Apps on orkut coming soon

Posted by Amar, orkut Product Manager

Back in November, we announced that orkut was open to developers. Developers have been building exciting new social applications over the last few months that will make the orkut experience even better. This is why we're excited to announce that apps will be available to a subset of orkut users starting in a couple weeks, and to all orkut users several weeks after that.

In the meantime, here on the orkut blog, we will be inviting guest posts from developers as a sneak peak into some of the apps developers have built, so stay tuned!

If you're a developer and want to have your app available to orkuteers the last week of February, you can find out more on how to submit your app here. If you need more info on how to build an app, check out http://code.google.com/apis/orkut/.

The latest versions of APIs are available, and developers can build and test their apps at sandbox.orkut.com. We are going to be accepting applications into the directory manually in order to ensure apps are high quality. To get the latest news on the orkut sandbox, check out the new orkut developer blog.

Have an orkut app that you would like featured here? After you've submitted your app to us , send us an email (orkut-app-submissions@google.com) with a description (250 words or less), screenshots, and/or a video walkthrough.

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Managing your friends (online)

Posted by Eduardo Cordeiro, Software Engineer

Do you have a lot of friends on orkut? Do you sometimes want to find all your school friends, send a message to all your co-workers, or check out your best friends' karma?

Friend groups have been on orkut for some time now, but we're now making them more accessible throughout the site to make it easier for you to create new groups or add new friends to them. Here's what's changed: when you add a new friend or accept a friend request, you can now select which group(s) you want to add them to. You can also modify these groups (rename them, remove them or add new ones) either when you add or accept a friend, or on the friend management page. And we've turned friendship levels into groups for you, so that you can send messages to all your best friends, or see all the friends on orkut that you haven't met offline yet.

If you're not sure what groups to create, we've made a few default groups to get you started. This will make it easier to categorize your friends. You can always change the name of these groups if they don't suit your particular need.

We're also planning on a bunch of new features so you can use your groups to make the orkut experience more tuned to your needs. Stay tuned!

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Upload more photos, faster!

Posted by Abhishek Surana, Software Engineer

Back from a vacation? Had a party? Surely you must have a ton of photos to share with your orkut friends. Well, we're happy to tell you that we've made sharing those photos with your orkut friends even easier. We have increased the photo limit, so now you can share up to 1,000 photos, and made the upload experience faster for Internet Explorer users.

If you're on orkut with Internet Explorer, click on the link for "New! Upload multiple photos" on your albums page. It takes you through an instructions page for installing the application needed to upload multiple photos at once.

Once you have completed the installation, simply click "add photos" and select multiple photos at once to upload to your selected album. You can remove the photos selectively if you don't like them, as you can see the smaller images before they are installed. Ready? Just click on "upload photos" to complete the job.

Now there is no need to pick and choose a small set of photos to upload to orkut, because you can simply create an album and upload all photos from your event at once!

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orkut trends: The State of orkuters

Posted by Ellen Spertus, Research Scientist

A question came up in the orkut trends community: What is the distribution of orkut users among the different states in the US? Here's a peek into where US orkuters come from.

All 50 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico are represented. The #1 state is my adopted home (and that of so many other US Googlers), California, with 20% of US orkuters. Next comes the great state of New York (11%), and then two southern states, Florida (8%) and Texas (7%).

In fifth place was Massachusetts, the home of my alma mater, MIT. This state's name had the distinction of being spelled the most incorrect ways by our users. Misspellings including: massachussets, massachussetts, massachusets, massachusettes, massachustes and even massachuster. (I confess to using spell-check to get the right spelling although I resided there for ten years. I guess what they say about engineers and their lack of English skills may be true.)

Rounding out the top ten were New Jersey -- referred to by some as "Joisey" -- at 6%, my home state of Illinois (4%), Georgia (2.5%), Pennsylvania (2.5%) and Virginia (2.4%). Other states making up more than 1% of our US user base were Washington (2.3%), Michigan (2%), Ohio (2%), Connecticut (1.9%), Maryland (1.7%), North Carolina (1.6%), Arizona (1.4%), Minnesota (1.1%), and Colorado (1%). Least represented were the sparsely populated states of North Dakota (.07%), South Dakota (.07%), and Wyoming (.06%).

I was intrigued by the number of US orkuteers residing in "states" which I had never heard of. One such state is Fakelandia (4555 residents) and its presumed capital Fakecity (158). I was disappointed that there were more residents of Hell (367) and Inferno (356) than of Heaven (135). I would enjoy visiting the residents of the magical states of Disney (346) and Hogwarts (247), or the neighbors of the fictional Simpsons in Springfield (175). While I have spent many happy hours observing Sim City, unlike 107 orkut users, I do not reside there.

Until next time, may your state be a happy one!

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Create a Private Community

Posted by Nishant Redkar, Software Engineer

A wise man once said "Privacy is the condition of being left alone, out of public view, and in control of information that is known about you." Here at orkut, we're keeping up with your requests for additional privacy controls. We recently added new features that allow orkuteers to limit viewership of photos, videos, testimonials and scrapbook to friends. Based on your feedback, we've decided to go even further to empower the owners of communities to choose whether to make their community content private or public. The additional privacy control we've added allows you to make your community an enclosed entity so that you can discuss whatever you want within its walls (of course, content must abide by orkut community standards and policies), resting assured that only members can view your discussions, forums, and events.

Have you ever thought of creating a community poll like "Who is the best teacher at your school?", but stopped yourself from doing it because the teachers might actually see it? Or perhaps you wanted to create a community to keep in touch with family, but didn't want to share your family events and posts with the whole orkut community? While communities are a great place to meet new people who share your interests, we understand that the current structure of communities sometimes makes it difficult to have intimate discussions with a select group of people. We hope that the introduction of private communities will fill this need.

So go ahead and create your communities, and use the privacy setting that fits your needs!

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