Googlified

Orkut recently announced to increase their silly limit of 50 photos per user to 10,000 and up to 10MB per photo. Now let’s do some simple math, 10,000 photos * 10MB/photo = ~100GB of photo storage, and guess what, you need to pay about $200 per year to have that much storage in Picasa Web Albums (PWA doesn’t have a 100GB plan, but it has a 150GB plan for $250 a year).

Not that everyone have cameras that take 10MB photos, but still (I have ~1700 photos - mostly 6 megapixels - on PWA right now and it takes a bit over 1GB - PWA probably compressed them).

A couple of downsides are that you can’t upload photos directly from Picasa (or any other major photo management tools that I know of. They do have bulk uploader for Internet Explorer and Firefox though, but the link for the Firefox one is currently showing a “Cannot be found” page) and no API to access the photos (you can always roll out your own!).

IT’S OVER NINE THOUSAND!!

Twitter famous for it, Facebook and MySpace has it, and now Orkut finally added status updates to its social networking platform. To update your status, just go to your Profile page, click on “Set your status here” (or the “edit” button), and enter your status. The status is viewable to all (Orkut users) and there doesn’t seem to be a privacy setting on who can view the status.

Whatever happened to Jaiku? (other than moving their infrastructure over to Google App Engine)

[via Inside Orkut]

Orkut launched the mobile version of the site today, and as one can expect, they still have that “Bad, bad server. No donut for you.” message. You can only access limited amount of information via the mobile interface, such as shrunk profile pages, friends list, and post scraps on other people’s profiles.

Two other things you can do are staring into your broken Scrapbook (it will probably take them 10 seconds to fix it - only if they aren’t so drunk on Kool-Aid) or report your friends for abusing Orkut.

[via Inside Orkut]

AFP reports that Orkut - the Google-own social networking site is related to “nearly 90 percent of the 56,000 pedophilia complaints” in Brazil (where majority of the Orkut users came from). Now, the Brazilian Senate ordered Google to hand over the information of the suspected users to the authorities, and Google will comply with the request, according to CNet News.

Google has tons of pranks for this year’s April Fool’s Day, including Gmail Custom Time, Virgle: The Adventure of Many Lifetimes, Google Wake Up Kit, and more!

• Gmail Custom Time: It enables you to send email back until April 1, 2004.
• Google Human Search (Chinese): searches 250 million volunteers by their personal characteristics.
• Virgle: Virgin and Google team up together to create Project Virgle to build a second Earth on Mars - just in case Earth gives up on us - in the next 100 years.
• Google Wake Up Kit - The kit from Google Calendar is designed to wake you up by whatever means possible - including “a bed-flipping device … for forceful removal from your sleeping quarters.” Google Calendar also added a “I’m Feeling Lucky” button that sets you up for dates with celebrities.
• gDay - Brought to you by the Google Australia team, it let’s you to search contents on the Internet even before it’s created! - “Hi guys, I am from the future.”
• Scratch-and-sniff books - Google Books is “now able to capture some of the smells during the scanning process” and you can smell them in the preview pages!
• Greener Google Talk: To reduce the amount carbon dioxide produced by instant messaging, Google Talk will now shorten the number of characters used in a IM message by “abbreviating words and dropping vowels” - the so-called IM-speak.
• Google Dajare (Japanese): The mission of this project is “to organize the world’s laughter, (allow) people around the world (to) have access to what(ever) they want.”
• YTRickRollsYou - “We’re no strangers to love, You know the rules and so do I … Never gonna give you up, Never gonna let you down … We’ve know each other for so long” - click on any feature videos on YouTube (no, this is not rickroll).
• Google Cash (Russian) - Now you can install the Google Cash portable right from your office or home and make payments for advertising cash roubles - designed exclusively for Russian AdWords users. (I thought the machine is designed to print money to pay for the users’ online advertising campaigns…)
• Yogurt: the new Orkut!
• Google Docs Airplane: Stop typing the boring documents, fold an airplane instead! Go to Google Docs and create a “New airlane!“
• Google Weblogs - New service from Blogger that “Publish text to the web in reverse chronological order.” OMG, this is going to be SO COOL!
• AdSense for Conversation: AdSense will display ads that are relevant to the conversations that you engage in on a headgear that Google provides for you to wear. Also AdSense for Phone Calls (Portuguese).
• FrankRank: a new AdWords ranking algorithm inspired by Frank the hand turkey.

Happy April Fool’s Day everyone! :)

Orkut had the above logo on its site yesterday to celebrate Easter.

The Google-run social networking site Orkut added a new feature today that lets you to “find friends from address books on Yahoo, Hotmail and AOL.” Well, since Yahoo!, Hotmail (turns out that Windows Live has a Contacts API as well. Sorry for hiding under the rock for so long and thanks to Ionut for pointing out.) and AOL doesn’t have a cool Contacts Data API like Google does, you will have to give your password of the “other email service” to Google in order to let Orkut get your friends’ email address (and possibly other info) to check against their database of users. Your password will not be stored - or so they say.

Although I don’t really use Orkut (nor other SNS’s), but only 1 profile view in two years? Come on, that’s so not right. I know that I am probably not that popular, but still, look at my list of recent visitors - how can they visit my profile yet doesn’t generate a view of the page?

Google Brazil today celebrates Carnaval, or Brazilian Carnival, “an annual festival in Brazil held 40 days before Easter and marks the beginning of Lent.” Orkut also has a special logo for this event:

I thought the girl (on the Google logo) was standing on a big pie or something. :-/

[via Zorgloob]

Google’s (not-so-popular-in-the-States) social networking site Orkut turns 4 today. When the social networking site launched in 2004, the “initial target market … was the United States” [Wikipedia], but today - four years later, the majority of its users are from Brazil and India, while users from the United States only account for less than 15% of the site’s user base.

David Hetfield (from the Google Blogoscoped forum) spotted that the extra artworks on the birthday logo are originated from Google Talk’s default set of avatars.

Well, happy birthday.

Google is experimenting a way to index information from Orkut user profiles and show the results as OneBox results “when someone who is logged in to orkut performs a search on Google.com for another orkut user.”

A typical OneBox result will include “key details like your name, photo and location.” The setting is set to “show information” by default, so if you want to opt-out, just change the setting here.

Since Google is still experimenting this, only a small group of users will see the the orkut OneBox in their search results. If you are one of those lucky users, please send in a screenshot. :)

[via Google Operating System]

Orkut released its first application (not sure if it’s related to the newly released Open Social, but I will say that it’s not), Ask Friends, earlier today. The application, as its name suggests, lets you ask your Orkut friends questions, whether is to “to seek and share advice, recommendations, knowledge or plans in private.”

To use this application, first you have to add it to your profile here. Then you can access Ask Friends by clicking the link on the navigation menu on the home page, which is a bit inconvenient (I am not going to use it, but I am just saying). There you can enter you question, select who you want to ask the questions to (either all, or individual friends) and you can enter labels for the question, but that’s optional. The suggested label feature is really cool that it updates with a list of labels based on the content of your question as you type.

It’s everywhere, so please don’t ask yourself, “Haven’t I seen this somewhere before?” You are not having déjà vu.

[via Digital Inspiration]

Orkut announced that they have doubled your album size to allow you to upload 50 photos now!

Wow. ROFLMAO.

UPDATE: They changed 50 to 100 in their blog post, but I caught them forget to change double to quadruple. Hehe, they “doubled 25 to 100″.