In December last year, I posted a little walkthrough to help Orkut users get access to the Orkut sandbox and test out new Orkut applications. The good news is that Orkut Apps are now officially live on the scene and you don't need any long and weird tricks to get access to Orkut Apps!

The official Orkut Blog has started posting reviews of Orkut apps and is welcoming new developers to write a post about the Orkut applications they have made. The good thing for developers is that Orkut applications are based on the OpenSocial set of APIs so these applications can be made to work on other OpenSocial platforms too.

Orkut is slowly rolling out the changes across all Orkut profiles so soon you will be able to see the My Apps page on your Orkut profile. Orkut Apps have been enabled for users from Estonia so if you are so desperate to get your hands on Orkut Apps, all you need to do is edit your profile and change your country to Estonia.

The applications I have tried so far are cool and interactive but are in no way comparable to the applications provided to the Facebook users. Plus I think Facebook has got a design that is much more capable of handling widgets and applications than Orkut. However its still a cool move by Google.

I am myself working on OrkutSense -- an Orkut application that will allow users to add Google Adsense to their profile and make money