News: Allowing users to finally display videos, images and hyper linked text within community forums.


One Word for this one - Wow! You can now allow members to enjoy HTML posts in your forums. This feature is available to the community owners who wish to allow HTML posts in their forums. Only moderated communities can enjoy the feature.

Public communities are not allowed HTML access even if the owner wishes so.

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News: Orkut has introduced it's low bandwidth version which can be very helpful while surfing orkut from slow connections.


Great news for dial up users. This is also a boon for limited internet users who have to pay for every megabyte they send/receive.


» Using Low Bandwidth Version of Orkut

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• Navigate to your General Settings
• In the options, you will see a low bandwidth option (screenshot)
• Choose the low bandwidth option
• Save and surf orkut to feel the difference.

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News: Orkut Integrates with Sandbox Applications!

As expected by all the Open Social Community people, today Orkut integrated with Sandbox - the opensocial development of Orkut!

If you also want to develop you own application and show you worth to the world, visit the Getting Started page to become familiar with the Orkut Codes.

(Google Code) The web is more interesting when you can build apps that easily interact with your friends and colleagues. But with the trend towards more social applications also comes a growing list of site-specific APIs that developers must learn.

OpenSocial provides a common set of APIs for social applications across multiple websites. With standard JavaScript and HTML, developers can create apps that access a social network's friends and update feeds.

As of now, Orkut has rolled out this feature only in Estonia so to enjoy it with you www.orkut.com account you have to change your country to Estonia. Otherwise you can enjoy this feature on www.sandbox.orkut.com also!

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It was going through my mind the whole week. Today I decided to go with it. As you all might have guessed from the post title itself. From now onwards, on every Saturday, we'll bring you one unique Orkut theme which would match your taste and needs. We are going to name this program as STD (Saturday: Theme Day).

So, what are you all waiting for? Ahh I think I guessed it right.... a Saturday! Don't worry you will get your themes from today itself. But before posting any theme, I think, I should post a tutorial on how to install the themes so that you could try and enjoy the themes easily. Let's go then....

I'll also be creating a label called "Themes" under which, you can see all the collections of our themes.
Update:

Tutorial of Orkut Themes is now available on: http://orkutaddons.blogspot.com/2007/12/installing-orkut-themes.html

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News: Are you going to get PhotoAttack Application in Orkut??

Attack photos of your friends with cool animations! Slap them silly, send them a kiss, splash them with color balloons. No matter what your emotions are they have an animation that can help you to express yourself. Let the game begin. Attack Now !!

Lalit Sarna, Developer Team

(Orkut Blog) Bring your friends' photos to life! Attack them with fun animations, ambush them with flying kisses, throw a snow ball, ninja kick them, send them some puppy love, and more. There are tons of different ways to make a friend smile. With cool new attacks being added often, the fun never stops.
We have you covered, whether it is your friends, that special someone, or your greatest rival. Our fun attacks should get their attention, so be prepared to be attacked back! Express yourself and most of all have lots of fun.

Application Link: Click Here

Application Screenshots:


You should have a sandbox account at Orkut to use this application for now. Visit Here for more details about getting the account.

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News: Choose People who can view your Profile Contents!

What is social Networking? As per me, it means to socialize. Don't know what Orkut thinks about it! It's introducing such new features, which not only minimize networking over the world wide web but it might hamper it's image too.


See the new feature just introduced on Orkut. It allows you to control your profile viewer ship. This feature minimizes the fields on your profile to: about me, age, birthday, city, state, country and relationship status only.

It's getting bad for those who prefer window networking. Hope that one day Orkut doesn't give an option to hide the profile from it's database!! Anyways, you guys enjoy this feature (located at http://www.orkut.com/PrivacySettings.aspx) as per your thinkings and enjoy your Holi holidays!

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News: Beat Account Hijackers by knowing your last login time!

This comes out to be of a great surprise to all the Orkut users. Orkut has recently rolled out a new feature, which allows you to see your last login time. This feature will not only help us to control our Orkutting habits(just joking) but will also prevent us from account jacking!

Suppose that someone hacks your account (god forbid!) and logins through your username and password. If the person would be considered only a bit intelligent, he won't change your password and will try to misuse your account! There comes the trap for the person from Orkut!

You just need to remember your last login time and the next time you login, make sure that you match both of them. If they don't match up, don't look back and change your password!! Have a safe and happy Orkutting.

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News: Orkut reacted strongly against Spams!

Refer our recent post on "Orkut calling all spam fighters". It looks as if Orkut is going to win the war against spam! A recent new feature introduced in Orkut forums is that of auto spam removal technology. This technology auto crawls the links in the community forums and may be in scrapbooks too and trashes them into the google bin, if found matching with suspicious links, already present in the directory.

Orkut's Software Engineer says:

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!

We at OUG discovered that on posting any type of link, related to freewebs (we did the test only on this), after approximately 1 to 2 hours, it automatically gets deleted. Isn't this amazing! It might be for some and not for others. So, start using other services as freewebs is in Orkut's hitlist.

After enabling users to block unwanted messages in their Orkut scrapbooks, it looks as if Google is taking more aggressive measures to remove spam from community forums.

We too are against any spam and request the readers to use the scripts and softwares judiciously. And keep on reporting spams. Your report serve to make Orkut filters better!

Meanwhile, I would also like to inform you all that we have created our own community in Orkut. I would feel humbled if you could spare a second to join it. That would decrease the distance between you and me. The community is still into it's initial stages. We'll soon be developing it.

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News: Orkut introduces Multiple Album Creation.

Orkut is the best place for sharing snaps and videos. But till now there is a limited space to share your beloved photos. Recently Orkut has introduced a new feature, which gives it a picasa like appearance.

(orkut Blog: Photo Albums on orkut)
Now that you can have 100 photos, we thought you might want to organize them into multiple albums to make it easier for you and others to enjoy. We were looking for ways to group all of our photos on orkut based on the different experiences that they shared. Today, orkut will be launching Photo Albums! Have many photos from a recent trip? Create an album specifically for that trip. Lots of pics from a recent night out with friends? Create another album with just those photos!

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!

Vacations are over and I hope you enjoyed a lot. Ahh.. you collected lots of pictures and now thinking to share them on Orkut. Welcome to Orkut's New Album update.

Now you will be able to arrange your Pictures as per your requirements and choice, because you can now manage your Albums as different-different categories assigned to them such as holidays, marriage or friends, school and whatever you want. This makes picture sharing more fun.

One feature orkut should have given is to move photos between albums. As of now if you have uploaded lots of photos on orkut on different topics, you can not move them just into different albums. You have to download them first to hard drive, then upload them again in different album!

Happy Sharing

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News: Orkut calling all spam fighters.

It looks as if Orkut is really upset with all that "Orkut Virus" crap. Today, it formally introduced a new feature viz REPORT SPAM to control the growth of spams, though it was functioning since many days. Read more to know some key ideas of the new feature.

As quoted by Dharmesh Mokani, Software Engineer, Orkut

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.

Explaining the New Feature:

REPORTING SPAM

1. Click the report spam button located under the topic you'd like to report. The post will automatically be deleted from the forum and sent to the orkut team for investigation.
2. If you wish to report multiple topics as spam, you can do so by checking the box next to each topic and clicking the report spam button.

Anyone can use the report spam button to submit spam topics for orkut to investigate. Topics are only automatically deleted if an owner reports them.

We too feel that it's not worth spamming orkut. So, we urge you all to use our products, which can also be negatively used, productively. Don't spam and stay beautiful. You may also like to read Orkut's help on spam.

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