Tag: Orkut

News

Orkut Added Facebook Like Status Updates Feature!

Post author By Rahul Bansal
Post date May 4, 2008
7 Comments on Orkut Added Facebook Like Status Updates Feature!

Just returned from a long vacation to see a new and exciting feature on orkut.

You can update your status by going to your own profile page.

A edit button (not shown in following screenshot) can be seen there just below "Home > My Profile" line.

When you click on it (edit button), you will see a single line textbox with update & cancel buttons, as shown below. The smiles on right side will be visible when you click on single smiley icon beside the line.

Facebook users will find this similar to status update feature out there.

Analysis of this feature

#Good Part…

A feature like this is long awaited. So I guess orkut user will stop abusing first name and last name field they use for updates. So you can hope names like exam till 7th, going offline for a week, blah blah to disappear!
Smiley option with updates to indicate your mood. So this is also like mood update! 😉

#What can be improved…

User should be able to update status from orkut homepage.
A separate status feed for friends will be delight. Something like timeline will be appreciated.
A separate tab can be added on recent updates box, beside existing Updates from my friends & My updates tabs.
Connecting with Twitter updates as suggested by Darnell Clayton. I guess this is not possible with Orkut Apps and so orkut must do it officially.

#What about security?

Don’t worry this box is XSS safe. Atleast it seems from my little testing!
But URL should not be hyperlinked in status updates.

Thats it! I guess this feature is available to all of you by this time. If not it will come to you soon.

Thanks Pramod 🙂

Tags Bing, Google, Orkut

News

Orkut Open Social Apps Available in India Finally

Post author By Rahul Bansal
Post date April 17, 2008
8 Comments on Orkut Open Social Apps Available in India Finally

As we have discussed it earlier, orkut open social apps finally arrived in India.

Just noticed on my orkut homepage as shown in screenshot above, India has been chosen by Orkut second country after Estonia to unveil Orkuts open social apps.

Nevertheless no matter from which country you are, you can change your country to Estonia and now India to enjoy this cool apps. (Read more…)

It will be too early to say anything about Orkut Apps so soon, but as of now only thing I like notably that orkut apps don’t force you to invite 20 friends like facebook.

Anyway you can add these apps to your account by clicking on edit link as highlighted in following screenshot.

Let us know what you think about these orkut apps? Will they really enhance your orkutting experience or will just clutter orkut profiles?

Update: Just read on Orkut official blog, there is limit of 25 apps a user can add.

Related Links: Beginners Guide to Orkut Apps | First Orkut App

Tags Bing, OpenSocial, Orkut

News

Post Images, Videos and other HTML in Orkut Communities!

Post author By Rahul Bansal
Post date April 15, 2008
56 Comments on Post Images, Videos and other HTML in Orkut Communities!

Few months back, orkut added support for Images, Videos and other HTML in scrapbooks, now on similar lines these cool HTML features are extended to orkut communities.

You can see following screenshot where HTML, image & video shown in a forum post.

To enable this feature.

Yes, by default its disabled… 🙁

Go to your communities edit profile link in left sidebar menu…

Next check type setting. If its public you have to change it to moderated as the feature is only available to moderated communities.

Finally scroll down an look for forum setting. A new check-box will be there saying- “allow HTML posts in forums“. Just check it!

Now all community members can post images, videos and other HTML in forum post as shown above! 🙂

How To Post Images, Videos, etc…

(Added on April 20, 2008)

Adding images
Copy and paste urls ending in .jpg, .gif, .png or .bmp and the image will appear in the scrap.
for example, http://example.com/example.jpg

Adding videos from YouTube and Google Video
Copy and paste the url and the video will appear in the scrap.
for example, http://youtube.com/watch?v=videoid

Adding podcast/audio
Copy and paste the url of an audio file and an audio player will appear in the scrap.
for example, http://example.com/example.mp3

Adding html-embeddable objects
Create or upload your content at sites such as photobucket.com, imageshack.com, rockyou.com or slide.com. Copy and paste the html embed code to share it with your friends.

I think many community owner will not like requirement to make the community moderated type in order to use this feature. It seems orkut is worried about spam and security, but orkut is bad at handling both problems anyway… 😉

(by orkut-plus via inside orkut)

Tags Bing, Google, Orkut, YouTube

News

Orkut New Album Features – Edit All Captions At Once & Reorder Photos!

Post author By Rahul Bansal
Post date April 15, 2008
4 Comments on Orkut New Album Features – Edit All Captions At Once & Reorder Photos!

Just noticed two new features is continuously evolving orkuts albums… Edit all captions at once & Reorder Photos using drag-n-drop method!

Edit All Photos

Clicking on it will open a page where you can edit captions of all album photos at once. Moreover you can delete multiple photos and choose album cover from the same page as shown below!

Reorder Photo

Without a doubt, we all like drag-n-drop method to move things on screen. Thanks to reorder photos feature you can do same with your orkut albums…

You can see these features in action by going to your orkut albums! 🙂

Tags Bing, Orkut

News

Orkut Goes Mobile Silently – m.orkut.com!

Post author By Rahul Bansal
Post date April 14, 2008
52 Comments on Orkut Goes Mobile Silently – m.orkut.com!

Two days back, I have posted about orkut’s low bandwidth version. I concluded that post saying, Orkut could have done better by creating a dedicated mobile version like m.orkut.com….

Now thanks to Darnell, for taking pain to actually check m.orkut.com and so discovering the mobile orkut. 🙂

You can really access orkut from mobile now by going to m.orkut.com. No need to use our old days methods anymore.

