It has been more than a month since I have started OrkutFeeds. Since then this service received lots of support & appreciation from many fellow bloggers. But what I was missing honestly a review on insideorkut by Darnell Clayton – biggest authority on orkut.

Well the review by Darnell is here. And one step ahead to show his appreciation & support for this service he also donated to Orkutfeeds…

Now on this nice occasion I want to highlight something very important for orkutfeeds users. I was asked one question over and over again… “Whats your plan to monetize orkutfeeds?” or “Whats your business model?” or something like this only…

Everytime my answer was same and simple… First orkutfeeds is not a business to me. I always referred to it as a service. Its my payback to all orkut users for their love and support which helped me decide what to do with my life!

Technically yes, orkutfeeds is bandwidth incentive service and may burns hole in my pocket in future. But I am optimistic about few things…

• First I am planning some major optimization to codes in June. They will bring down bandwidth requirement considerably.
• I hope more generous people like Darnell will come forward to help.
• My professional blog will generate some extra bucks to feed orkutfeeds…
• Orkut will come up with this feature officially one day…

Still question remains why I am not advertising here to make some extra bucks. Although some feed advertisers showed interest in putting ads in feeds generated by orkutfeeds, I am not comfortable with this idea as the content in feeds are not written by me. I feel its evil to advertise on someone else’ content.

Next I also don’t want to clutter homepage of Orkutfeeds. In fact I am trying my levels best to help orkut user get feeds without ever visiting homepage!

Now remains this blog. First this blog have no large readership. Next this is not a commercial blog. So I feel its contradiction to make money from a blog which is about a free service!

Finally orkutfeeds idea is not mine. The original idea was by Vikas and contents are by orkut user. So I feel its evil to make money by just coding for few nights on someone else idea and content!

So bottomline is, orkutfeeds will remain ad-free and if something go wrong in future I will release the codes in open-source so that people with spare bandwidth can host orkutfeeds on their servers!

Also I will try to give more time to OrkutFeeds now on. It has a long to-do list pending here…

Thanks again Darnell for being first donor!

Image Credits - “Thank You For Your Donation” by Shamufilth (via Flickr).