Happy Holi!

Another year, another wild and crazy Holi celebration, and another set of white clothes that are going to take some serious washing before I can wear them again ;-)

As you may know, Holi, one of the most popular festivals in India, is not known as the Festival of Colors for no reason. All over the country, colors are whizzing through the air as people playfully toss colored powder and liquid at their friends and family (who have conveniently bedecked themselves in white).

This year, not even the orkut homepage was spared. As you can see, the orkut logo has been splattered with color too:

(Hopefully we can get it back to it's familiar purple by the end of the celebration!)

If you'd like to add some color to your orkut profile, try using different themes, including a special 'Happy Holi' theme designed for today:

With all the colors going around, Holi is a photographer's paradise (as long as you manage to keep your camera clean). So if you've got pictures from the day, share the wealth and upload them to orkut. You can also try joining Holi communities to chat with others about their holiday experiences.

Hope your holiday is happy, healthy, and safe!

Posted by Shaon Roy Chowdhury, orkut operations team

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Photo slideshows for everyone

Recently we announced a completely new photo viewing experience on orkut that includes in-line photo browsing, face detection and photo slideshows for Google Chrome and Firefox. Now this feature is also available for Internet Explorer users as well!
Simply click the slideshow icon at the bottom right of the full view of a photo, and a full-screen, automated slideshow of the album will begin:

Also try playing around with some of the keyboard controls (like Home, End, left and right arrows, Spacebar, and Escape), to see what happens.

Enjoy your photos, folks!

Posted by Ariel, orkut operations team

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Happy Independence Day Estonia!

It's Independence Day in Estonia and the celebrations are going on in full force. Morning parades, the presidential reception, festive parties, and of course national flags abound throughout the country.

The orkut team wanted to show our appreciation for our Estonian members and created a special doodle to mark the occasion:

If you're out celebrating today or watching the Winter Games with your Estonian fellows, be sure to share your photos and videos with your orkut friends. If this is your first introduction to Estonian Independence Day, try checking out the Estonia community to learn more about the day's history from other orkut members like yourself.

Hope you have a good one!

Posted by Karl Pae, Google AdWords team

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What's your theme? Orkut shows it off!

We've learned from your lively feedback that you love themes on orkut. To brighten things up, we added 40 colors to the new orkut; now, we're creating a brand new layout design and new set of themes! Ready to try out the new look? Just click the "themes" link beside the color palette on orkut:

You'll find your very own themes gallery here. Click on any theme to preview it, and then choose the one you like best. Whatever your mood or favorite flavor, we think you'll find a theme to match.

And if you crave someone else's theme when you're visiting their profile, just grab it for yourself with the "get this theme" link that appears on the top of the page:

Still not enough themes for you? Just browse the activity updates from your friends, click "preview" and then visit the gallery page to preview that theme. Your friends will also be able to see what cool themes you adopt. And remember: You can change your theme as often as you change your mood.

We hope you'll enjoy the new orkut themes. Or you can still use simple background colors instead -- by selecting a color from the color palette. And if you prefer browsing orkut pages without themes, just use the "Browse with no themes" option from the themes gallery.

Your excellent feedback spurred us to bring back themes. So continue telling us what you think at orkut's help forum or official community. And keep checking your themes gallery for new themes coming up from time to time. Watch for locally flavored themes as we go forward!

Posted by Janani Rajagopal, software engineer

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Happy Carnaval!

The beat of the drums is booming from the streets, tambourines are in hand, and the rhythms of samba, frevo and axé are making the whole country want to dance. It’s Carnaval in Brazil! Get your costume ready, buy some confetti and you'll be all set to lose yourself in one of the world's largest parties.

Celebrations can be found all over Brazil, from parades in small towns to the samba schools and wild street parties of major cities like Rio de Janeiro, Salvador, and Recife. Hoping for your own piece of Carnaval fun? Look no further than the special doodle the orkut team has created for the orkut sign-in page:

If you'd like to keep the Carnaval conversation going, try joining the Brazil for non Brazilians community. There, you might meet people who've already experienced a Carnaval or two on their own and can share their stories with you.

For those of you who'll be out in the streets enjoying the festivities, be sure to upload your photos to orkut so that all of your friends can share in the fun!

Posted by Ariel, orkut operations team

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It's Valentine's Day!

Today is February 14th, a day that millions of people have either been eagerly awaiting or much, much less eagerly expecting for months. Love it or hate it, it's Valentine's Day, a day for couples in countries around the world to break out the romance and show each other just how much they really care.

Flowers will be exchanged, candlelit dinners will be shared, and sweet nothings will be whispered in quite a few ears -- in short, love will most definitely be in the air. Love has also made its way over to orkut, where you can use the Be My Valentine app to share your feelings, or join a community especially created for other romantics excited about the day.

Not feeling quite so sentimental today? Don't worry, you're not alone! Check out this community of people who're single on Valentine's Day and proud of it.

Either with your friends or with your soul mate, we hope you enjoy the day!

Posted by Rodrigo Paiva, orkut operations team

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The Winter Games have arrived on orkut

Even in places where "winter" means occasionally putting on a thin sweater, the Winter Games are attracting an ever larger fanbase. While a few of the 15 sports aren't the most familiar ones (ever heard of Skeleton before?), you can use orkut to learn more and get engaged by joining the Winter Olympics 2010 community.

Use it to support your country and all of your favorite athletes. We promise it'll be warmer than making the trip all the way out to Vancouver, Canada -- where this year's games are being held.

To show our support for all of the athletes who'll be competing and representing their countries, the orkut team created a special doodle:

Hope you enjoy the Games this year!

Posted by Karen Callahan, orkut operations team

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Morph Fun with Friends

Today we're launching a new orkut application in Google Labs called People Hopper that lets you take your profile image and "morph" it into your friend's photo, using publicly available images from other orkut users along the way. No computer graphics tricks are used here, every image along the transition comes from real orkut users.

This new application hops across millions of user images in orkut so that one image is smoothly transformed into another. To do this, People Hopper uses "image matching technology." First, faces are automatically detected in public profile images and normalized in contrast and size. Then, for each image, we find other public profile images that are similar to one another. Finally, when you pick a friend you want to be your end match, we just hop along similar public images, step-by-step, until the connection is made.

It's a fun, new application that also allows you to make new connections. Since the images that show in your Hopper all come from people who've chosen to make their orkut profiles public, you can click through to their profiles to learn more about them and reach out to them.

Curious? Just click to try People Hopper on orkut right now!

We are eager to hear your feedback on how we can make this application more fun and useful. Also, if for any reason you would prefer your profile image not to appear in any Hopper path, you can choose to opt out by visiting our People Hopper homepage. Note that we don't use any face-specific features during this process and no facial recognition technology is involved. It's just simple, automatic image matching to find similar photographs.

Don't forget that a path between the same pair of images is likely to change every few days as new photos are uploaded to orkut, so try it frequently. Have fun matching photos!

Posted by Henry Rowley and Sanjiv Kumar, Google research scientists

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