Security Reminder

Posted by Sergio Marti, Software Engineer

This week, the orkut team discovered that a user had exploited a bug in our scrapbook feature. As a result, many of you likely received scraps from friends of yours that they actually didn't send, and friends may have received scraps that appeared to come from you.

The orkut team responded quickly, and worked late into the night to fix the underlying issue and contain the spread of these scraps.

We believe that this action has been effectively stopped and you should no longer receive any more of these unintended messages. We appreciate your understanding in this case and hope that this did not create too much of an inconvenience for you or your fellow orkut friends.

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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!

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We hear you!

Posted by Viviana Agostinho, orkut Operations Team

2007 was a really good year for orkut. So many new features were launched! But where did these new ideas come from? Well, mostly from you. Yes, it was all of you who sent us the enormous amount of suggestions about how to make orkut even better.

For example, one of the top suggestions we've received was regarding the photo album. Of course, 12 photos weren't enough for you to showcase all the photos of your friends, family and travels to your orkut friends. So we worked hard to get enough storage space to bump that number up-- and now you can upload up to 100 photos! Another top suggestion was about privacy. We heard you tell us that you wanted to share your photos and scrapbooks with friends, but perhaps not with everyone on orkut. So we launched privacy settings for both album, scrapbook, videos and testimonials so that you can chose who you want to share your content with.

And how can you continue to change what you see us developing for orkut?

There are two different ways you can submit your suggestions. One is to visit our Suggestions Page, where you can select from some pre-defined suggestions that we hear often. The other one is to visit our Help Group and post any idea you have on the suggestions section. Either way, your voice will be heard.

Thanks for your suggestions, keep them coming and we look forward to continuing to take them into account!

Stay beautiful and happy holidays!

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I'm feeling serendipitous!

Posted by Jude Britto, Software Engineer

There's nothing quite like the feeling you get when you find someone on orkut that you've lost touch with for a while. We've been working on ways to make this a more common occurrence.

One of the nice things about Gmail is that it adds the names of the people you have been in touch with over the years as contacts in your address book. Wouldn't it be nice if you could automatically find those contacts on orkut? We've started rolling out a new feature to do just that. If you use a gmail address to log into orkut, finding your friends is now just a click away. The find friends button on the homepage, friends page or friends list page gets you started on importing contacts. Your gmail address is already filled in, and since you've already logged into orkut, we don't have to ask for your Gmail password once again. We'll show you the contacts who are already on orkut, and let you choose which ones to add as friends. For contacts who aren't on orkut yet, we make it easy to choose the ones you want to invite to orkut. You can even add a personal message to send with the invite. Soon, we'll be adding support to import your contacts from other email accounts.

So go ahead and try it out. You may just find that long lost cousin, or maybe an old flame :)

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Keeping more of your content private

Posted by Zachary John, Business Product Manager

Recently, we wrote about the new functionality that allows you to chose whether to let everyone or just your friends view your testimonials, videos and photos. And now, we're announcing that we've expanded privacy settings so you can now do the same with your scrapbook and feeds. Though some of us feel perfectly comfortable keeping our scraps open to the community, we know some of you are more private and would prefer to keep them among friends. How do we know? We've heard you in the help group and help center, and we've listened! Limiting who can view your scrapbook has been a long requested feature on orkut. To adjust your level of privacy, go to your settings page and click on "privacy". Thanks for the feedback, keep letting us know what you want to see from orkut!

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Keeping orkut Beautiful!

Posted by Keyla Ribeiro, orkut Operations Team

We all love orkut, but no one likes to come accross profiles or communities of questionable content. It's important to keep in mind that orkut is a place for people to communicate freely about all sorts of topics -- but that doesn't mean anything can be posted on the site. Here are some guidelines to remind you what sorts of things will be removed when we become aware of their existence:

• Hate comments about race or ethnic origin, religion, disability, age, veteran status and sexual orientation or gender identity; we also do not tolerate direct threats of violence towards individuals.
• Content with child porn, pedophilia and frontal nudity.
• Profiles and communities that promote or encourage illegal and dangerous activities that could result in physical harm to the person committing the act or those around him/her.
• Defamatory profiles that imitate a real person; we'll remove them if we receive a full and complete report from the person being impersonated.

To file a report on any profile or community you believe may fall into any of the categories listed above, simply visit the profile or community in question and click the “report abuse” link. On profiles, this link will appear once you hover over the "more" link. We are counting on you to help us keep orkut nice and clean.

Stay beautiful!

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Community News

Posted by Eduardo Cordeiro, Software Engineer

Are you a fan of soccer? Heroes? Britney Spears? Formula One? Whatever your passion, you've probably found a community around it on orkut. And when you're not on orkut, chances are you also visit a favorite news site to check for news on that subject too, right? Well, now you can stay up to date on news from within your community, because community owners can now display a news feed on that subject within the community. So while you talk to your fellow members, you can see what's in the news on the same subject, without leaving orkut. When this feature is available for your community you will see a message on its page. Click on the "edit profile" link from that community and you'll see a new feature, called "customized news". Once you click to enable it, you will enter the subject or term you'd like news about.

We're enabling this feature for all communities slowly, and soon even the fans of cotton-swab lifting (the professional series, of course) will be able to talk about the latest developments in that sport from within their communities. Oh, and by the way, if you're a developer, you can bring the same power to your website with the Google AJAX Search API.

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Keeping your content private

Posted by Vlad Patryshev, Software Engineer

Have you desperately wanted to show off photos from a recent romanitc getaway or from friends' really "colorful" party? Or have you wanted to put up videos that feature your family & friends but held back because you didn't want the whole world to see them? Well then, we have just the feature for you! You can now make your photos, videos and testimonials viewable to just your friends. While many of you love orkut for its open nature, we understand that there are some things you'd rather not share with the whole community (and we've heard you say so in our help group). So if you'd prefer to keep your photos, video or testimonials amoung friends, just go to the settings page and click the privacy tab. You can then set the privacy to friends, add personal content to your heart's content and rest assured that no one other than your own friends will be able to see it!

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