Orkut founder launches another Social network, is it a threat to Facebook!?

I recently stumbled upon an article on YourStory which talked about the latest social networking platform - 'Hello'. What caught my attention was that it's the fourth social networking platform created by Orkut Büyükkökten, a Turkish software engineer. Yes, Orkut was his 3rd social networking platform and 'Hello network' is his 4th attempt.

Orkut feels that the current social apps are not doing a great job of connecting people and building bonds. This is what he feels -

"All social apps out there promise us friendships, companionship and romance but we’re more divided and more disconnected than ever. We’re not ending up as better people."

Orkut sees Hello.com as a spiritual successor to orkut.com. He wants to create a social network that brings people together where everyone can be authentic and be themselves. He believes that on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram, you don’t make friends. The users are just communicating with people they already know or giving life updates to their friends and people that are following them. Hello.com doesn’t take social graph into context but rather refers to common interests, your location, your reputation, and your personality. That provides a different feed. Orkut says,

In real life as well, common interest is the best way to bring people together. On Hello, we connect people around passions (called personas).

So, this got me pretty curious, and i downloaded the app to see if Orkut's thought process is evident in the app. I used the app for a few days and this is my initial review of the app:

A user can select specific interests which defines his persona. The news feed is curated based on user's interests and preferences. There are a host of communities which a user can join or even start a new community. Users can join any community based on their interests and each community has a chatroom. The chat rooms are pretty chaotic as multiple users can chat simultaneously and there is no coherence or the concept of a thread or post.

The chatrooms remind me of the Yahoo chatrooms in the early 2000's. The news feed also consists of different sections based on the selected interests like fitness, health, music, philosophy etc. There is one cumulative newsfeed and then there are individual theme-based news-feeds. The app tries to experiment with different things like - persona, karma, potentials, achievements, karma etc. The posts are called jots in the app.

Hello.com is trying to gamify a 'Facebook + Pinterest' kind of experience into a single app.

The app also has a prominent chat section where you can connect with anyone and start chatting. This is how the home screen and news feed look like -

The community discovery and chat option looks like this -

My first observation is that there is too much happening on the app. Hello.com is trying to achieve a lot through the app, and it lacks the simplicity of a great app. There are interest-based communities, but i do not see the social bonding or the actual humane community which Orkut aspires to create. There are also less efforts to get more of your friends on-board the platform. The way the app is designed with easy access to approach anyone and easy chat/gift options etc, the app does not look to be very privacy friendly. It can be a breeding ground for pranksters and bullies. The app also has shades of being an online dating app!

Orkut claims that there are over 300k users on the app. And that they are getting good growth from Brazil and India. Hello.com wants to renovate Orkut with the new social network. But, given the current scheme of things and the lack of a clear product strategy, the goal seems to be a distant reality. In my verdict, Hello.com is still a kid on the block and FB doesn't have to fret a single sweat about it, well not at-least yet.

Do share your views on Hello.com, in case you have used or come across the app. Or just download the app and give it a shot.

Credits: With inputs and excerpts from https://yourstory.com/2017/07/techie-tuesdays-orkut-buyukkokten/