Security Reminder

Posted by Sergio Marti, Software Engineer

This week, the orkut team discovered that a user had exploited a bug in our scrapbook feature. As a result, many of you likely received scraps from friends of yours that they actually didn't send, and friends may have received scraps that appeared to come from you.

The orkut team responded quickly, and worked late into the night to fix the underlying issue and contain the spread of these scraps.

We believe that this action has been effectively stopped and you should no longer receive any more of these unintended messages. We appreciate your understanding in this case and hope that this did not create too much of an inconvenience for you or your fellow orkut friends.

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Planning a holiday party?

Posted by the orkut team

It's that time of the year again-when many of you may be hosting friends and family for a holiday party. While catching up is wonderful, planning a party can be a pain. Here's how orkut can help:

Scraps make easy invitations: Paper is overrated, and who knows street addresses anymore? Rather than printing and sending paper invites, make a colorful invite in Photoshop or Paint and post it in your friends' scrapbooks as an invitation. If you're tech-savvy, you could even make it in HTML.

Put Maps in your scraps: Go to maps.google.com and type in the party address. Once it shows up click on "link to this page" in the top right and paste the URL into your friends' scrapbooks. Then they'll see exactly where they are going, and will even be able to find driving directions and the nearest spot to pick up a bottle of champagne to bring!

Capture the fun on film: Break out your digital camera and take some photos. Now that you can upload up to 100 photos, that should give you plenty of space to document the fun. Since "added photos" show up in your updates from friends, your friends will be able to relive the party through your album. If you have some especially good ones you want to share, you can decorate the photo (as I have done below) or make a slideshow on slide.com and post it in your friends' scrapbooks.

Take some holiday footage: To really see your guests in action, there's no substitute for video. Break out your video camera and capture the singing, dancing and fun. When you're done, upload your videos to YouTube and put them as your Favorite Videos on orkut.

Happy holidays and we'll see you in January!

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We hear you!

Posted by Viviana Agostinho, orkut Operations Team

2007 was a really good year for orkut. So many new features were launched! But where did these new ideas come from? Well, mostly from you. Yes, it was all of you who sent us the enormous amount of suggestions about how to make orkut even better.

For example, one of the top suggestions we've received was regarding the photo album. Of course, 12 photos weren't enough for you to showcase all the photos of your friends, family and travels to your orkut friends. So we worked hard to get enough storage space to bump that number up-- and now you can upload up to 100 photos! Another top suggestion was about privacy. We heard you tell us that you wanted to share your photos and scrapbooks with friends, but perhaps not with everyone on orkut. So we launched privacy settings for both album, scrapbook, videos and testimonials so that you can chose who you want to share your content with.

And how can you continue to change what you see us developing for orkut?

There are two different ways you can submit your suggestions. One is to visit our Suggestions Page, where you can select from some pre-defined suggestions that we hear often. The other one is to visit our Help Group and post any idea you have on the suggestions section. Either way, your voice will be heard.

Thanks for your suggestions, keep them coming and we look forward to continuing to take them into account!

Stay beautiful and happy holidays!

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I'm feeling serendipitous!

Posted by Jude Britto, Software Engineer

There's nothing quite like the feeling you get when you find someone on orkut that you've lost touch with for a while. We've been working on ways to make this a more common occurrence.

One of the nice things about Gmail is that it adds the names of the people you have been in touch with over the years as contacts in your address book. Wouldn't it be nice if you could automatically find those contacts on orkut? We've started rolling out a new feature to do just that. If you use a gmail address to log into orkut, finding your friends is now just a click away. The find friends button on the homepage, friends page or friends list page gets you started on importing contacts. Your gmail address is already filled in, and since you've already logged into orkut, we don't have to ask for your Gmail password once again. We'll show you the contacts who are already on orkut, and let you choose which ones to add as friends. For contacts who aren't on orkut yet, we make it easy to choose the ones you want to invite to orkut. You can even add a personal message to send with the invite. Soon, we'll be adding support to import your contacts from other email accounts.

So go ahead and try it out. You may just find that long lost cousin, or maybe an old flame :)

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Keeping more of your content private

Posted by Zachary John, Business Product Manager

Recently, we wrote about the new functionality that allows you to chose whether to let everyone or just your friends view your testimonials, videos and photos. And now, we're announcing that we've expanded privacy settings so you can now do the same with your scrapbook and feeds. Though some of us feel perfectly comfortable keeping our scraps open to the community, we know some of you are more private and would prefer to keep them among friends. How do we know? We've heard you in the help group and help center, and we've listened! Limiting who can view your scrapbook has been a long requested feature on orkut. To adjust your level of privacy, go to your settings page and click on "privacy". Thanks for the feedback, keep letting us know what you want to see from orkut!

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Keeping orkut Beautiful!

Posted by Keyla Ribeiro, orkut Operations Team

We all love orkut, but no one likes to come accross profiles or communities of questionable content. It's important to keep in mind that orkut is a place for people to communicate freely about all sorts of topics -- but that doesn't mean anything can be posted on the site. Here are some guidelines to remind you what sorts of things will be removed when we become aware of their existence:

• Hate comments about race or ethnic origin, religion, disability, age, veteran status and sexual orientation or gender identity; we also do not tolerate direct threats of violence towards individuals.
• Content with child porn, pedophilia and frontal nudity.
• Profiles and communities that promote or encourage illegal and dangerous activities that could result in physical harm to the person committing the act or those around him/her.
• Defamatory profiles that imitate a real person; we'll remove them if we receive a full and complete report from the person being impersonated.

