Update on recent Orkut maintenance

Many of you may have noticed or heard from friends that orkut experienced some downtime. On Monday July 21st we discovered a bug that affected the profiles of a small set of orkut users. Starting at 14:30 PST, our engineering team disabled access to orkut.com while we worked on this issue. We brought orkut.com back up as soon as the bug was fixed, although we temporarily disabled a small number of profiles while we were restoring them. Less than .1% of all orkut users were impacted.

At no time was any user's login information at risk. Additionally, our team has fixed any impacted accounts automatically. As always, you should not click on any links that you receive in your messages folder, scrapbook, or email as we are already taking care of this bug.

At this time, we have notified all impacted users on their orkut homepage (see example below). If you have not received this notification from our team, then your account was not affected. Your safety and security on orkut is the number one priority for our team, so we wanted to be as transparent with you as possible. It's important that we continue to work with our users to provide a safe community for all to enjoy!

Posted by the Orkut Team

Read More

New orkut search filters

You may have noticed that lately it's been easier to find what you're looking for when searching on orkut. For example, when you search for a person, we now show people in your network or country at the top of the results list , and we also suggest other terms if we think you've misspelled something. We're always looking to improve search on okrut, which is why we just launched some new search filters that we hope will further aid your searches. Here's how search filters work:

Say you are trying to find a person you met yesterday, but you can't remember his or her complete name. As always, you can type in what you remember of the person's name and hit search. After that, you can refine your search by applying the filters that appear on the right side of our search page. You might start by restricting the search to the languages you speak or the country you're in. To get even better results, try restricting by gender, age, relationship status, children or sexual preference. The more filters you combine, the more specific results will you get.

If you're searching for a community, you can now refine your results to communities that focus on only one specific category. This may help you find what you're looking for faster.

Posted by Diego Fernandes, Software Engineer

Read More

App Highlight: Joga TV

Posted by Nike

[Since apps recently went live on orkut, we're excited to invite orkut developers to guest blog and tell us about their apps here.]

JogaTV by Nike is a great place to discover and share your favorite soccer videos on the web. Search the world of soccer videos by most viewed (day, week, month, or all-time), top rated, most discussed, most recent, teams, and players. Pick your favorite videos and then show your top 5 to the world on your orkut profile. Easily view and comment on your friends selections. Use JogaTV to showcase your love for the world’s most beautiful game.

Read More

Making orkut more accessible

Posted by Rama Pokkunuri, Software Engineer

Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. We know that for visually impaired users, it can be difficult to navigate through orkut using a mouse to point and click on various links. In order to make orkut more accessible to all users, we recently added accesskeys for some commonly used links on orkut. With accesskeys, you no longer need to click your mouse to visit different pages on orkut. For example, if you are using IE, when you press "alt + s", the focus is moved to the "Scrapbook" link at the top of the page. Pressing "enter" will then take you to your scrapbook page.

Please note that different browsers use different control key combinations for accesskeys. On Netscape Navigator and Mozilla Firefox, "alt + shift + s" should take you directly to your scrapbook (you don't need to press "enter"). Similarly, if you hold down "alt+shift," simply press "h" for home, "p" for profile, "b" for friends, "c" for communities, "l" for logout. Almost all browsers support this feature, so please consult your browser manual to find the right key combination for your browser.

Read More