Have you ever wanted to see updates only from your family members or colleagues? Or have you ever tried to share a photo with college friends and had to select each recipient manually? If you have a lot of friends it could mean selecting dozens of people, one at a time. What if you could easily group them and interact with all of them at once?
As managing a large list of friends and keeping it up-to-date can be very time-consuming and not much fun, we came up with a solution: Auto-Magic Groups, a new feature that, as the name suggests, "automagically" figures out any friend groups you may have and also suggests labels for those groups.
Clicking the "edit groups" link will pull up groups you previously created, as well new groups suggested by orkut. You can reject orkut-suggested groups, or further customize them (the way you do with groups you've created yourself) by naming them and deleting or adding people to existing groups. Also, orkut tries to identify communities most closely related to each group.
This new feature makes it easy to filter your friends' updates based on relevant groups, right on your orkut homepage, so now you can easily see only the updates from a specific group of people at a time. Try it out by selecting a group from the "groups" drop-down menu on your homepage!
Another cool thing is that when you add new friends, orkut will recommend appropriate groups in which they might belong. So, no more selecting groups while making friends -- orkut does the heavy lifting for you! Of course, you can still add them to other groups if you want, and reject any group recommendations made by orkut.
Feel free to share your feedback, and remember to stay tuned -- more features will be added to groups management soon.
Posted by Amogh Asgekar and Sandesh Tawari, software engineers
UPDATE: If you're not seeing this feature yet, don't worry, it's being implemented to all users during the next hours.