Google’s Orkut Gets Polls; Answers Next?

The
wisdom of orkut from the Official Google Blog covers how Google’s social
networking site Orkut now allows people to
post polls. No big deal? Perhaps not. But it also makes me wonder if it’s a
first step toward trying to give Orkut an answer search roll for Google.

Yahoo Answers — where a community
provides answers to each other — continues to gain steam. Yahoo
recently added
social networking features to Yahoo Answers, and LinkedIn added
LinkedIn Answers
to its own social networking service
back in January.

Google had its own Google Answers service, of course. That was a fee-based
service using freelance answering staff that was

shuttered at the end of last year. It was hardly a community, as with Yahoo
Answers. So you have to wonder if Google is thinking about trying to push the
community service it does have, Orkut, into the answer search space. Polls could
be a first move in that direction.

More on the new polls feature can be
found here
on Orkut.