Google recently revamped the interface of its social networking site, Orkut and this is available to only select users and is invitation-based (similar to GMail and Wave).

New Interface

Click for a larger view

The new interface incorporates Facebook’s status updates, adding comments to status updates, friend updates, a revamped version of scrapbook and yes, it uses rich-AJAX content to show you everything in one page.

The first thing that attracts you will be the welcome box, that looks like

Here’s where you can update your status, enable/disable chat, change box color (it’s limited to only 5), view your recent visitors. Unlike the older version that shows only the profile names of recent visitors, this one, shows only the avatar – moving your cursor over the avatar shows you the profile name.

You can jump to any profile right inside your homepage and this is not the same for communities. Friend Suggestions and What’s new are similar to the ones you’ve been used to, in the older version of Orkut.

Scrapbook, Chat and Testimonials have been improvised. You can now add videos, change colors, bold, italicize, underline and add emoticons to scraps and testimonials in just a click. Chat is now embedded with voice and video.

Invitations

If you are looking for an Orkut invitation, scrap me on Orkut making sure you’ve already added me as a friend, as the invitations can only be sent to friends.