To file a report on any profile or community you believe may fall into any of the categories listed above, simply visit the profile or community in question and click the “report abuse” link. On profiles, this link will appear once you hover over the "more" link. We are counting on you to help us keep orkut nice and clean.

Stay beautiful!

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Community News

Posted by Eduardo Cordeiro, Software Engineer

Are you a fan of soccer? Heroes? Britney Spears? Formula One? Whatever your passion, you've probably found a community around it on orkut. And when you're not on orkut, chances are you also visit a favorite news site to check for news on that subject too, right? Well, now you can stay up to date on news from within your community, because community owners can now display a news feed on that subject within the community. So while you talk to your fellow members, you can see what's in the news on the same subject, without leaving orkut. When this feature is available for your community you will see a message on its page. Click on the "edit profile" link from that community and you'll see a new feature, called "customized news". Once you click to enable it, you will enter the subject or term you'd like news about.

We're enabling this feature for all communities slowly, and soon even the fans of cotton-swab lifting (the professional series, of course) will be able to talk about the latest developments in that sport from within their communities. Oh, and by the way, if you're a developer, you can bring the same power to your website with the Google AJAX Search API.

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Keeping your content private

Posted by Vlad Patryshev, Software Engineer

Have you desperately wanted to show off photos from a recent romanitc getaway or from friends' really "colorful" party? Or have you wanted to put up videos that feature your family & friends but held back because you didn't want the whole world to see them? Well then, we have just the feature for you! You can now make your photos, videos and testimonials viewable to just your friends. While many of you love orkut for its open nature, we understand that there are some things you'd rather not share with the whole community (and we've heard you say so in our help group). So if you'd prefer to keep your photos, video or testimonials amoung friends, just go to the settings page and click the privacy tab. You can then set the privacy to friends, add personal content to your heart's content and rest assured that no one other than your own friends will be able to see it!

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Scrap notices!

Posted by Scott Kirkwood, Software Engineer

We all love receiving scraps, but constantly checking back to your scrapbook page can be tedious. How many of us have our scrapbook page open and are clicking refresh on it constantly!

With scrap notices you can be on any orkut page and find out that you have received a scrap - that very minute. You could be browsing your friend's photos, and find out "hey! I just got a new scrap." Then you can click on the "Scrapbook" link to reply on the spot. This way you'll be free to explore all of orkut, comforted in the knowledge that when you have received a new scrap, you'll know about it that moment.

We'll be rolling this feature out over the new few days for all users, but If you really prefer clicking the refresh button all day long, you can go to settings to disable to the feature.

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orkut on your homepage!

Posted by Natalie Schwartz, orkut team

Did you know that instead of bookmarking the blog, or going to orkut.com and clicking on blog to see if we have updated the content, you can simply add this blog to your Google homepage? If you're unfamiliar with iGoogle, it is a customizable Google search page that you can add all sorts of gadgets to. In addition to adding any blog, you can select from a variety of games, tools, pictures and more to make your homepage your own. You can pick which gadgets you'd like to add from our Gadget directory. You can also bring your orkut birthdays to your homepage by adding the orkut birthday gadget. Some of my other favorites are the YouTube and Gmail gadgets. You can also select one of 11 themes or designs and color schemes that make your page more colorful. Just click on "Select theme" on your iGoogle page, and pick the one that best suits you. Some of them even change throughout the day based on your location, like the cityscape shown below. You can save your gadgets to the page simply by signing in to iGoogle with your Google account (the same sign-in you use for orkut). So next time you go to google.com, can click on "iGoogle" in the top left hand corner of the screen and see all of your stuff (or go directly to google.com/ig).

Have an idea for a gadget that you'd like on your iGoogle homepage? You can create one! Any developer can use our gadget API. Check it out to see how simple it is to create a gadget and upload and share it with the world.

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More orkut trends

Posted by Ellen Spertus, Research Scientist, and Torsten Nelson, Software Engineer

In our first column, we reported how orkut users rated their beauty by continent. In a poll in the orkut trends community, 69% of you said that you'd like to see the per-country ratings (while 21% said they already know their country has the most beauties). Interestingly, almost all of the comments about beauty were by men commenting on women. We aim to please, so here are the results.

Women from Mexico are most likely (29%) to describe themselves as "beauty contest winners" and the least likely (2%) to describe themselves as "mirror-cracking material". Men from Tonga tend to extremes, with the most (23%) claiming to be pageant winners and an equal number (23%) claiming to be mirror crackers. Uruguayan women are most likely (58%) to consider themselves average, as are 58% of Paraguayan men.

If we assign a numerical weight to each rating (1 for beauty contest winner, 2 for very attractive, etc.), we can get a single "beauty index" for each country's women or men, with lower scores meaning greater (self-rated) beauty, and female Mexicans and male Equatorial Guineans taking the lead. Here are how orkut's leading countries stack up:

country	female beauty index	male beauty index
Brazil	2.95	3.13
United States	2.82	3.15
United Kingdom	3	3.29
Pakistan	3.05	3.25
India	3.23	3.38

The complete data is available here.

Of course, anyone can claim to be beautiful, especially online, so the above rankings may say more about conceit and humility than about looks. As one user wrote, "Orkut can make a lot of money if they put tax on how beautiful people declare themselves to be."

