As we started the new year, we took some time to look back on the year for orkut. Sometimes we get so caught up looking forward to all the new features we want to launch, we forget to look back at what we have accomplished. If you've been on orkut since January, you may remember when you first saw these features. Or if you've joined more recently you may never have known the site without these favorites. So here are the highlights for this year by month - turns out orkut has come a long way!
In January, we launched our first mobile feature on orkut with orkut SMS integration with Claro, the Brazilian mobile carrier. Since then we have partnered with other mobile providers, and you can now send and receive scraps and find your friends' contact information if you have phone service with Amazônia Celular, Brasil Telecom, Claro, or Telemig Celular. If you still haven't signed up it's not too late to receive those new years scraps on your cell phone: just go to settings and click on the mobile tab.
February brought videos to orkut when we launched integration with Google Video and YouTube. People began copying and pasting URLs of their favorite videos onto the favorite videos page of their profiles. This has been one of the most popular feature launches ever. Since February you have added over 300 million videos to your profiles!
Orkut Buyukkokten, the creator of orkut.com, visited Brazil for the first time in March and spent three weeks touring the country, giving tech talks to hundreds of University Students, conducting focus groups and interviewing with the press. If you missed the visit you can check out the community and the photo album.
Community Polls were enabled in April. Since then people have been voting on topics from the best restaurants in their cities to the most important politician of their towns.
May brought feed integration, allowing you to bring in content from your favorite blogs, Picasa Web Albums or any other source that supports feeds. Still haven't added a feed? Why not add this blog so you always know the latest. Go to add stuff in the left navigation and add the URL.
You wouldn't be reading this if we hadn't launched this blog in June! In case you are bilingual, check out the blog in Portuguese as well.
We were honored to receive the award for "Best Social Networking Site!" from India PC World in July.
The biggest milestone for orkut, perhaps since the launch of the site, happened in August when we launched the visual redesign. This included a slight change to the colors, rounded corners, new icons and an easier-to-use navigation. While giving the site a facelift we also maintained the familiarity and simplicity you've enjoyed for years. Can you even remember the old orkut?
We revamped the site again in September to show updates from your friends right on your homepage. To show or hide your own updates go to the settings page.
In October, we went from allowing you to upload only 12 photos to your album to allowing 100 photos in your album. If you still haven't filled up your album, why not add your latest holiday photos?
This November, Google made the announcement that orkut would be opening up to developers through OpenSocial. If you're a software developer you can test out the platform by joining our Sandbox. We look forward to seeing what applications you're developing for orkut when we launch the platform to consumers next year.
As the year winded down in December, we launched new privacy features that allow you more control over who sees your photos, videos, testimonials and scraps.
Happy New Year orkuters-- we look forward to a great 2008!
orkut Highlights for 2007
Monday, January 07, 2008 11:27 AM
Photo Albums on orkut
Friday, January 04, 2008 9:07 AM
All of your current photos will be stored by default in their own album. Feel free to setup new ones by going to "photos" from your homepage. Once you have created an album, simply click on it and start uploading new photos inside. You can also change the cover photo by clicking on "edit" of the photo that you want to appear, and then selecting "album cover."
All of us from orkut look forward to sharing our latest photos with you!
Calling all spam fighters
Wednesday, January 02, 2008 7:30 AM
Posted by Dharmesh Mokani, Software Engineer
orkut is an online community designed to help people connect, build relationships and create engaging communities around common interests. We love orkut just as much as you do, and we want to keep it fun and clean - or, as we like to call it, beautiful. So while many members of the orkut team work to build new features like the orkut platform, others of us are dedicated to building tools to keep orkut clean and spam free. But we can't do it ourselves- we need your help.
That is why we recently created a new tool for communities. While communities provide a great medium for people to come together and share ideas through forums, polls and events, lots of communities can be the target of spam. Until now, if you were not the community owner or moderator, you couldn't remove the spam if you saw it. Well that has changed. Now you will be able to click "report spam" to specific topics or items in communities that are spammy, even if you are not the community moderator or owner. This will help us take down spam faster and take the pressure off the community owners and moderators. You can also report spam on specific scraps that you see in your own scrapbook.
We're constantly working on new spam fighting tools, so stay tuned as we release more early this year. In the meantime, please help keep orkut communities beautiful and report spam when you see it!
Security Reminder
Thursday, December 20, 2007 1:53 PM
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.
Planning a holiday party?
Wednesday, December 19, 2007 12:15 PM
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!
We hear you!
Tuesday, December 18, 2007 4:15 AM
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!
I'm feeling serendipitous!
Friday, December 14, 2007 1:02 PM
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 :)
Keeping more of your content private
Monday, December 10, 2007 3:51 PM
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!
Keeping orkut Beautiful!
Friday, December 07, 2007 10:11 AM
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.
Stay beautiful! Permalink | Links to this post |
Community News
Thursday, December 06, 2007 12:16 PM
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.