The mobile orkut is centered around individuals. It supports profiles, scrapbooks, search, friend-lists, birthday reminders, friends updates, pending friend requests, etc.

Group features, those related to communities are completely omitted. Also you can not edit your profile from mobile.

You can still access communities on mobile to by switching to www.orkut.com, i.e. web-version. Of course, it will be slower.

On other hand, you can use m.orkut.com from your desktop browser like firefox. It will be much faster and cleaner than low bandwidth version of orkut, as we pointed out in earlier post.

The only thins surprised me is silent launch by Google. I am still confused if Orkut blog is just meant for reviewing OpenSocial Apps for orkut. In past also they did not bother to post about prominent features they launched or upgraded.

Long time back, I used to check m.orkut.com in hope for mobile orkut, but after wasting enough time, I created custom javascript bookmarks to do orkutting. That post still hold the honor of most commented post at Devils Workshop. Its little pain seeing it retire now. But as Shakespeare said, All’s Well That Ends Well.

Thanks Darnell for discovery and credits!

Link: m.orkut.com

Update: Official announcement on Orkut blog (April 17, 2008)

Tags Bing, Blogger, Firefox, Google, Javascript, OpenSocial, Orkut

Tips

Orkut Low Bandwidth Version – Good for Dial-Up and slow GPRS users!

Post author By Rahul Bansal
Post date April 12, 2008
15 Comments on Orkut Low Bandwidth Version – Good for Dial-Up and slow GPRS users!

Orkut silently launched a low-bandwidth version. Many forum sites have a lo-fi version for dial-up users. But orkut took different path and rather than giving a separate subdomain with complete redesign, a small setting is added to General Settings.

To enable “low bandwidth” version…

Go to General Settings
Find low bandwidth setting
Click on show the low bandwidth version of orkut option.
Hit save changes button at the bottom. (not shown in screenshot)

Selecting show the low bandwidth version of orkut option switches your account to low bandwidth version where images in scrapbook, profile pages and users orkut homepage are disabled. Considering users spend more time on these pages this is good.

Still if you like to see communities, friendlist and other areas of orkut or any site without images, you can use imgLikeOpera, a firefox plugin, which turn on/off image loading just by clicking on a small icon in browsers status-bar. (Read more…)

Orkut could have done this better by creating a dedicated mobile version like m.orkut.com or wap.mobile.com. Although you can use Orkut from mobile, official support is always a delight. Moreover being light weight, it could have been used as a low bandwidth version itself!

Update: Orkut have a mobile version now. Thanks Darnell.

Credits: Orkutplus

Tags Bing, Blogger, Firefox, Google, Orkut, plugin

News

Orkut – OpenSocial Apps Coming Officially To India!

Post author By Rahul Bansal
Post date April 12, 2008

Looks like Orkut team overlooked our discussion on Orkut Apps being launched in Estonia first. Many Orkut users including me and, notably Darnell Clayton, felt Orkut should selected Brazil, India or any bigger country like US rather than Estonia.

Now skipping Brazil, Orkut Developer Blog announced today that in coming weeks OpenSocial apps will be available to millions of users in India. India have 16.90% of total orkut users according to Orkut demographics.

I think Orkut should have gone for a global release this time. After the fact that anyone can use OpenSocial apps just by changing their country to Estonia, this country-specific releases makes no sense! At the most in few weeks you will have one more country to choose from at par with Estonia! 😉

For OpenSocial developers…

On a sidenote, Orkut team created a new app submission page. All apps, even if submitted previously, need to resubmit through this new page.

If you are yet to start with OpenSocial orkut apps, here is the beginners Open-Social guide covering FAQ.

Tags Bing, Google, OpenSocial, Orkut

Tips

Auto Approve Pending Friend Request On Orkut!

Post author By Rahul Bansal
Post date March 26, 2008
3 Comments on Auto Approve Pending Friend Request On Orkut!

This is a very small but useful script for orkut users who get many friend requests everyday!

I created this actually few week ago for orkutfeeds bot to automate approving pending friend requests.

At this point itself I want to make one thing clear that this script is plain and simple enhancement to orkut. Imagine having a new button named approve all. So do not think that this script will let you add anyone on orkut without other users knowledge or anything like that!

This is a GreaseMonkey Script, so you need firefox as well as GreaseMonkey addon to use this. In case you have both then you can go ahead or read this GreaseMonkey guide.

Install Link – Click here to install this script

Related Script – Orkut Pending Friend Requests Deleter Script

Tags Bing, Firefox, Orkut, Software

Tips

Subscribe to Orkut Scrapbook, Community & Topic RSS Feeds With Just One-Click!

Post author By Rahul Bansal
Post date March 9, 2008
18 Comments on Subscribe to Orkut Scrapbook, Community & Topic RSS Feeds With Just One-Click!

This GreaseMonkey Script for Orkut users adds a RSS feed link on most orkut pages like profile, album, scrapbook, community, topics, etc! The RSS feed links uses our OrkutFeeds service in the background.

Most important aspect of this script is that the way it integrates OrkutFeeds service and Orkut! All feeds are just one-click away. This means you will never need to visit OrkutFeeds homepage or do any kind of URL copy-pasting! 🙂

The RSS feed link will point to…

Scrapbook of the user whose profile, album, scrapbook or any other page related to the user you are checking
Community if you are at any communities homepage, forum, polls & members list
Topic if you are browsing any community topic!

The above covers most orkut pages indeed. Let us know if you want something is missing… 🙂

The RSS feed link will appear…