes
Will “Janta” use this feature – Hell Yes.
It is a great move, but what (I believe) they are doing is taking your google account credentials, logging you in and posting scrap on your behalf. I wouldn’t trust them on this (I did trust FaceBook and LinkedIn though).
It will be a great feature when half-baked Open Social gets any useful. I will (hopefully) not need to hand over my username and password to vakow or anyone else.
It might be not only against Orkut’s TOS, but Google Accounts too as any Orkut login is a G Account too.
Gaurav
Tons of sites have “invite your Gmail friends” feature – I dont know the exact details, but your credentials will not be stored in any server except Google’s (and you are just calling up their login api). Lets hear from the horse’s mouth (i.e. Vakow’s)
Hey everyone,
Sorry for the delay in replying. I was actually going thru Google Accounts and Orkut’s TOS to figure out if there’s anything written about the activity that we’re doing. I havn’t been able to find any.
Having said that, Orkut/Google may block us whenever they want to.
The way I look at it is that we’ve just launched, let’s see how it goes, if it becomes a popular feature we may try to partner with Orkut and provide this feature with ‘official permission’ of Orkut. Like this company – http://www.slide.com
@Mandar I think, other sites don’t provide this kind of feature because they have stopped believing in text and have moved on to richer things like photos and videos. And for all such rich media Orkut has “captchas”.
And, happen to have a very large collection of user-generated SMS Forwards which are just text.
Hey guys,
Orkut updated it’s robots.txt for friends and profile page which we are ‘respecting’ so now we can’t fetch your friends list from Orkut.
So, now the feature is working only in its manual form.
Got to think of other ways for viral growth
Orkut/Google offer 2 authentication API’s – ClientLogin and AuthSub. The former is meant for desktop applications and the latter for web applications. Many sites (and I believe Vakow too) are using the ClientLogin api to sign in Orkut/Gmail users. Using this api is unsecure for webapps (which is why it was meant only for desktop apps) since the credentials you enter are NOT on the Google/Orkut site but on a page residing on the particular website (e.g. Vakow). The AuthSub API unfortunately is not meant for Single Signon (you cant retrieve the users unique id) and Google has said that they might consider adding this feature. Until then I would consider it unsafe to enter your Google/Orkut credentials on any of these sites.
On the other hand, Facebook/Yahoo offer Single-Signon solutions that are more secure because the user enters their credentials on their sites (Facebook, Yahoo as the case may be). Which is one reason why we at SadakMap.com have stayed away from building an Orkut/Gmail login yet. We do have Facebook and it was a breeze to implement.
Yahoo’s single signon solution (BBAuth) though has been frustrating to work with. We havent got past the first step of registering our application because of some problems on their registration site. There support forum is dismal and havent got any satisfactory resolution yet.
Anyways, cant wait for Google/Orkut to provide SSO through their AuthSub API.
Regards,
Unmesh – Founder, SadakMap.com
SpotMeUrl: http://www.sadakmap.com/spotme/unmesh
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