Like everyone else, team Orkut is all set to squeeze maximum juice out of this holiday season! Just logged on orkut to see following message…
When you click on it, it takes you to a page where Orkut recommends (read promotes) some of its feature and applications which you can use this holiday season.
Apart from albums and videos, the other feature orkut is promoting with maximum efforts is their newly launched events feature.
Also, we can expect different homepage designs on Xmas and New Year. If you like themes on Orkut, keep an eye on themes tab as special holiday theme will appear anytime!
Just noticed a new and important privacy setting on Orkut: “allow people to find me through my email address”
Using this setting you can restrict others from finding your orkut profile using email address. Just select “Don’t allow people to find me” option in above screenshot and you are done!
This is surely good for most job seekers as many companies/employment agencies nowadays go through candidates’ profiles on social networking sites before making an opinion about them. Its hard to find a person specially in IT industry who is not using atleast one social network.
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I remember myself coding a script for one HR agency where the script accepts list of email addresses, find orkut profiles for each of them, gather some information from profiles and uses a customized algorithm to rank candidates! 😉
Guess, now you can save yourself from some disappointment if you have a profile which you do not want to seen by your employer.
Personally, I will recommend not to put any private information on social networking sites, no matter what privacy settings they offer.
Just came across the Orkut help group where a Orkut guide (Dhivya) is directing all Orkut community owners to report any fault they come across, in ‘Co-owner’ feature of any Orkut communities. I am not sure whether there’s really a new bug, if you come across any such fault or bug in ‘Co-owner’ feature, you can report about it here. As there is no official release about it, Community owners are request not panic.
Also, if you come across any bug, do not forget to let us know about it so that we too can investigate something about it. 😉
Sounds interesting, isn’t it? This is really possible using the all new feature in Live Image search – ‘Search similar images’. But you must be wondering what is the real funda behind the whole thing. Whether you need to upload your search image or anything else? Actually, to make use of ‘Search similar images’ option, first you need to enter you search keyword and after this step (as shown on the image below), from many results you can use a specific image to find similar images with different shape and size.
Step 1:
Step 2:
From the above images, you can imagine how useful this new tool is. 🙂 Do I need to say anything else about this tool?
Its not more than 2-3 days that I mentioned about the Gtalk – Orkut integration. Infact, the feature is yet to be rolled out in every profile and Orkut has come up with another cool feature. This time they have heard the plea of Orkut members who use Orkut somewhat as a photo sharing service. Unlike the previous case, now it would be upon your discretion about whom to show your photos, even though he/she is a member of Orkut or not. Yes, what you heard is right! If you want you can even share your photo albums even with a single friend or a non Orkut friend.
Officially this information was being provided by a guide at Orkut help group. For those who are excited to know how this feature can be used, you can see the below screenshot. More screenshots are here.
In a nutshell, the new options introduced are:
You can share photo albums to a specific set of friends or groups.
Option to share album even with non Orkut friends.
Also if you want, unlike previous case, you can lock specific albums to prevent spying by persons in your friends list. 😉
As Orkut’s usual practice, they have started rolling this brand new feature, and your profile too will hit soon! Ultimately before leaving all I can say is, you can now easily add your party pics and share them with your friends keeping your parents unaware about it. 😉
Just had a glimpse of one of the most awaited feature on Orkut, THE Google Talk Integration! It looks like I am the last one to see it on my orkut account! 😉
After many Greasemonkey scripts, orkut apps and other hacks, nothing seems to beat this official integration.
More than 2 years ago, we posted about this much needed integration. But after a bold move from rival Facebook to offer chat feature, this was quite expected from Orkut.
Integration looks nice but with some open questions…
Whether Orkut will show list of online Orkut friends like Facebook? List of Orkut friends can differ from list of Google Talk friends.
In any case, list of online friends is good option. I could not see it anywhere. May be I failed to notice it.
I am not sure if all Orkut users can use this feature. It looks like one need to be user of Google Talk separately to enjoy this feature.
It is not clear whether you can chat with online Orkut friends from your existing Google Talk clients.
Orkut added a separate Google Talk settings page, but it contains just one option – Choose which friends can chat with you.
