Orkut for Android — live folders, photo upload and more!

Orkut is now ready to roll on mobile phones with Android. Now you can stay connected to your orkut friends wherever you go -- via scrap notifications, direct photo uploads to your orkut albums, and a phonebook synced to your orkut friends' phone numbers and status messages. Orkut for Android lets you stay in touch with pals through...

Orkut friends live folders
Simply add the list of your orkut friends as a live folder on your home screen, and you'll be able to browse through your friends list even when not under data network coverage. The live folder also lets you communicate (via call, scrap or SMS) with your friends in a single click. To install a live folder, click "Menu > Add > Folders > Orkut" on your Android device's homescreen after installing the orkut for Android application.

Photo uploads to your orkut albums
Gone are the days when you needed to download photos from your Android phone to your computer and then upload them to your orkut albums. Now you can simply upload photos from your Android Photo Gallery. Just click "Menu > Share > Orkut" while browsing your photos in the Android Photo Gallery to get started.

Scrap notification
You will get notifications on your Android device when you have new scraps on orkut. The notifications will appear on your Android device notification bar; clicking on notifications will take you to your scrapbook page.


To install the orkut for Android application visit Android Market from your Android device and search for "orkut" under the social applications category. You can also directly scan the QR code below to install it. Note that this application is available only for Android devices running version 1.6 or higher.

Hope to see you on orkut for Android soon!

Posted by Deepak Sethi and Alok Goel, software engineer and product manager

(Cross-posted on the Google Mobile Blog). .

Share photos on orkut directly from Picasa

Most people love taking pictures and sharing them with their friends, and Google is always trying to improve the photo managing experience in our products such as Picasa and orkut. (If you haven’t heard about Picasa yet, the free photo editing tool by Google, you should definitely give it a try!)

The problem is that, sometimes, the photos we take aren't quite ready for sharing. So we have to transfer them to a computer for editing, and then return later to orkut to upload them to an album. That's too much work! So, we're making life easier by giving you a way to upload photos to orkut directly from Picasa.

To get started, you just have to install an orkut button on your Picasa program by downloading the free 'Share photos on orkut' plugin. This plugin (for Windows or Mac) makes sharing your photos with your friends as easy as clicking a button.

If your Internet browser asks your permission to launch the Picasa software, say "yes." Once Picasa opens, simply add the orkut button. (If you need more help, check our Help Center article). Once you're done, you will see a new button with the familiar orkut logo at the bottom of your Picasa screen. It'll look like this:

Next, just select the photos you want to upload to orkut and click the orkut button you've added to Picasa. You can upload your photos to an an existing orkut album, or create a new one.

The photo uploads will begin, and a slider bar will show the progress of your upload. Once it's complete, you'll be redirected to your orkut album page where you can share your photos with your friends, or set privacy levels for your new album.

So start up Picasa, browse through your pictures and share some of your photographic gems with your friends with just a few clicks. We're betting your photos will start plenty of conversations!

Posted by Sandesh Tawari and Arijit De, software engineers

It's Valentine's Day!

Today is February 14th, a day that millions of people have either been eagerly awaiting or much, much less eagerly expecting for months. Love it or hate it, it's Valentine's Day, a day for couples in countries around the world to break out the romance and show each other just how much they really care.

Flowers will be exchanged, candlelit dinners will be shared, and sweet nothings will be whispered in quite a few ears -- in short, love will most definitely be in the air. Love has also made its way over to orkut, where you can use the Be My Valentine app to share your feelings, or join a community especially created for other romantics excited about the day.

Not feeling quite so sentimental today? Don't worry, you're not alone! Check out this community of people who're single on Valentine's Day and proud of it.

Either with your friends or with your soul mate, we hope you enjoy the day!

Orkut is easier than ever on Google Chrome

We've got great news for users of orkut and Google Chrome (Google's awesome and free web browser): We've just launched a cool orkut extension for Google Chrome.

