1. Watch what you say: The public nature of the social networking sites is also the most dangerous thing about them. You say (tweet, set a status message, leave a scrap, comment) something and it STAYS there till eternity, for the rest of the world to watch and judge. Being funny might be a good thing to be considered “sociable”, but what if your potential boss fails to see the humor? Extreme case in point: There were at least couple of occasions where guys had to land in jail, because the police didn’t find their tweets funny!

2. Don’t be the Sales Guy: Okay, we know. That most of us join social networking to gain something in return. So, it makes perfect sense to spam others with your affiliate links, right? WRONG! No other feeling is more irritating than the feeling of being at the cross-hair of a spam-attack. Avoid forcing your business to other people. It is considered as spamming if you try to overly promote your business. It’s just like going to a conference and handing out your business card to EVEYONE even before you are introduced. When you don’t do this in real life, then why in the social networking sites?

3. Politics and Religion: Okay, we know – it’s a free Nation (world) and everyone has right to freedom of speech blah blah blah… But the fact remains that people join social networking sites to connect with others and while doing so they prefer to leave their political view and religious beliefs behind. Obviously, they expect the same from you, as well. So stay away from strong political or religious views. Since people can have different views in these areas, it is in your best interest if you remain neutral and professional all the time.

4. Consistency is the Key: Irrespective of whether you are an average Joe, a social networking guru or a huge multi-national trying to leverage social networking to connect with its consumers, being consistent is the key to your social networking success. Social networking can take up a lot of time – agreed! But, if you get bored with it and stop updating your profile (status updates, community updates, pics, tweets, videos etc), it is just a matter of time that your friends/followers/consumers will also get bored of you and will stop following you. Make sure you make a schedule and more importantly — stick to it. Although you don’t want to spend all of your time on social networking sites, you DO want to consistently update every day and there are automated tools to help you do so.

5. Incomplete Profile: Even if you don’t feel like completing your profile page and even if you don’t think that it is important, on the contrary, it is the most important thing for your success in social networking sites. Just because of the fact that I have included this point as the last mistake, don’t assume that it is the least important of all. Your profile is where people will go to find more information about you and your business. This is the place where you should be genuinely talking about your business, and maybe even provide a link to it. If you go around adding value to forums, it is most likely that people will be interested to visit your profile, so make sure it looks impressive. Compare your social networking profile page to the home page of your blog or company website and suddenly you will start seeing more value in it.

Which of these mistakes have you committed in your social networking life? Feel free to add your own mistakes to the list via commenting.

The researchers, led by led by Robin Dunbar, have developed a theory known as “Dunbar’s number“, which claimed that the size of our neocortex – the part of the brain used for conscious thought and language — is too small to handle more than 150 active relationships.

He told the Sunday Times that “The interesting thing is that you can have 1,500 friends but when you actually look at traffic on sites, you see people maintain the same inner circle of around 150 people that we observe in the real world“. “People obviously like the kudos of having hundreds of friends but the reality is that they’re unlikely to be bigger than anyone else’s.”

Anyhow, those looking to catch a glimpse of the work of Professor Robin Ian MacDonald Dunbar, can consult one of his numerous publications, “The evolution of culture: An interdisciplinary view” on Google Books.

Professor Dunbar’s findings will be published towards the end of the year and might finally debunk the myth of Facebookers who claim to have 5000 friends or so and Twitter users with over 34,000 followers. How many friends do you have on Facebook/Twitter?

Talking about the navigation, it’s a gem. The pages load faster than ever. There are applications which make you freak about them. The album in New Orkut is well managed and can be maintained with lesser efforts than its counterpart. With updates from friends on the main page, ability to comment on almost everything, colorful main page makes Orkut feel better, like never before.

Still, there are loopholes. New Orkut is not complete. Still most of us miss our old Orkut! Don’t we? And, why is that? I found out a number of glitches in New Orkut that makes the user feel exhausted, dissapointed and frustrated.

1-    The updates page is really big and a lot of thumbnails in the home page makes Orkut look cute. But, it’s no fun for low bandwidth users. Remember? Indians are known do have slow connections and they constitute 17.51% of the total users of Orkut (Huge huh!).

2-    It’s good to see all your friends on the home page! But, who wanted it? Make it simple. Make it as it was.

3-    With the nuclear Mutual friends list, it gets really tough to identify the REAL mutual friends. The thumbnail is so tiny and unclear in this New Orkut that it leaves you wanting for more!

4-    Finally, I would like to ask all of you, how many times did you get the message “Bad, bad server! No donut for you.” in the older version of Orkut? Once in thousand times. Am I right? As it appears, this New Orkut comes attached with this message. Whenever, whatever, wherever I clicked, I was scared to get this error on my screen. This appears on the page as the frustrating element. This message is more frequent while adding somebody to the friend list. Most of the time the page gets stuck with this message and it takes forever to get rid of it.

Orkut is still in Beta phase and developing day by day. But, issues like these should have been solved before the beta release. Hope, Orkut team is going to take some serious actions in the near future.

For the time being, Happy Orkutting How do you like New Orkut by the way?

Recently Orkut team came up with their new project which was done in a secret manner. They came with the all new Orkut. As disclosed in the latest press release, Orkut new is entirely built on the Google Web Toolkit (GWT) infrastructure. It comes with a bunch of exciting features, user interface enhancements and a refreshing look. There are a lot of features included in this version of Orkut.

Simpler and faster:
As said by the Google-Orkut team this version of Orkut is the fastest, easiest to use social network. Browsing your friend profiles, photos, viewing updates is faster than ever. So you no more need to wait while browsing your friends on Orkut.

Easy Navigation
Now, you can check your mails (Gmail), Check out the maps (Google Maps) from the Orkut interface itself; just like the Google home page. Stay in the Main page and browse any of the Google products by clicking the small header on the top of any page.

State your status!
Wanna tell the world what you’re up to? Try this feature of Orkut. Status stays always at the top of your profile ad also comes in the friends’ updates immediately. I guess, this was already there in the old Orkut. So what’s new? You can comment on your friend’s status message in the ‘friends updates’ section. Cool huh?

It’s all ‘about me’ with more customization
Are you done with the writing part of “about me”? Still not satisfied? Try this All new About me from new Orkut. You can add a YouTube video, a photo or even embedded applications into your “about me”. Cool feature if you consider yourself an extrovert dying to let the world know more about you.

Fast photo uploads and photo sharing
According to Google-Orkut team, now uploading a photo is 3x faster than before. You can select multiple photos, upload them, drag and drop them as you want, rotate them, pick an album cover, add captions, share the album with group of friends with a single click, tagging your photos, inviting your friends to see your photos from outside of Orkut within a fraction of seconds. Phew! So many features to be listed :-S

There are a lot of more features to be explored in this version of Orkut. Excited to experience this version of Orkut?

- You can join Poppy and Shashi on the official community; http://www.orkut.co.in/neworkut and you can have the new ways to join the New Orkut suggested by the owners.

- Do you have a friend who already got into Orkut New? Get an invitation from him/her. The friends who already got into New Orkut can be identified by this icon   (Looks like the icon of Halo, huh! ) that appears next to their names on their profile pages.

So what’re you waiting for? Try these two steps and experience the new world of Orkut.

Happy Orkutting