Orkut on the iPhone— a socialite's dream come true

Are you an iPhone user? Do you wish you could stay in touch with your orkut friends while you're out and about? If so, you'll be happy to know that we've created a fully optimized version of orkut designed especially for use on the iPhone. Now you can stay on top of everything your friends are up to no matter where you are with the same quality of experience that you get from orkut on your computer.

Orkut on the iPhone gives you on-the-go access to:

• Your personalized home page with status and activity updates from your friends, along with all-important birthday reminders
• Your scrapbook where you can both read and write scraps
• Your friend list with one-click call access to anyone whose number is publicly displayed on orkut
  
• Fully functional search for anyone on orkut so that you can add new friends as you meet them
  
• Photos in a rich full-screen format

We've even snapped a photo of orkut on an iPhone for you to check out:




Just enter http://m.orkut.com in your iPhone browser and you can start enjoying the full orkut experience wherever you go.

Posted by Saurav Shah, Software Engineer

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A new look for orkut emails

We are constantly working to make your orkut experience better, and while this includes adding new, useful features on the site, like new search features and support for applications, it also includes improving your experience when you are not logged-in to orkut.com. Recently we released a better orkut experience for your smartphone, and now you'll see snazzier emails from orkut.

We decided it was time to change our emails to give them a look and feel more like orkut.com pages. We started by giving a new look to the emails that are associated with orkut's most popular features: scrap alerts, testimonials, friend requests, photo tagging, crushes and teaser alerts, as well as the emails for social events, which is a brand new feature.

Now, you will be able to feel like you're inside orkut even before you click the links sent in our e-mails.


Posted by Diogo Kropiwiec, Software Engineer

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orkut for S60, now with photo uploads

When we launched the mobile (xhtml) version of orkut back in April on m.orkut.com, we were overwhelmed by its adoption.

However, Google always tries to build our products for a diverse group of users. Many people access orkut from their smartphones, many of which can support more advanced functionality. So today we are launching a new mobile orkut experience that is optimized for Symbian Series 60 (3rd edition) phones. The new orkut works on many popular phones, including Nokia's Nseries (N95, N82, etc.) and Samsung's SGH models. We have added a bunch of new features including photo uploads, picture galleries, click-to-call, and quick friend searches. Best of all, everything is available without the need to download any special client. If you have a Symbian Series 60 3rd edition phone, just visit http://m.orkut.com in your mobile browser, and you are good to go!

So go ahead and upload all those wonderful pictures you took at the beach or at the city's latest dancing spot, and then start calling your orkut friends to plan the next gathering.

Posted by Ankit Gupta, Software Engineer

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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

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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

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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.

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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.

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What are your friends up to? Check out your homepage

Posted by Priya Mandawat, Software Engineer

Ever since we added "updates from my friends" to the orkut homepage, you've been requesting that we add more information to these updates so that you can stay informed on the latest developments from your friends. Over the past several months we've some added new types of updates and ways for you to control what kinds of updates you see. You can see everything from new photos and videos that your friends upload, to testimonials they receive, to changes they make on their profiles.

Now you can tell your friends what you are doing or how you're feeling right this minute by changing your status message on your profile and letting it show up in your friends' homepages.

If you prefer to keep your updates private, we give you the option of not showing your friends your updates. To prevent your updates from appearing on your friends' homepages, go to the Privacy Settings page and select 'hide updates' under the "my updates" section. If you don't want to see updates from your friends, select the "don't show updates from my friends" option under the "updates from my friends" section on your homepage. But if you ask me, with all the cool comments I get on my new photos and the scraps I receive in response to my other updates, I'm not going near these settings!

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orkuteers visit Google Bangalore

Posted by Robin Norvell, orkut Operations Team

A few months ago, we invited our Portuguese orkuteers to visit Google's Belo Horizonte office. But we weren't going to rest until we'd given our orkuteers in India the same chance to meet the orkut team and share their feedback about orkut in person. On June 6, three of our Indian superusers from throughout India met at the Google office in the Garden City (aka Bangalore), where they told us what they loved about orkut, shared suggestions for improvement, and sampled Google cuisine (and chai tea, of course). On hand to talk with them were a group of Googlers from the orkut team including product managers, engineers, operations staff, user experience researchers and HR reps.

Even at the end of a long day, there was still excitement in the air at the Bangalore office. The orkuteers gave first-hand feedback of some soon-to-be-launched features, and they also shared some common user pain points that the team can start working to remedy. The orkut team was happy to have Rakesh, Prashant and Gaurav share their perspectives, and the orkuteers were thrilled to meet the Google guides and engineers. Here's what they had to say:

"It was the most memorable day in my life because it helped me to meet the guides, orkuteers and engineers.”

"The invitation was really surprising for me…That day became the historic landmark for me. I will never ever forget that day that I spent there with Google. Google people are so careful about users and that day they cared a lot of me and my mates. I feel lucky that I'm a superuser. This was the first time for me that when anyone was asking question, I was listening with my full concentration.”

"The best thing about being an orkuteers is to receive the recognition from Google for doing something that I just love, helping people on orkut. The recognition I'm talking about is not just gifts, but to know that Google wants to hear from me about problems and suggestions for orkut and the orkut Help Group."

The orkuteers were happy to serve as reps for many orkut users, and would like to thank all members from INDIA community and OUG community for feedback to help prepare for the orkuteer Day in Bangalore.

We're glad they enjoyed the day, and many thanks to them again for their continued support in serving as wonderful guides in the orkut help group!

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Drag and drop to customize your profile page

Posted by Adam Winer, Software Engineer

Orkut profiles have become a lot more dynamic in the last year. Not only are your photos, videos, and testimonials showcased on your profile, but now users in many parts of the world can also add OpenSocial applications to their profiles. With so many new elements on the profile page, we've received feedback that you'd like to be able to arrange it as you wish.

So, to help you organize all this content and show your visitors the elements you most want them to see, we've rolled out new functionality. Here's a couple of things you can now do:

1. Reorganize your profile page with drag-and-drop: Simply click on any of the applications or showcases (photos, videos, and testimonials) on your profile page and drag them around until they are just as you'd like. The new layout of your profile page will automatically be saved, so your profile visitors will see everything just as you want it.
   
2. Put as many or as few applications on your profile as you want. Until now, you were able to display up to three applications on your profile, and some of you wanted to show more. Now, when you add an application, you can choose whether or not you want it on your profile. Just select or unselect the "Add to my profile" box above the big "Add Application" button. You can change this any time with the "tool" button in the upper-right corner of the application.

So go ahead and rearrange your profile and make it your own...and if that's not enough, why not add a theme as well!?

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