Share the (photographic) wealth! Now you can share your orkut photos with whoever you want

It seems like pretty much everyone knows at least one person who loves photography. The orkut team is no different– Navneet, one of the orkut engineers, is absolutely obsessed with taking pictures. Whenever we leave the office, he immediately whips out his camera and starts snapping photos of everything in sight. (I once caught him taking a close-up picture of my left foot– needless to say, I was not pleased.) All of these photos are of course uploaded to orkut, where he invites his orkut friends to compliment him on his artistic prowess. Like any budding artiste, however, our Navneet is constantly seeking exposure to a wider audience. To help Navneet share his "gift" with the world, and to help all of the rest of us stay connected with our friends who don't have orkut accounts, we're excited to announce a new photo sharing feature on orkut. Now you can share your orkut photos with all of your friends who have email addresses, whether they use orkut or not.

Here's how it works:

When you create an album, go to the "share with" drop down menu and choose "only selected friends". In addition to being able to enter the names of your friends on orkut who you want to share photos with, now you can include the email addresses of all of your friends who aren't on orkut as well.




If you decide that you want to share or stop sharing an album that you've already uploaded, just click on the blue "Share Album" button to add/remove whichever friends you want from your "Currently Shared List."



All of the non-orkut friends that you've included in the list will be emailed a special URL bringing them to your photo album. As this is a limited-access orkut page, your non-orkut friends will not be able to view your profile or any other part of orkut unless they join the site.

Keep in mind that non-orkut friends who receive the link to your orkut photo albums can (and, if your photos are interesting enough, probably will) forward it on to other people who may also want to check your photos out. The only way to ensure absolute privacy over your photos is to restrict your album to specific orkut friends, as we showed you in the last blog post.

So, whether you want to share your graduation glamour shots with all of your friends and relatives (even the ones who've never used orkut), or have photos from the party that you threw last weekend that you'd rather limit to just a few people, photo albums on orkut now give you the ability to choose.

As Navneet can attest to, sharing photos is too much fun to limit just to orkut users. So get out there and start inviting all of your friends, family, and coworkers to join in the experience with you!

Source Orkut Blog.

Google Unveiling Orkut Apps To The Public

After several months of testing, Google is planning on releasing the first batch of (hopefully) many Orkut apps to the public.

(Orkut Official Blog) Starting this month, we're enabling developers to make their social applications available to orkut users. We'll start ramping up to more than 50 million people over the next few weeks.

To prepare for this growth, we're now accepting social applications. For a while now, developers have been able to write, test, and play with applications on orkut. Later this month, however, we're going to start rolling them out to orkut users. OpenSocial developers can submit their completed applications (deadline: Feb. 15).

While Google is silent on the total number of apps being tested in the Orkut Sandbox, those with access can test (and check out) a variety of applications over at the OpenSocial Directory.

It will be interesting to see which applications make the cut, although I am hoping that the Orkut Facebook App is approved, not to mention the various chat programs (especially Google Talk, although the greasemoneky version looks better in my opinion).

Photo Albums on orkut

Now that you can have 100 photos, we thought you might want to organize them into multiple albums to make it easier for you and others to enjoy. We were looking for ways to group all of our photos on orkut based on the different experiences that they shared. Today, orkut will be launching Photo Albums! Have many photos from a recent trip? Create an album specifically for that trip. Lots of pics from a recent night out with friends? Create another album with just those photos!

All of your current photos will be stored by default in their own album. Feel free to setup new ones by going to "photos" from your homepage. Once you have created an album, simply click on it and start uploading new photos inside. You can also change the cover photo by clicking on "edit" of the photo that you want to appear, and then selecting "album cover."

All of us from orkut look forward to sharing our latest photos with you!

Defense Ministry Watches Orkut Closely

The defense ministry has taken steps to ensure that military secrets are not leaked through the social networking site, Orkut, though no violations have been reported so far, parliament was informed Wednesday.

"Defense personnel are periodically sensitized to nuances of military security and the implication of sharing classified information with strangers on social networks. They are also aware of the implications of such sharing under the Official Secrets Act,"

Defense Minister A.K. Antony said in a written reply in the Rajya Sabha.

"No report pertaining to sharing of classified defense information on social networking sites involving defense service personnel has come to the notice of the government," he added.

According to the minister, directions have also been issued to

"take stern action against defaulters"

using the Internet at large for passing on defense secrets.

Antony also detailed the steps being taken to ensure that foreign intelligence agencies did not gain access to India's military secrets through the Internet.

These included sensitization of defense and civilian personnel at all levels, with special attention paid to new entrants at training institutes; regular policy guidelines being issued for compliance; and checks/audits undertaken by in-house teams to locate any breach, the minister stated.