Share the (photographic) wealth! Now you can share your orkut photos with whoever you want

It seems like pretty much everyone knows at least one person who loves photography. The orkut team is no different– Navneet, one of the orkut engineers, is absolutely obsessed with taking pictures. Whenever we leave the office, he immediately whips out his camera and starts snapping photos of everything in sight. (I once caught him taking a close-up picture of my left foot– needless to say, I was not pleased.) All of these photos are of course uploaded to orkut, where he invites his orkut friends to compliment him on his artistic prowess. Like any budding artiste, however, our Navneet is constantly seeking exposure to a wider audience. To help Navneet share his "gift" with the world, and to help all of the rest of us stay connected with our friends who don't have orkut accounts, we're excited to announce a new photo sharing feature on orkut. Now you can share your orkut photos with all of your friends who have email addresses, whether they use orkut or not.

Here's how it works:

When you create an album, go to the "share with" drop down menu and choose "only selected friends". In addition to being able to enter the names of your friends on orkut who you want to share photos with, now you can include the email addresses of all of your friends who aren't on orkut as well.




If you decide that you want to share or stop sharing an album that you've already uploaded, just click on the blue "Share Album" button to add/remove whichever friends you want from your "Currently Shared List."



All of the non-orkut friends that you've included in the list will be emailed a special URL bringing them to your photo album. As this is a limited-access orkut page, your non-orkut friends will not be able to view your profile or any other part of orkut unless they join the site.

Keep in mind that non-orkut friends who receive the link to your orkut photo albums can (and, if your photos are interesting enough, probably will) forward it on to other people who may also want to check your photos out. The only way to ensure absolute privacy over your photos is to restrict your album to specific orkut friends, as we showed you in the last blog post.

So, whether you want to share your graduation glamour shots with all of your friends and relatives (even the ones who've never used orkut), or have photos from the party that you threw last weekend that you'd rather limit to just a few people, photo albums on orkut now give you the ability to choose.

As Navneet can attest to, sharing photos is too much fun to limit just to orkut users. So get out there and start inviting all of your friends, family, and coworkers to join in the experience with you!

Posted by Kuldeep Gharat and Shivaram Venkatraman, Software Engineers

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Photo albums on orkut– the control is in your hands

When I get together with my buddies for a party, we often tend to get a little silly. Whether my friend Vidya starts lip-syncing Beyonce's latest hit or one of the software engineers decides to challenge a product manager to a wrestling match, we always have a great time and end up with tons of pictures. But when I go to upload the photos on orkut, I often find myself in a dilemma. While I'd love to share the photos of the shenanigans that went down at the party with my friends who were there, I don't especially want everyone on my orkut friends list to be able to see them. In order to resolve this issue once and for all, now you can choose specific friends to share each of your different photo albums with.

If you want to customize the privacy settings on a new photo album you're creating, choose the "selected friends" option from the "share with:" drop down menu. Enter the beginnings of the names of your orkut friends, and the system will automatically complete the names for you.

To make sure that your friends know that you've uploaded pictures for them to check out, you can send them a customizable email invitation (look for the checkbox) that links directly to the album. No matter what, your friends will receive an update from you on their home page when you share an album specifically with them.

If you change your mind about who can view any of your existing albums, or think of more friends to add, you can go to any existing album and click on the blue "Share" button. In the box that pops up, you can see who the album is currently shared with and easily grant or take away access.

Now that I have total control over who can see my photos, I'll definitely be posting pictures of a lot more karaoke nights, dance-offs, and impromptu celebrity impersonations soon. You'll have to take my word for it though, because I'm only going to share these photos with my other wild and crazy friends. :-)

As always, we'd love for you to tell us what you think of this feature. Looking forward to to hearing from you!

Posted by Arijit De, Software Engineer

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Fully integrated chat in orkut– that's what I'm talkin' 'bout!

As so many of our friends are constantly on orkut, sending scraps, commenting on photos, and bumping hips on BuddyPoke, we figured it was time to make it easy for you to chat directly with your orkut friends whenever they come online. That's why we are excited to announce a fully integrated version of Google Talk that works seamlessly from within orkut, with no install or separate window required.