This extension adds an orkut icon on your browser's toolbar and shows the number of unviewed updates from your friends. When you click the icon, you'll see a drop-down menu with quick links to main orkut pages, plus the number of updates currently on your orkut homepage and scrapbook. This extension also has a "Share this page" link, so you can tell your orkut friends about interesting online content with a single click.

The orkut extension also includes a universal search box that lets you search for content on orkut and jump directly to a friend's profile in a matter of seconds:

The extension lets you work online, or browse the internet while staying up-to-date on the latest happenings on orkut. It pops up new updates on photos, scraps, videos, status messages and applications from your friends as they occur. And you can set the notification interval that works best for you.

To download this new orkut extension visit the installation page. Have fun using orkut on Google Chrome, and don't forget to share your feedback with us!

Happy Australia Day!

Watching fireworks burst over the Harbour Bridge in Sydney? Having a barbecue with your friends and family in Perth? Today people are gathering all over Australia to celebrate Australia Day, one of the country's largest national celebrations.

Not to be left out of the fun, the orkut team created a special doodle to commemorate the occasion:

If you'd like to learn more about Australia Day, try visiting this Australia community on orkut. If you're celebrating today, be sure to share the good times with the rest of us by posting some photos or a video from the festivities to orkut.

Hope you have a good one!

The new orkut in a nutshell

As more and more people are switching to the new version of orkut, we thought it would be nice to show you what's new in your new orkut homepage. Check it out:

If you're still using the old version of the site, simply click the "visit new orkut" button, on the top of your old homepage, and try it out!

Once there, explore our new features, and stay posted for more launches coming out soon. If you'd like to share a comment, visit our help forum or official community.

Orkut's 6th birthday!

It may not have popped up in your birthdays list, but today is orkut's big day: the site is now 6 years old! In the past 6 years we've learned to walk, talk, and color inside the lines, among many other achievements. We've even shaken things up and reinvented ourselves not once but twice!

More importantly, we've made a ton of great friends along the way (over 80 million worldwide), and are happy to include you among them.

To celebrate the day, you might have noticed that we created a special doodle:

Thanks for sticking with us for all of these years. There's plenty more to come from the orkut team, so we look forward to many more birthdays together!

Sharing on orkut just got easier!

As part of our continous efforts towards giving orkut users more ways to share interesting content with their friends, we are happy to announce the launch of the orkut Share API. The API allows website owners to enable their visitors to share the content on their website, with visitors' friends on orkut.

Users can share the content and optionally promote it to make recommendations to their friends, which then appears in their activity updates. Every such shared item has the potential to spread virally and get wider attention from orkut users, increasing the traffic to the website.

Web publishers can post orkut share buttons like the one above on their page using a simple JavaScript library. We also support the JavaScript and HTTP APIs for a more direct interaction of sharing-related UI actions with the server. These options combine to give web publishers, flexibility in the way sharing features are implemented. The user experience remains consistent and secure in each case.

Some of our early access developers like addthis.com, have already started supporting orkut in their list of services. If your website has implemented sharing functionality using the 'addthis' button, you can simply configure orkut in the destination network list.

Details of orkut share API and sample code can be found here.

So spread the word, have fun sharing!

Auto-Magic Groups

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.

Found something interesting on the internet? Share it on orkut!

We're happy to announce the launch of a great new way for you to share with your friends interesting content that you read on the web -- the 'orkut share' bookmarklet for internet browsers.

To quickly install this bookmarklet in any browser, just visit the 'orkut share' installation page. In a few seconds you'll be all set.

Then, when you find something cool on the internet, just click the bookmarklet and share a snippet and a link to the webpage with your friends on orkut. You'll also have an option to create a promotion (using 'orkut promote') to better spread the word about that content.

Your friends will see a link to the page you shared and your comments about it in their 'friends updates' section. They'll also be able to comment on it:

Web publishers and bloggers can also post 'orkut share' buttons (like the one at the end of this post) on their pages to enable their visitors to share content they find interesting on the site with their friends on orkut. If you run a blog or a website, try our code generator or visit the API documentation for more details.

So spread the word and have fun sharing!