What if you want to judge people's beauty yourself? Just a week after we announced that you can store up to 100 photos in your orkut album, more than 10,000 of you had already gone to the limit. Iranians averaged the fewest photos per person: only 4.1. At the other extreme were Myanmar (12.8) and the island nations of the Cook Islands (12.6), Jamaica (12.7), the Northern Mariana Islands (13.6), and Madagascar (13.8). Of the most popular orkut countries, Indians averaged 6.5 photos each, Pakistanis 6.7, Americans 7.9, Brits 9.3, and Brazilians 9.4, so most of you can increase your albums tenfold! Of course, as Cesar JB expressed, "The concept of beauty varies from one country [to] another". In any case, statistics can give us information but not wisdom, such as that expressed 2500 years ago by Confucius: "Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it."

Until next time, stay beautiful, each in your own wonderful way.

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Thanks from an orkuteer

Posted by Prashant, orkuteer*

*orkuteers are members outside of Google who have shown incredible dedication and been active in our orkut Help Group. Prashant has written his story, and has let us share it with you. Read more.

I'm excited to write this, since I want to thank orkut for making this great social networking site for all of us :-). orkut was new to me when I joined in early 2006. I wasn't really excited to open an account at that time, but finally accepted a friend's request to join. Now I'm so happy that I did.

I think communities are the most interesting thing on orkut. In the early days, I was addicted to creating communities about certain social issues, as well as ones on subjects like education and travel. The great thing about communities is that they bring people from all over the world together. On Jan. 1, 2007, I helped to create the Marathi Yuva community. Marathi is a regional Indian language, and Yuva means youth. The aim of this community was to introduce Marathi youth to one another and to get people together to perform social work in our area. We've had one meeting this year so far, where after knowing each other in the virtual world, we came together in reality. It was so much fun to meet everyone in person. We've really become friends both on orkut and outside as well. I've gained real-life friends from all over Maharashtra. We've got another meeting coming up soon in Mumbai, which will hopefully bring in new members who have new ideas.

Through orkut, I've gained many good and caring friends, and have also stayed close to many school and college friends whom I'd have otherwise lost touch with. orkut brings the opportunity to talk and reminisce about old days, even with someone you haven't seen in 5 years. I feel that orkut is also helping me to grow as a professional through sharing experiences and thoughts in in various communities. It's been a great platform for me to develop myself.

orkut has grown a lot since I first started visiting the site. Lots of great new features have been added recently, which makes it even more fun! My recent favorites are photo and rich-content scraps, the redesigned look, scrapbook privacy, being able to add up to 100 pics to the photo album and orkut's availability in 5 regional Indian languages. I'm always looking forward to what's next.

Since I've been on orkut, helping others has become my passion. In the beginning of June, I happened to visit the orkut Help Group, where you can find help about any orkut query from other members. I suddenly found the perfect platform to help other people, which is my way to give back a little bit in return for all that orkut's given me :-) In addition, I've met friends like Rakesh, Nabeel [FlIrT], the other orkuteers, and of course, our favorite: Robin, a.k.a orkut Guide.

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Now see 10 recent profile visitors!

Posted by Anna Hentzel, Software Engineer

If you're not busy checking scraps, chances are you are checking out who visited your profile lately. After all, aren't you curious who's taking an interest in you, checking out your photos, and keeping up with the things going on in your life? Even if they don't leave you a scrap, you still know they care :)

In fact, increasing the number of recent visitors listed has been a very popular request, and so starting today, you'll see your ten most recent profile visitors instead of five. Of course, if you'd rather no one saw whose profiles you've been visiting, you can go to "settings" and click on the privacy tab to opt out.

We like it when you show an interest in orkut by sending us suggestions, and your friends like it when you show an interest in them. So keep letting us know what we can do to make orkut better, by telling us in the orkut Help Group, and keep letting your friends know you care by visiting their profiles!

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Add your Picasa Web Photos to your Scrapbook!

Posted by Anisha Malhorta, Software Engineer

A couple months ago, we announced that you could add HTML or links to your friends' scrapbooks so that they could enjoy photos, videos or other rich content. We've seen you add photos of your friends, flyers to promote your concerts, video slide shows from slide.com and rockyou.com, animations to celebrate Independence Day and more to each other's scrapbooks. In order to make it simpler to add photos, you can now access all your Picasa Web Albums from the photo picker. Simply go to your friend's scrapbook, click on "add photo" and select the "Picasa Web Album" tab in the photo picker (shown below).

This way if you've got hundreds of photos on Picasa Web (like me!) you can easily have your pick of the best ones by grabbing it right from the album, rather than having to re-upload photos from your computer. Or, if you're on a shared computer where you don't have your photos stored, you can easily access them. If you haven't tried Picasa Web yet, you can use your orkut login and password to sign up for a Picasa account here. In addition to being able to add individual photos directly from Picasa Web Albums to your friends scrapbooks, you can also add slideshows. To do so, go directly to Picasa Web, click on the album you'd like to use and then click "Embed Slideshow" in the left navigation. You'll get a small pop-up containing HTML which you can copy and paste directly into your friend's orkut scrapbook. You can also add your Picasa Web Albums as an orkut feed so all your friends can check out your newest photos!

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Lighting the way for Diwali

Posted by Robin Norvell, orkut Operations Team

Many orkut users (and a number of our engineering and operations staff) are celebrating the festival of Diwali this week. Never one to miss an important occasion, orkut wanted to find a unique way to recognize this national holiday. In India, lots of people pass around sweets and snacks to celebrate.

