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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