A Mashable reader spotted that Google has added a video section to Orkut today, giving users the ability to add videos from YouTube and Google Video straight into their profiles without copying and pasting code - instead, you just enter the URL of the video. You can also change the title and description and explore favorite videos on your friend's profiles. You need to be logged in to view the new section, or you can just check out the screenshots below.
What they haven't done yet is to add a centralized video section - unlike MySpace Video, Bebo's TV section or Xanga Videos, there's no central page where all the community's favorites are aggregated. There's also no ability to rate or comments on clips.
Perhaps they want that activity to take place on originating sites, which is fine, but I still think it would be great to have a "popular videos" page where the most interesting clips posted by the whole community can be found. I'm sure Orkut users would have very different opinions about what's worth watching than the YouTube audience.
[img src="" caption="" credit="" alt=""]
[img src="" caption="" credit="" alt=""]