Comment on anything you want!

Have you ever wanted to comment when your orkut homepage shows that a friend you haven’t seen in a while just got married? Or maybe when someone you know just got to a new phase in a game you really like as well?

So have we! And we’re now happy to tell you that now you can comment on virtually any update coming from your friends on orkut, such as when a friend joins a new community or changes his relationship status, for example:

We hope that this makes it easier for you to keep in touch with the people you care about. Now go ahead and start commenting!

Posted by Eduardo Thuler, orkut product manager

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New in orkut: Edit your photos with Picnik!

Orkut has an exciting new feature to share with you all: Now you can edit all the photos in your orkut albums with Picnik, the online photo editor. Picnik makes your photos fabulous! It's an award-winning photo editing application that lives online, in your browser, with nothing to download. It's fast, easy and fun.

And now it's right in orkut! Just open any photo in your orkut photo albums and click on the "Edit with Picnik" button above it:

Picnik will load right inside of orkut. You can do basic fixes with easy but powerful editing tools, tweak to your heart's content, then get creative with oodles of effects, fonts, shapes, frames and more:

When you're done turning your photo into your perfect picture, just click the "Save to my album" button in the top right-hand corner to add your new photo right back into the photo album it started in. It's never been easier!

The best part is, this is all happening right in time for the Holidays! Picnik has a whole suite of Holiday tools for cheerful costumes, wintery effects, and all the decorations your photos could ever need to ring in this merriest time of year. So even if you live in the southern hemisphere and you're on your summer vacation enjoying the beach, you can turn your photos into the perfect Winter Wonderland.

Everyone here on both orkut and Picnik teams wishes you all Happy Holidays and Happy Picniking!

Posted by Virginia Roman, Picnik writer and orkut site editor

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Keep your friends organized on the go!

Isn't it great when you don’t have to do work twice? The new feature Groups of Friends in orkut is one way of saving you a little extra effort. Once you group your friends into appropriate groups, such as "family", "college" or "best friends", you can later interact with all these people at once, in a single click. If you haven’t created your groups yet, that’s not a problem! Now it’ll be even easier for you to save new groups when you post a scrap to multiple people.

This is how it happens: when you manually select a bunch of friends to send a single scrap to, a "save as group" button will show up right there:

Save it, giving it any name you want, and that's all: the new group will now be available to you at anytime in the top of your homepage, in case you want to send more messages to these friends later on.

Also, if you choose a group but add or remove some recipients before sending out the group scrap, the "save" button will also be there, in case you want to make these changes to the existing group you’ve chosen or if you want to save these recipients of your scrap as a new group.

Have fun with your groups, and let us know if you have other suggestions.

Posted by Kristian Magnani, software engineer

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Happy Holidays and Happy New Year!

Yep, it’s that time of the year again when everyone takes a break to celebrate the traditional holidays with their family and friends. At Google it’s no different. Despite our constant work to launch new improvements for you every month, we like to celebrate the holidays with all orkut users :)

This is also a great time to look back to 2010 and plan ahead for 2011. It was an incredible year for us with over 30 launches, such as Groups of Friends, private scraps, badges, themes and many more. And speaking of themes, don’t forget to visit our themes gallery and make your orkut profile ready for the new year!

Looking forward to 2011, there are a lot of new things on their way. You may have noticed one of them: if you receive an orkut badge code during the holidays or at any time next year, just type it in the Badges Management window to redeem your exclusive, limited edition badge:

Also try to type “HOH0HO” in the badges management window :)

To see the Badges Management window, click the “add badges” link, right next to your photo in your orkut profile. Every time you get a code, usually with 16 characters, just type it in the badges window above for the new badge to automatically show up in your collection.

So enjoy the holidays, keep an open eye for exclusive badges codes, and get ready for 2011: lots of good stuff is on the way!

Posted by Frederico Quintão, Santa Claus wannabe in the orkut team

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Share your community’s knowledge with the world

As an orkut user, I always considered orkut communities the best place to find the latest information about my favorite games or my football team. Members of these communities share amazing tips, they know exactly who the best players are, and make great points about who should be hired as a coach or player for each team. Even when I’m not looking for sports info, I know that orkut has tons of amazing information hidden in its communities. My friend planned her entire wedding mostly by the great tips and suggestions shared there, and another friend backpacked across Europe based on tips he found in several communities.

At Google we believe that information should be universally accessible and useful. With that in mind, we’re making the information created and shared by users in their communities accessible to the world! Any Internet user will be able to find communities content using search engines like Google.

Starting shortly, people will be able to find your community much easier. If your community isn’t private, anyone can discover the amazing discussions happening inside your community in the search results for related topics that they’re interested in too. That way as well, more members can join if they think the content they find there is useful for them.

If you’re a community owner and would like to restrict access to your community content, don’t worry! If your community is private (content visible by members only), then only the community description page will be available on the web. If your community is public, the description page and its topics will be available, allowing you to reach so many more people because users not on orkut yet will also have the opportunity to learn and discover great new things from your community and its members.

Community owners can disable or re-enable the privacy setting at any time on the settings page. And if you’re one of the members of those communities, there’s no need to worry about your own privacy because orkut makes sure that no name or photo will be displayed for non-orkut users.

So what are you waiting for? Make a cool and informative description for your community and let the whole world enjoy it!

Posted by Bruno Fonseca, software engineer

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