I was one of the (un?)lucky few to be invited to use the new Orkut and quite frankly its not that good. Google has used a lot of Ajax, tried to make it more facebooky but have failed miserably. The first thing where they fail is the gaudy and bright color scheme. The bright pink and blue color schemes dont match with the uncluttered look at all.
Plus the new Orkut is not even uncluttered, the huge advertisement on the right column has been shifted to the top and adblock no longer kills the whole element so there is a sick huge void in my Orkut window when I use Firefox. The huge ads are the biggest turnoff in the new Orkut.
The menus are less intuitive, took me 2 days to figure out how to use the communities section and get the latest post times from my various communities. Friend updates it seems are no longer optional, despite having them disabled in the old Orkut I am thrown this huge list of status updates from friends which tries to mimic Facebook but is very unfacebook at the same time especially with all the junk HTML Orkut seems to allow.
Orkut went down the day it allowed all the junk HTML and javascript coding. Compared to that facebook has a much better style and restricted media options and thats what makes it cleaner. Hope the Orkut devs are taking notes 🙂