(By Preethi J & Nikhil Pahwa) Google owned Orkut, believed to be the largest social network in India in terms of userbase, announced the Orkut Zeitgeist last week - a report on the popular communities, usage and trends as witnessed by Orkut's engineers over the period of a month. The report is similar to Google's search Zeitgeist (2008s is here) but has been performed for the first time for Orkut, for India. [caption id="attachment_7958" align="alignright" width="165" caption="Rahul Kulkarni"][/caption] In this three part interview series, MediaNama spoke to Google India's Rahul Kulkarni (Product Manager) and Parminder Singh (Business Head) about the Orkut Zeitgeist, usage trends, applications, branding, ID theft, advertising and mobile and lots more. How will Orkut Zeitgeist help you? What was the metholodogy you adopted for the Zeitgeist? Kulkarni: It will help us learn what people are looking for, which will in turn help us tweak Orkut's features. The team at Orkut observed the volume of traffic at various communities to arrive at the ten most popular communities. The number of members is not necessarily an indication of activity - take for example Muktapeet, a citizen journalism community launched by Sakaal Times in 2006. Though it has only 8500 members primarily from Pune, the community is one of the most active ones. We looked at views, posts created and cities using IP address information. We are able to access IP information only for a limited time, so we kept the study to an average of 7 days, and repeated…
