—Google (NSDQ: GOOG) owned Orkut, widely acknowledged as the social network with the largest Indian community, launched applications today. Orkut has been building up to the launch of applications on its blog for a while now, highlighting apps like Reading Social, TypeRacer (I’ve won every game I’ve played so far), viibee, iRead, My Mini Life, Crazy Story Game, Hangout and Photoattack. Orkut had announced the opening up of its API in November. Here’s a video on YouTube giving a tour of apps on Orkut. There are two significant things here: Orkut is introducing apps first in India, before a worldwide rollout, and apps were rolled out shortly before the MySpace launch.

—A number of celebrities have MySpace pages, and now BigAdda, the social networking site from Reliance Entertainment, has roped in Bollywood superstar Amitabh Bachchan to start a blog on the site, at http://bigb.bigadda.com . As per the release, he will respond to comments. So far, the site only has interviews that Bachchan has given. No random post from him yet, and just one comment so far.