In keeping with this tradition, here's something new and 'sweet' when you log in: just in time for the annual festival of lights, you'll see a Diwali theme that transforms the site before your eyes! If you're located in India and have signed into orkut in the last day or so, you may have noticed something different about your profile: a small lamp icon next to your email address at the top of the page. If you click on the lamp (also called a diya) or the "Happy Diwali!" message, you'll be rewarded with a fun scene of firecrackers and celebrations set against an outline of some famous Indian landmarks.

Last year, our team posted a Diwali doodle on the login page, but we decided to go a step further this year by creating orkut's very first profile theme. We also thought it would be fun to let you discover this option on your own, instead of automatically changing it for everyone. If for some reason, you'd prefer the usual orkut look, simply click on the lamp or the message again, and ta-da, back to normal. But keep in mind that the theme will only last for a few more days, so enjoy it while you have it.

Who knows, maybe you'll see more themes in the future for special occasions. Until then, happy holidays to you all!

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Keeping your username and password secure

Posted by Filipe Lima, orkut Operations Team

These days many users' accounts can be compromised through social engineering techniques such as phishing schemes or malicious scripts and programs guised as being legitimate, and lose their usernames and passwords. Here is a simple guide to keep your account secure:

• The orkut team will never ask for your username and password, if you receive an email asking for those details don't give them to anyone; it wasn't sent by us.
• Be aware of every link that you open: you might be redirected to a page where you'll be asked to install a really cool feature which is in fact a malicious program that will give out your private information
• If you're logged into orkut, and after clicking on a link, you're prompted to login again, check the URL; if it's not www.orkut.com, don't login! Some links redirect you to phishing pages, where the page is absolutely identical to the real orkut one, but your account information will be sent to the attacker.
• Always logout from orkut when you want to finish your session, and if you are on a public computer, clear you cache and cookies before leaving-this is really important!
• Change you password several times a year, and when you do, use a password that's easy to remember but difficult to guess.
• Don't write your password anywhere!
• Don't share your account with your soulmate. In the unfortunate event that your relationship ends this can cause you a lot of problems.
  

These safety tips are not unique to orkut. You should follow the same advice for email sites, or any other site that requires a username and password.

I hope this friendly reminder will help you maintain your beloved profile in peace :)

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Ask Friends – Share, plan, communicate with friends

Posted by Shivaram Venkataraman, Software Engineer

It was party time the other day when we launched SMS Search in India. We have a team with diverse tastes and opinions; finding a restaurant to satisfy all was an unenviable task that somehow landed on my plate. In a fit of inspiration, I decided to use the new orkut feature we had launched just recently, it was time to test its potential to help me ask questions of friends who knew my tastes and preferences.

I turned on the "ask friends" feature from the "add stuff" page, brought up the feature from my left nav bar and typed in: "Can you suggest a location in Bangalore that has good North Indian food, a themed restaurant and really super dessert options nearby? And in case we change our mind, it would be ideal to have Mexican or South Indian food not too far from this location."

This was a challenging question and I didn't know who among my friends would be able answer it. So I chose the "Ask among friends" option, and decided to let the system route the question to some of my orkut friends. I was hoping that the system would find friends who had answered similar questions or were resident experts on restaurants unknown to me.

I got three useful answers. But the answer that really helped came from my HR colleague and orkut friend who happened to be browsing my orkut profile. I scrapped back a heartfelt thank you.

Then it was time to find out how many of my teammates would actually turn up for the party. So I accessed "ask friends" again and typed in another question: "Got a really promising place for the party. Are you coming? You can also call and let me know on my cell". This time I chose the "Ask individual friends" option because I didn't want all of my orkut friends to know about the party and call me.

Over the next day all of them said yes; there were the usual wisecracks that you have to expect from my team. I was able to see all the answers in one place in the "ask friends" feature, find the phone number of the restaurant (using SMS Search, of course) and make a reservation. We had a fun party. It was cool to use this feature to ask friends questions that got me personalized answers.

Hopefully you'll have fun using this feature too. Let us know how it goes for you here. I hope we'll have enough cause for another small party within our team. Of course, this time I'm going to make sure someone else from the team organizes the party. :)

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orkut opens to developers

Posted by Amar Gandhi, orkut Product Manager

The orkut team continually tries to build new features based on your feedback -- features that help you better express yourself and communicate with friends. But no matter how hard we work, we can't build features fast enough for you. So to bring you as many new features as possible, today we're announcing that third-party developers will be able to build additional social experiences right into orkut. While we will be sure to maintain security, privacy and ease of use, opening up orkut to developers means that soon you will be able to add dynamic new applications that will make your orkut experience all the better.

The applications will use your current connections to help you better communicate with others and do fun new things in orkut. And they will be integrated just like regular orkut features, such as your scrapbook or testimonials. Application pages will look and feel like regular orkut pages, and you will be able to access them from the lefthand navigation bar after you add them. An example of an application might be a tool that lets you rate your favorite music or movies for your friends to see, or one that allows you to draw pictures on a friend's profile page.

You will have to opt-in to any application to use it and give it permission to access your profile. And as always, we will never sell your personal information and we have no intentions of making your contacts publicly available. You will be able to add or delete these applications any time you wish but even if you don't have a certain application, you will still be able to interact with it on your friends' profile pages if they install it. Of course, we are also going to monitor orkut for any inappropriate or malicious applications, and if you ever see one you think is offensive, you will be able to report it to us.

You won't see any changes in orkut immediately, but over the next several weeks developers will be playing in our "sandbox," a separate online site developers can use to test apps. Essentially, we're allowing developers to try out their apps to make sure they work properly before offering them to orkut users. Eventually, you'll be able to select applications you like and add them to your profiles, but this won't happen until later on. We also want to make it clear that once we make applications available, nothing will change in orkut by default -- you'll simply have the option to add your favorite applications to your profile (and delete them if you choose) and interact with friends in entirely new ways.

