Find your online friends with the new orkut chat roster

If you're anything like me, the recent launch of the built-in chat feature within orkut has made hanging out with friends online much easier and a whole lot more fun. Yet, while it's always great to come across a little green 'available' bubble next to the name of a good friend, finding friends who are available to chat on orkut hasn't been as straightforward as it could have been.

To make it easier to connect with all of your friends who are online, we've decided to launch an orkut chat roster. This new roster shows you all of your contacts who are signed into Google Talk, whether through orkut, Gmail, iGoogle or the Google Talk application. If you want to chat with any of them, all you have to do is click on their names directly within the roster.



No matter where you go on orkut, the chat roster sits neatly on the left side of your orkut page. Want to customize the size and organization of your chat roster? Play with its look and feel by clicking on the 'options' tab. Of course, if you ever get tired of seeing who's signed into chat, you can also minimize the roster (or sign out of chat entirely), with a single click.

We've just begun to roll this feature out to everyone who has chat enabled in orkut, so if you haven't seen a roster yet, please be patient- we'll do our best to get it out to everyone as soon as we can.

Posted by Rodrigo Almeida, Software Engineer.