Orkut Toolbar, the most famous firefox add-on for orkut users is not updated for latest Firefox 3 version yet. When you go to orkut toolbar page, it says This add-on is for older versions of Firefox…
Now thanks to Stanley for making orkut toolbar compatible with firefox 3. You can install it from here.
Orkut Toolbar helps you to format the text of your posts in the Orkut forums, easily access all common functions of orkut, create and manage custom signatures and insert and view images and flash movies in orkut posts and scraps. (Read More…)
Orkut added yet another new feature. Now they are showing community recommendations on your orkut home.
Recommendations are based on your profile and network. If you are curious as why a particular community has been recommended to you, just click on view all link below community recommendation box. You will be take to a dedicated community recommendation page, where you can check individually why a particular community has been recommended to you.
If you don’t like this new feature, you can turn it off by going to settings page and unchecking community recommendations checkbox.
Form last few days Orkuts theme feature is creating buzz. I am receiving lots of mails/comments with same questions again and again. This post is an attempt to answer some common FAQ…
Q. Are Orkut Themes officially available for all users?
One word answer is NO. They are limited to few Indian users only as mentioned in this official orkut blog post. But don’t get disappointed, as you can still enjoy this theme feature by using a greasemonkey script as explained here.
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Q. How to know if you can use orkuts theme feature officially?
All of below indicate theme feature is available to you…
When you log into your account you will see ‘change theme’ link beside logout option in top-right corner.
When you can see themes on your friend profiles. Just check ‘get this theme’ option which will appear then near logout option in top-right corner.
Go to Edit Profile option. A new tab, themes will be there!
Q. Can these themes be seen my friend on orkut?
If the person visiting your orkut profile also have this theme feature enabled on their account, they will see your profile in your selected theme unless they choose to disable the feature manually as explained below.
Q. I hate themes, I want old, clean & simple orkut back…
YES, you can do that. In fact I have disabled themes on my account.
To disable theme feature completely on your account, go to Edit Skins option and check Disable themes option. You will now get old Orkut interface throughout the site.
If you just want to keep your theme to old orkut but like to see how colorful your friends are then just select the orkut blue theme.
If you still have any other question regarding orkut themes please post it here via comments. I will try to answer it. 🙂
Orkut introduced album privacy feature few months back by which one could choose who can see their photos. Then they added support for uploading 10000 photos and a new level of privacy feature was needed as many users uploaded lots of albums but not all albums are equally personals.
Thanks to orkut’s new album privacy feature you can set privacy differently for each album from your orkut photos page as shown below…
On lines of facebook, orkut added photo tagging feature to their social networking site. Using this feature now your friends can tag you in group photos.
Below are steps, how to do this….
#1. Go to any photo you have uploaded, you will see add tag link below it…
#2. Click on add tag and you will get a cross-hair mouse pointer. Select your friend you want to tag. Type his name in Add person tag box. Select your friend and click save.
Next time when anybody visits your friend profile, they will see photos of him option apart from normal photos uploaded by him. Similar photos of me link is present on your orkut homepage.
What about privacy???
Don’t worry! This time orkut really did great job for all people concerned about their privacy on social-networking sites. You can disable this feature completely by changing photo tagging setting on privacy settings page.
This works even if you do not have new orkut theme feature enabled on your account like unfortunate me. Also there is no manual effort involved while using this script compared to using themes from unofficial orkut theme directory.
Once installed this script randomly switches between 11 themes listed in this theme directory. This script is direct extension of original greasemonkey script created by Digiok and Gautam.
With recent launch of orkut’s country specific sites, all greasemonkey scripts stopped working. The reason is most greasemonkey scripts are domain specific and at the time of writing them, they were coded for url http://www.orkut.com which is now changing to http://www.orkut.co.in and so on depending on users country.
So all greasemonkey scripts for orkut needs to be changed now to reflect this domain change. Listed below are steps need to be followed by users and developers to make your favorite greasemonkey scripts work again on orkut…
For GreaseMonkey Script Users…
Just go through following steps for each greasemonkey scripts you want to modify…
Open Manage User Scripts option from Tools >> Greasemonkey menu or right-clicking on small greasemonkey logo in bottom-right corner of your firefox.
A wizard will open like below. Then…
Click on a script you want to edit from left side menu.
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Then Click on right-sides included pages list.
Then click on Add button.
Clicking on Add button will open a pop-up. Put orkut’s domain name you have in your country their. Ex: http://www.orkut.co.in/* for Indian orkut users. Note /* at the end of domain name. You must not forget it!
Just click OK and the script will start working. 🙂
If you are a newbie greasemonkey script developer then you may be wondering about long list of orkut’s country-level domains.
But with one small change in your scripts you can make them work with all orkut sites. Here are the steps…
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Open your greasemonkey script is editor.
Go to @include line in ==UserScript== header.
Change http://*.orkut.com/* to http://*.orkut.*/*
This will make script work with all orkut domains plus few more domain like http://www.orkut.pk. But rather than listing all countries and making mistake on the way, this way is full-proof. Its also simple as all you need is to replace com in orkut urls with a * (asterisk).
You can do try-catch type nesting around your domain sensitive codes so that they will not clutter javascript error console in firefox. But this part is optional so don’t bother much if I sound like alien… 😉
About our greasemonkey scripts go, you can just update them by installing again from respective locations. I have updated all of them and you can find them at one place, thats here! 🙂
A new option is added on privacy settings page named “my networks” which let you control geographical regions from where people can view your profile or send you friend requests.
By default, it is set to county you have mentioned in your profile only. Means if you have changed your country sometime back to Estonia to enjoy Orkut Apps, you may have become unavailable to friends from your country. 😉
No worries you can change this setting to global or any number of networks. But please note that this “my networks” setting is directly linked to “everyone” options you see in other privacy settings as explained below with example taken from official orkut help page.
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For example, if you choose the United States and Brazil as the only countries that can access your profile, then selecting ‘everyone’ in your other privacy settings only accounts for orkut users who are in those two countries. This is not ‘everyone’ on orkut, but only ‘everyone’ in your network. Selecting ‘friends of friends’ will also be restricted to ‘friends of friends’ within your network, so a friend of a friend who lives outside of the United States or Brazil won’t be able to see your profile.
One more thing as I mentioned in my Orkut App & Estonia hack post, Orkut restricts now changing country in your profile. An attempt to change country shows warning like below…
A nice step towards better privacy control by Orkut Team… 🙂
Last week, I wrote about Orkut’s Indian version. During the same time Orkut launched many other county-specific versions and below is the list of such orkut’s country domains…
Above list is complied using Darnells blog post and wikipedia country-level domain page. If you find something is missing here, please post a comment. Also post link to your blog/website so that I can give you due credits. 🙂
As of now Orkuts Pakistani version domain www.orkut.pk is taken for some proxy site as mentioned by Darnell, but Orkut may legally take it back anytime, thanks to protection offered by trademark laws.
