Everyone can chat now!

We almost can't believe it ourselves, but we've finished enabling orkut chat for everyone!

Those of you who have been patiently waiting will be pleased to know that we've made orkut chat even more dynamic by adding these new features:

• Chat pop out: allows you to view individual chats in separate windows

• Group chat: lets you chat with multiple friends at the same time

• Chat list: makes it easy to see which of your friends are online, whether they're logged in via orkut, Gmail, iGoogle, or Google Talk

Want to learn more? Check out this short instructional video:



Don't have access to chat from your orkut profile yet? Take a few seconds and verify your email address with us and you'll be all set.

By the way, we've still got a couple of cards up our sleeves. Do expect to see more exciting features coming to chat soon.

Posted by Rodrigo Almeida, software engineer

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orkut 'promote': a free tool to help you spread the news to all your orkut friends

Almost everyday there's something that I'd like to spread to all of my orkut friends, whether that be a hilarious YouTube video, a new orkut community I just discovered or a quote that happens to fit my mood. That's why I'm so happy to announce the release of a new orkut feature: 'promote'.

orkut promote is a free tool that allows you to create announcements and automatically send them to all of your orkut friends with a single click. Promote makes it easy to show text, your original photos from your orkut photo albums and your original YouTube videos to your orkut friends– just give your promotion a catchy title and a short description and you'll be all set to go.

With this new promote tool, you get:

• the ability to easily create promotions using text, photos from your orkut albums, and your original YouTube videos
• built-in 'spread' and 'trash' features that let you pass on the promotions you like to all of your friends and delete the ones you don't so that they never show up for you again
• the 'my promotions' tool that shows you how many users have viewed, clicked on, or deleted your promotions, as well as how far they've spread
• the ability to stop or delete a promotion that you've created at any time

We've done our best to make promotions not just easy to use, but also easy to find. That's why we've placed them in the upper right corner of your friends' home and profile pages, in the same place where advertisements typically appear.

Excited as we are? Check out this short instructional video to learn more:



If you haven't seen 'promote' yet, it's important to understand that we're currently in the process of rolling it out to all of our users around the world. If you're living in India, we're looking forward to having promote ready for you in the coming months. When it appears, head to the orkut Help Center and let us know what you think.

Hope you like the new feature and looking forward to seeing your promotions spreading through orkut soon!

Posted by the orkut promote team.

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Happy 62nd, India!

As many of you know, today marks the 62nd anniversary of Indian independence, and in honor of the special occasion, we've created a special commemorative doodle that shows up when you log in.

Check it out below:

Excited about the holiday? Share your thoughts at one of the many Independence Day related communities.

Here's to hoping everyone's day is safe, happy, and very independent. ;-)

Posted by Miles Johnson, Marketing Manager.

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