I'm sure many of you (especially you social butterflies with hundreds of orkut friends), are concerned about being bombarded with chat requests every time you go online. Not to worry! To get you started, we've come up with a formula that automatically predicts which of your orkut friends you probably want to chat with, and only tells those people that you're signed into Google Talk. Our formula takes a bunch of things into consideration, giving preference to people who you've labeled as 'best friends' or written scraps to recently, and people who have friends in common with you.

We realize that no one knows who you'd like to talk to better than you do, so we've also made it easy for you to add and remove people from your list of orkut chat friends. To make changes to the list, just go to the revamped Google Talk settings page. Don't worry, only you can see your list of chat friends, so there's no need to worry about any hurt feelings when you make changes. :-)

If you already use Google Talk, either on its own or as part of Gmail, then your friends signed into Google Talk in other applications will also be able to chat with you when you come online.



To sum up, the new Google Talk in orkut lets you:

• chat with your orkut friends in real time from directly within orkut
• control which of your orkut friends can chat with you
• chat with your Google Talk and Gmail chat contacts
• visit different orkut pages while keeping your chatboxes open

We hope you have as much fun with this new feature as we've had creating it. We'll be rolling it out to all of our users over the next few weeks, so keep your eyes peeled for a note from us.

In the meantime, check out this video that we've made to show you how chatting on orkut works:



Posted by Scott Kirkwood, Software Engineer

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With the new Google Toolbar, orkut's never more than a click away

If you're anything like me, you probably spend a lot of time on orkut. It seems like no matter what I set out to do online, I always end up remembering a friend that I desperately need to scrap, finding a new set of photos that I absolutely need to check out, or getting an invite to an event on orkut that I simply can't miss. Whatever the reason, I'm usually busted by my coworkers with orkut open in at least two different windows at any given time. Thankfully, using orkut is a pretty important part of my job, so they usually let it slide. ;-)

With orkuteers like myself in mind, the Google Toolbar team has created a new version of Toolbar for Internet Explorer that makes it even easier to access orkut. With this new version, you can quickly and easily search orkut no matter what website you happen to be visiting.

To get started searching orkut from anywhere on the web, just go to the "Search" pull-down menu on the upper left-hand side of your screen and select "orkut". Now anytime you want to search for a term on orkut, you can just type it into the search box on your toolbar and voilà!, you'll go straight to the orkut search results page.



Google Toolbar also lets you add a custom orkut button to your toolbar that gives you one-click access to the orkut sign-in page.

To add an orkut button to your toolbar, just go to the Button Gallery and select 'orkut'.



For those times when I manage to use the Internet for things other than hanging out on orkut (it's a constant battle for me), I've found that Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer and for Firefox has a number of other cool new features worth checking out. Here are a few of my favorite features:

- Add gadgets to your Toolbar for easy access to content from your favorite websites
- Synchronize your settings online so you can use your Toolbar from any computer
- Create multiple profiles in AutoFill to keep your business and personal information separate

To learn about all of the different features that the new version of Toolbar offers, check out the Toolbar website: toolbar.google.com/features.

Have a Google Toolbar story that you want to share? Send the team a quick note, I'm sure they'd love to hear from you.

Hope this makes accessing orkut even easier and more fun!

Posted by Miles Johnson, Marketing Manager.

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A very eventful post

We on the orkut team love talking to our friends online, but there are also plenty of times when we'd really like to hang out with them in person. To make it easier for you to get together with old friends and meet new ones, we've added an events tool to orkut.

To create an event, just click the "events" button on the left side of your home page or profile. After you choose a creative title for your party/meeting/hot-dog eating contest and pick a good time for it to start, you can invite any of your orkut friends. To help ensure that all of your friends know how to find you, the orkut events tool will automatically create a Google Map of whatever location you choose. All you have to do is click "add more details" and type your event's location into the box labeled "address." If you'd like to make your plans a bit more exclusive, there are three privacy settings that you can choose from to restrict who can participate in and even view the event.

Check out the invitation I made for the going-away party I'm throwing on November 29th:



With the new orkut events tool you can easily:

• personalize your event with a creative title, description, and picture
• map your event's location just by typing in the address
• control whether your event will be a public gathering or a private party
• invite all of your orkut friends
  
• add photos from your event to remember it long after it's over
• manage your busy social schedule from anywhere there's an internet connection
  

So get out there and start turning your party plans into reality. Just don't forget to post pictures from your events for your guests to see and comment on!

Posted by Miles Johnson, Marketing Manager.

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