Lets hope like many other features this feature will be improved with time.
Again the credit behind the discovery of this bug goes to Gaurav Dua. Just a day ago Gaurav mentioned on his blog, about how Orkut can be exploited to get mail id of any person, even if he/she is not in your friend’s list. I think this is a serious concern and should be checked immediately by Orkut team as there are many famous personalities present in Orkut, and you can surely imagine their fate if anyone gets their mail id.
Actually this is done by adding the targeted person as a friend. After you add them as your friend, no matter whether they accept the invitation or not, you just need to import your ‘contacts’ from the ‘friends’ tab present on your profile and you are done! The imported CSV file then reveals all mail ids even if the targeted person have not yet accepted your friend request. Detailed step by step procedure is mentioned here.
Personally I don’t think it ethical to get the mail ids of others without their permission. So I am thinking to report about this bug. What do you say?
Google have just announced its integration of Gtalk with Orkut. Truly speaking this is the thing I was desperately waiting for and Google team have heard me. 🙂 Though the news about Gtalk and Orkut integration was leaked a fortnight ago on Gaurav’s blog, I was waiting for some official news to be in. And a couple of hours ago, I was really happy to see this news on the official Orkut blog where they mentioned that they have started rolling out this feature into orkut profiles.
Now you must be thinking about your privacy on Orkut. Keeping this point in mind and to prevent you from being bombarded with Instant Messages (IMs), they have some privacy features too.
Some key highlights of this integration:
chat with your orkut friends in real time from directly within orkut
control which of your orkut friends can chat with you
chat with your Google Talk and Gmail chat contacts
visit different orkut pages while keeping your chatboxes open
I guess, as customary, Orkut is going to roll this feature on my profile at the end. So, if you are also yet to try your hands on this new feature, than just watch this demo video and have patience till you see it live on your profile.
<div class="wlWriterSmartContent" style="padding-right: 0px;padding-left: 0px;float: none;padding-bottom: 0px;margin: 0px;width: 407px;padding-top: 0px"><div style="margin: 0px;padding: 0px"><div><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4QucvXOGgc&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=en&fs=1" target="_new"><img class="wp-image-51167" src="https://devilsworkshop.rsites.dev6.rt.gw/wp-content/uploads/sites/8/2008/11/videoc9333d1d774f.jpg" alt=""></a></div></div></div> <p align="justify">If this feature is available on any one's profile, please do let us know your experience with it. Before leaving I would like to thank Google and Orkut team for rolling out new features every alternative day. :-)</p> <p align="justify">Links: <a href="http://en.blog.orkut.com/2008/11/fully-integrated-chat-in-orkut-thats.html">Official news</a></p>
Its not more than a couple of days ago that I posted about how to get Scrap alerts on mobile. But many users were disappointed because using this trick they get SMS only with the name of the scrap sender and not the full scrap messages. 🙁
But you need not worry anymore. After working hard and contacting with the guys at Google, I found another trick using which you can get full messages of a scrap on your mobile as a SMS (of course it must be less than 150 Characters and not html contents). 🙂
For this, you just need to add “#both” at the end of the feed URL that you use in your SMS Channel.
If you have not yet used this trick, then you may visit this page for complete step by step instructions.
Approximately a month ago, Gaurav Dua mentioned on his blog that:
Orkut is going to introduce few more features in the coming days including ‘event’ feature, and it is so. Last afternoon when I logged into my Orkut profile I saw this option in my profile as well. 🙂
Well, I guess by now this feature must be available in everyone’s profile (as my profile gets all new feature at last). 🙂 But what is it all about? I tried doing some research using this new feature, and I am going to say you all what I could do out of this thing..
Though I did not find this feature much useful, still I gave it a try. Immediately after hitting the ‘events’ button on the left sidebar of my homepage, I got a form to fill and I did so by entering one of my friend’s birth day and also invited some of my friends too, to attend the event. Guess all the invitees have got an invitation and have an option either to accept, reject or choose the option ‘may be attending’ for the invitation sent to them.
Well many things done and said, but it matter not how much features Orkut introduces, but what matters is how useful are those feature..? You too give it a try and let us know, personally how useful did you find this feature.
