Orkut to Launch First OpenSocial Public Release February 27

A little birdie actually told this to me earlier, and I was going to blog about it tomorrow, but Orkut just confirmed it on their new developers blog. Orkut is looking to officially launch OpenSocial to the Public in one week – Wednesday, February 27.

Orkut is looking to release the final version of OpenSocial as Release Candidate on the Orkut developer sandbox this Friday, February 22. It will be released for developers to hammer away at for 3 days, and then will go back to Orkut for final QA and fixups. February 27 it will officially go live for the entire public to start installing Apps!

One feature that will be missing is user to user messaging – this is a very big feature that is perhaps much of the reason Facebook has gotten as large as it has. I am told in the first few weeks after launch that should go live. I anticipate after this launch, the public will get curious about Orkut and you’ll see their membership go up substantially – with a tie-in to Google it is sure to bring many of the current fans of Google into it’s ranks with the news surrounding the launch.

My Social Media development and consulting company that I co-founded, SocialOptimize should have an app released on the 27th. Keep an eye out for the “Know Your Neighbor” app when it launches!