On a more technical level, orkut will be the first website to use a new web technology called OpenSocial, which allows developers to use web standards (such as HTML and Javascript) to build new social applications in orkut. This means developers can enhance orkut using technologies they are already familiar with, and can run their applications in any other website that supports OpenSocial. We are also working with developers in places where orkut is especially popular, to make sure the applications are engaging to you. To learn more, please watch our YouTube video about this news, or if you are a developer interested in building apps for orkut using OpenSocial, check out our website which is full of resources and developer information. We'll update you here about launch plans and show you screenshots of cool applications created for orkut, so stay tuned.

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A Genius of the Web

Posted by Sanjay Ramakrishnan, Product Marketing Manager

Communication, social interaction, networking – these are concepts and experiences as old as the mountains but something here seems to indicate that the times they are a changing! When orkut was recognized as the MTV Youth Icon of 2007 a couple months ago, it was a great testimonial from the youth of India as to how much the spirit of free expression and exchange really means to them. But if some thought that 'smells like teen spirit,' here comes another testimonial to orkut and this time it's not just the users but a panel of experts who have bestowed on orkut 'The Genius of the Web Award 2007' as the best Social Networking website in India.

Genius of the Web is a series of awards instituted by Web 18 that recognizes industry achievements in the online space. But ask us who the award really goes to and where the kudos really belong and our unchanging refrain will always be – You. No wonder then that the evening of the award ceremony turned doubly special when two orkut users, randomly selected from amongst all you great guys and gals to represent the whole of the orkut community, actually went up on stage to receive the award. Prashant Saxena, an IIT Chennai student who has used orkut to build awareness of his NGO especially flew in from Chennai to be part of the ceremony and flew back post midnight to catch his class the next day! Meera Damji, a young advertising professional from Mumbai who has connected with the fringes of her extended family and over two hundred former classmates and friends through orkut joined Prashant in receiving the award, against a tight deadline at work the next day. That's the spirit of orkut users – all would agree!

Awards like this help in giving us the pulse of the market and enable us to do much more on the product as we go along. Every day, it is heartening to see new Indian users join orkut and with every new member, our resolution and passion to make Orkut the ultimate tool for self-expression and communication only gets stronger.

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Say no to hoax messages!

Posted by Nadine Sequeira, orkut Operations Team

We hate hoax emails! For example: have you received a message that claims Diana, the director of Orkut, has asked you to forward the message to your friends so we don’t shut down your account due to an overload? Or that orkut is going to start charging for accounts unless you appear to be an active user by forwarding the message? Or maybe you have received an email from someone claiming to be Google and asking for money? Do you think it's weird but still send it to all your friends ‘just in case’?

These messages are spam: bulk messages sent from malicious users trying to trick you into doing what they like! And you can rest easy because we don’t shut down random accounts due to overload, and orkut is a free service and will remain so! And of course we would never send you messages and ask you to forward them. A lot of variations of these sorts of messages have been making their rounds on orkut for a long time now, and we'd like to put an end to it. So, if you ever get a message that seems questionable, instead of sending it to your friends list, report it in the orkut Help group or follow these important steps in the help center. Just say no to spam!

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Customize your Communities

Posted by Arijit De, Software Engineer

There is no doubt that the best thing about orkut is the people you meet on it. Communities provide a great medium for people to come together and share ideas using features like forums, polls and events. We realize, however, that keeping tabs on unwanted messages can become a burden, especially if the community is large and popular. To help you more efficiently manage your communities, we've added settings which allow you to remove any sections of the community that you don't need. You can access these settings from the edit profile page of your community. For instance, if you happen to own a large community for the purpose of discussion, you may want to disable events if no one uses it. Or if you own a community around an election, perhaps you wish to have only polls and not bother with a forum or events. If you'd like to keep all of the community features, but not clutter up the front page, you can hide them and just make them visible from the navigation. We'd like to give you all the options we can to help make managing them as easy as possible. And if you don't happen to own a community yet... there's never been a better time to start one ;-)

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100 Photos in your orkut album!

Posted by Natalie Schwartz, Associate Product Marketing Manager

Several weeks ago, we announced that we'd expanded the orkut album size to 25 pictures. And last week, we quietly launched double the space, and now you can have up to 100 photos in your orkut album! Not many of you have caught on to this yet, so we thought we'd let you know here. For now, that's it, twice as much space for you to share more pics of your family, friends, travels, or whatever else you like! And, more photos makes browsing orkut even more fun. If you love taking photos like me, though, 100 covers about the past month's worth, so we'll continue to add photo space to accommodate even the extreme photo buff. Here are some of the latest photos I've uploaded: a church in Moscow, friends in San Francisco, family in Italy and more...Happy uploading!

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Getting too many emails from orkut?

Posted by Eduardo Thuler, Product Manager

I am. Though I'm happy to receive emails when I get a new scrap or someone is requesting friendship, lately it seems every orkut friend is sending emails to "all friends" -- which turns into a whole lotta email! So we've made some changes which will hopefully decrease the unwanted messages and help you direct email just to the friends you want. Here's a summary of what's new.

1. Until now, you've gotten a message whenever someone you invited as a friend has accepted your request. Now the default for this notification is off. If you'd like to change it, go to settings, then the notification settings tab and check the box next to "new friend approvals."
   
