Friends Map on Orkut

This has been a long awaited feature in Orkut - A map of your friends on Google Maps. This is a nice feature as it helps you in locating friends by browsing the map rather than clicking on each one of your friend's profile and finding out where they live. But what happens if someone has not entered their place or if someone has entered a place that Google Maps API does not understand? Hmm, as expected it screws things up as this feature still needs to be made completely fool-proof and proper exception handling needs to be in place. For example, when it cannot find the place based on what people have entered. One way Orkut could do is to map places to the closest proximity of last login - get the IP address and get the geographical location of the IP and display it on the map. That way it does not need to depend on people entering that information in the profile. But then again it comes with a price of privacy - the stupid privacy stuff that people jump around so much for! Also currently the feature is supported only for US and Europe locations. So your Indian friends are not going to be mapped on the Friends Map! Here is a snapshot of the Orkut Friends Map: