Tuesday, April 12, 2005

Orkut Flaw

Orkut, the premier online social networking software, has a serious flaw. While trying to update my profile photo, I discovered that there was no way to delete the previous profile photo. The only way to change the picture was to upload a new one. Hence, replacing the older one.

So what happens to the old picture? Surely, implementing a delete algorithm is not difficult and requires a few lines of code. Clearly, it is far less expensive than other routines such as uploading a photo or managing communities. So why has orkut left out the delete facility from profile photos section?

I could, ofcourse, only come up with a cynical answer - orkut does not want to miss out on any data which could later be sold. So make sure you people only upload a photo that you know you could share with others. Apparently, if you do upload a non-sharable photo, you are up at a loss when you try to delete it.

Is it a bug or a deliberate move to archive all the data?

1 comment:

Rafay Bin Ali said...

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