2. You receive a message when you're invited to join a community. If you're getting a lot of these, we figured you might like to turn it off. To do so go to the notification settings tab and and uncheck the boxes next to "community invite notifications."
   
3. To prevent unwanted spam, you can no longer send messages to ALL your orkut friends at once. Now that we improved our feature to group friends, we thought that you can start using them to address only those who you know will want to receive your message.
4. Messages to communities will only exist for moderated communities. Many of us join these because we want to associate the name and picture of the community and have it on our profile, but we don't want to participate actively. This is common, and we call these "badge communities." Strangely, sometimes people think it's a good idea to email ALL members of these (often huge and unmoderated) badge communities, which translates into a whole lot of spammy email.
   

We hope you think these are good first steps to lightening your orkut email load. We'll continue to work on more solutions until you can pick exactly what kind of notifications you'd like to receive -- and with luck, that shouldn't be too far off!

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Scrap in Hindi

Posted by Balaji Gopalan, Software Engineer and Prasenjit Phukan, Product Manager

Hinglish, the usage of both Hindi and English words in the same sentence, is an extremely popular form of communication in India - so much so that the venerable Oxford English dictionary now recognizes this as an official English word! And orkut's popularity in India means that a lot of scraps between friends are written this way.

Wouldn't it be fun if your Hinglish scraps automatically showed up in the native script, Devanāgarī ? Now we provide you with an easy way to do exactly that! Just edit your profile and add Hindi to the list of languages that you speak. Now visit any of your friend's scrapbook or just hit reply to your friend's scrap on your scrapbook and you will see an option to "type in Hindi" above the scrap compose area. Check that option (or just hit ctrl+g), and start typing your Hindi words in English as you normally do. And lo and behold, the words will get converted to Hindi script as you type! Don't like the transliteration we propose? Click on the Hindi word and see a list of alternatives that you can select from.

Learn more about this feature here, give it a whirl, discuss it, and spread the word. Happy scrapping!

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Inviting your friends, made simple

Posted by Ritika Sanghi, Software Engineer

When was the last time you invited a non-orkutter to join your network? Can't seem to remember? Well, for those of you whose friends are not all on orkut right now, we've stepped up our invite process making it easier for you to quickly grow your network. After all, the more people you invite, the more orkut friends you have -- and the more scraps you'll get (and who doesn't want more scraps?)

You can now invite your friends from the homepage, friends page, and friends list page. So while you're browsing through all your friends ON orkut, you can quickly invite other friends who are not there yet. Once you enter the email address of the friend you want to invite, we will check to make sure that your friend is not already on orkut, nor has already received a request from you. If you have a bunch of friends you'd like to invite at once, you can click on the "more" link which lets you enter a personal message to your friends.

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Numbers matter

Posted by Leonardo Mesquita, Software Engineer

If you have a big community (with more than a thousand members), you may have had a surprise last weekend as you saw a sudden drop in the number of members. Don't panic! It's not people leaving your community; it's just orkut learning to count.

Last weekend our engineering team did a bit of a "cleanup". We heard from those of you who are community members that the number of members listed in your community didn't match the number of people that you know are actually members. As more of you mentioned this in the Help Center and Group, we decided to look into it, and we fixed the problem. Now the number listed should match the actual number of members in your member list. As a result, some large communities saw a drop of 100 members.

This was just an initial adjustment. Now we're working to keep this and other counters correct all of the time. Community members, let us know if you have questions.

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A Proper Goodbye for the login page faces!

Posted by Natalie Schwartz, Associate Product Marketing Manager

As the new look of the site was rolling out several weeks ago, we were paying especially close attention to the feedback you provided via the help center and help group. There were some minimal bugs, as to be expected with a launch of this size, but for the most part, the feedback on the redesign was pretty minimal. Instead, we were surprised to find that a lot of you had more comments about the new login page. We got a lot of questions like "where did the faces go?" and "when are they coming back?" Apologies for the delayed reponse on this one, but thought I'd let you know that those login faces have been retired (at least for the time being). Why? We work every day to keep the site up and running and to improve the experience that you have on orkut. This includes launching new features like Updates from my friends and feeds and adding new languages like Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Tamil and Telugu, as well as some less glamorous tasks like keeping the "no donut for you" messages to a minimum. We believe that a faster site is a better site, and we understand that there is nothing more frustrating than waiting for pages to load! And though beautiful, the orkut faces that greeted you on the homepage were slowing down your experience. So while you may miss these smiling faces, you'll get to your homepage to check out your friends smiling faces faster. And as much as we liked showing you our pictures every day on the homepage, we know you care about your pictures a lot more ;)

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Latest Update from your orkut Friends

Posted by Viviana Agostinho, orkut Operations Team

In the last week or so, you've probably noticed one major change on your orkut homepage: there is now a box displaying updates from your friends. With this feature you can take a peek at what your friends are doing on orkut. Has someone uploaded a new photo? Added a video? Changed their favorite movies? You can easily see in the "Updates from my friends," list. As always, we've received a lot of feedback on this feature, and we're psyched that most of you are finding it a helpful way to stay up on the latest from your orkut friends.

However, we did get feedback from some of you that your friend updates were preventing you from seeing the birthday list, which was pushed lower on the page. So we've put the birthday list back on top, so you won't miss the party. Some of the traditionalists among you have told us that this box is cluttering up your homepage. Personally, we welcome this friend-update clutter, but if you'd rather not have it there, you can now go to "settings" and uncheck the box next to "updates from my friends" to remove it from your homepage. If still want to check out your friends updates (just not see them every time you log in), you can click on the new "Updates" link in the left navigation under your profile picture.

