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!