Orkut‘s performance is miserable these days. All of the icons and graphics rarely (if ever) show up when going to a new page or refreshing the current one. I get more server errors than I can shake a stick at. Messages show up in my inbox more that once.

I’m greeted daily by several of these friendly errors:


Bad, bad server. No donut for you
 

Unfortunately, the orkut.com server has acted out in an unexpected way. Hopefully, it will return to its helpful self if you try again in a few minutes.

It’s likely that the server will behave this way on occasion during the coming months. We apologize for the inconvenience and for our server’s lack of consideration for others. 
 

I doubt I’m the only one experiencing these issues when using Orkut. The problems have been going on for some time. I wonder if Orkut is so far on the back burner at Google that they’ve given up on making it a successful community. It had such great promise and with the know-how and geek-savvy brain-trust that is google, you might think they would continue building the community.

Sadly however, performance and a comparative lack of features makes it hardly worth logging into anymore. Friendster has continued to add features such as decent forums which are searchable (Google???), blog integration, etc. while Orkut seems stagnant and forgotten.

I wonder where Google thinks this little corner of cyber-space is going…maybe like a hole in a donut, it’s going nowhere.