These improvements could not be possible without your awesome and prompt feedback. So keep it coming: join the help group and share your suggestions to make orkut a better place!

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orkut trends

Posted by Ellen Spertus, Research Scientist, and Torsten Nelson, Software Engineer

Greetings! We're launching a new column to share some of the fascinating trends that we've discovered about orkut users through looking at the aggregate trends of our user base.

Our unique worldwide user base lets us investigate questions that have been debated for millennia:

1. Do gentlemen prefer blondes?
2. Are Latin Americans the world's friendliest people?
3. Do women talk more than men?
4. Is it true that men overestimate their attractiveness and women underestimate theirs?
5. Are beautiful people more popular?

Here's a sample of what you'll find in our monthly post:

Do you remember that moment of honest self-assessment when you had to rate your own attractiveness in the profile? After all, who among us believes they could be considered a "beauty contest winner"? Six percent of orkut users, that's who! Take a look:

1. Africa (14%)
2. Caribbean (13%)
3. North America, Central America, and Oceania (Australia, New Zealand, and surrounding islands) (12%)
4. Europe (10%)
5. Middle East (9%)
6. South America (6%)
7. Asia (3.5%)

Fully two-thirds of Orkut users who rated themselves said they were more attractive than average (giving a new meaning to average). Asians were most likely (32%) to consider themselves average looking. Oceania residents were most likely to rate themselves as "mirror-cracking material" (14%), and South Americans the least likely (4%).

Data-heads can find the complete results, broken down by sex (as so many of us are), here.

You can suggest questions you'd like us to answer and vote in polls by putting on your helmet and visiting orkut trends. And remember, these trends and stats are compiled using aggregate data, not individual or personal data, so your secrets are safe with us.

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Add more photos to orkut!

Posted by Zachary John, Business Product Manager

Too many photos and never know which ones to choose? Bring your craziest, hottest, funniest photos onto orkut for your friends to see and enjoy. Having a great photo experience is an important part of sharing and connecting with friends, so the orkut team plans to continue to innovate our photo experience until it's the one place that you would go to upload your photos. This week, orkut will double the number of available photos for you to upload, and continue to grow the number of photos over the coming weeks. You already enjoy having all your friends on orkut, why not start bringing all those photos too? Additionally, we're working on features that will make your photos more social and easier to share.

Stop reading and get started! I have already started picking out mine: New friends in Rio, my favorite taxi driver in SF, dancing in Barra, sunset in Salvado, going out with my flatmates and relaxing in California

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Why I'm an Orkuteer

Posted by Alexandre Luis Vignado, orkuteer*

*orkuteers are orkut members (outside of Google) who have shown incredible dedication and helpfulness in our orkut Help Group. Alexandre has provided us with his story and permission to share it with you here. Here's more - about the Help Group and orkuteers.

I've been an orkut user since the early beginning and what has most impressed me is the ability to reconnect with old friends whom I hadn't met for ages. Recently, I found Thainá, my high school platonic love. Six years ago, I had to move from our city and we lost contact. However, recently, we found each other on orkut and started talking again.

Without orkut, it would have been impossible to contact her or meet up, which we did last month, in the same town where we used to live. Since then, we've found that we had many common interests that we didn't notice when we used to live in the same town. Now we have a much stronger connection because of orkut.

That's why I love orkut, and I'm always willing to help other users in the Help Group: so more and more people can have a similar experience, which is extremely important to me, and is changing my life.

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Searching for better search

Posted by Eduardo Thuler, orkut Product Manager

Though I've discovered dozens of people on orkut, searching for them has never been easy. Trouble is, there are so many people in orkut that you'll always find several people with the same name. It's usually easier to find people in friend's lists than actually searching for them. Well, we just can't accept that search wouldn't also be a good way to find someone, so we're working on a bunch of improvements.

For example, you'll now see that when you search for a name, we'll show your friends (and friends of friends) as the first results. This will make search an alternative quick way of finding a familiar profile. Currently we're working on a change, so that your search results show people who have interests similar to yours -- so keeping your information updated, will improve the search results you get. So stay tuned for that in the coming months. We'll let you know as even more improvements go live.

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With a little help from your friends

Posted by Robin Norvell, orkut Operations Team and orkut Guide

Got a question about a feature? Need a refresher on how to manage a community? Our beloved orkut is a work in progress, but we’re always working to improve it for you – and with you. So we’d like to introduce you to a place you can go for your orkut-related questions and discussions.

The orkut Help Group is a forum where the knowledgeable and the curious meet to discuss orkut. You can post about your favorite features, tell us your suggestions, and find out what others are saying. From complex questions to new features to bug fixes, anyone can post a question or response on an innumerable array of topics. Think of it as one big orkut community: It’s a one-stop shop for you to visit and share your comments about orkut with everyone.

An especially nice thing about the help group is that you can get an answer in minutes or hours by anyone in the know, instead of having to wait in the huge queue of email messages our team sifts through each day. You'd be surprised at how helpful you all are to each other. In fact, we've got a group of volunteer helpers who have proved to be both expert orkut users and super-helpful question-answerers called"orkuteers." These folks are on hand to take almost any question you could have. In addition to learning from and sharing with others, you'll also see friendly orkut Guides (look for the cool Guide logo on our posts). Guides are Google employees who pop in to monitor the action, answer questions, tell you new features, and follow up on problems and bug reports.

Any time you need help, or if you just want to be heard, feel free to stop by. We’ve got you covered in both English and Portuguese. And if you think orkut’s perfect as it is, come let everyone know why!

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What's new with your orkut friends?

Posted by Priya Mandawat, Software Engineer

If you're at all like me, you constantly check your orkut friends' profiles to check out their pics from last weekend, see if they've found any funny YouTube videos lately, updated their relationship status, or changed any other profile info. If you have lots of orkut friends, this can get a little tiresome, so we thought: let's put it all in one place. Starting today you may see a "Updates from your friends" box on the homepage where you'll get real-time updates when your friend Divya has a new address, when Priya has uploaded a new favorite YouTube video, or Amar has posted his new photos. Any changes you make will show up on your friends' homepages as well, so they can be the first to wish you best of luck at your new job, or or send you a scrap about the photo from your latest vacation.

Of course, there are some things on your profile we know you want to keep private (e.g., not letting your boyfriend know about that new guy you just friended), so we've added an easy opt-out button on the settings page.

We're rolling this feature out over the next couple days, so if you don't see it yet, you will soon!

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orkut in Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Tamil and Telugu!

Posted by Patrick Barry, Software Engineer

In our quest to make orkut universally accessible, we're now available in 5 new languages: Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Tamil, and Telugu. Indians have always been a vibrant part of the orkut community, and we continue to see more Indians joining orkut every day. It's our goal to make orkut the ultimate tool for self-expression and communication, and we know that if we're not translated into your native language, this becomes harder. So we worked closely with Googlers in our Indian offices to help develop the initial release of these languages. Since there are many different nuances to these languages, we want to hear your feedback. To help us improve the translation or tell us what language you'd like to see orkut in, you can visit our community on orkut: Indian Language Translations. We chose these languages initially because together they cover 80% of India. We do recognize India has more than 400 different spoken languages, but think these 5 are a good start, and we hope that introducing orkut in these regional tongues brings us closer to many more of you to bridge the gap between language and technology. Viewing the orkut site in Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Tamil or Telugu (or any one of our other 12 languages) is easy.

1. Click the settings button under your profile photo (or click the blue settings link at the top of any page).
2. On the general tab, choose your preferred display language from the drop-down menu at the top of the page.
3. Click save changes.

If you are having trouble reading languages on the "Settings" page, it is likely that your browser scripts have not been updated. For Internet Explorer, proceed to "Tools" and then "Windows Update". Here you should accept the Windows XP Service Pack 2 update. All languages are included in this update.

We hope this will help many more people enjoy orkut in their own language every day.

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Redesign Preview: New Friends

Posted by Priya Mandawat, Software Engineer

On orkut, it's all about how cool your friends are, or how many you have. (Hey, it's a social network, what do you expect?) So we've made some improvements to the way you view your friends. To start, we've taken advantage of the space in the friends box so now 9 rather than 8 of your friends are displayed on your homepage and profile page. We also keep the basic links to your friends' content right under their profile picture as you browse through their different pages. For example, if you are browsing Amar's favorite videos, you will have easy access to his testimonials, profile, scrapbook, album and feeds from right under his picture on the left hand side of the page. If you like his videos so much you want to add them to your bookmarks, click on "more" under his photo to find more actions including sending a message or a teaser, adding to bookmarks, crushlist or hotlist and ignoring or reporting abuse.

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Redesign Preview: It's the little things...

Posted by Daniela Mota, Software Engineer

Last week, we started rolling out the redesign to just a fraction of our users. If you don't have it yet, remember you will have it over the next week. In the meantime, we wanted to tell you a little bit more about it. Though the overall change is in the layout we told you about previously, it's the little things that will change the way you use the site. We know you love orkut's simplicity, so we've tried to make things even more simple by re-organizing the headers and footers. After talking to a lot of you, we learned that the most important pages are your homepage, scrapbook, friends and communities. So we've given these pages the most prominent spots in the header. In the footer we've added a link to the help center and "what's new," which links to this blog.

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Redesign Preview: True Blue Simplicity

Eduardo Cordeiro, Software Engineer

When you think Google, you picture primary colors; when you think orkut, you see blue. And though we're updating the look, we're staying true to blue. We've added some rounded corners and new icons that make orkut look a little more sleek and modern. Check out a screen shot of the new homepage.

We're rolling it out to groups of users at a time over the next week.

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Coming Soon: A New Look!

Posted by Narayan Kamath, Software Engineer

Remember the first time that you logged into orkut? Maybe you received a coveted invitation from a friend, heard about it in a blog, or stumbled upon it when searching for a social network on google.com. But no matter when your first login was, whether yesterday or 3 years ago, you were greeted by the simple blue site with a friendly purple logo that remains the same today. Looking back, our site has grown up a lot. We've added features like photo and rich content scraps, favorite videos and feeds to make it easier to communicate with your friends and share content. We've also translated the site into 12 languages so you can add orkut friends from all over the globe. Since our network has grown, we've had thousands of suggestions through our Help Group, Help Center, focus groups, and of course from our orkut friends. The one comment we always hear is how orkut's simplicity keeps long-time users coming back and new people signing up. So as we work away planning improvements to the site, we always keep this in mind.

Today we're announcing our latest improvement to the site: an updated look! Just as you change your profile picture to keep with the times, we're updating the look of orkut. The change isn't live yet, but starting soon, we will start rolling-out the new look. To start, we will roll it out to a small group of users randomly selected, and will continue to do so until everyone is on the new site. We'll tell you a little more each day, so come back to the blog to get a few sneak peeks.

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