Google's Orkut social network isn't just big in Brazil. It's also popular in India, especially among software developers, according to a new survey.
Despite Facebook's efforts to promote that social network as the platform of choice for third-party application developers, Orkut is used by twice as many software programmers in India than either Facebook or MySpace, according to an Evans Data survey of more than 300 developers in India.
Software programmers in that country are heavy users of social networks in general.
Seventy-three percent of those surveyed said they had used Orkut, compared with 35 percent for Facebook and 32 percent for MySpace.
"Capturing mindshare with developers in fast-growing emerging development markets like India and Brazil gives them (Google) a strategic advantage going forward in further cultivating this very important community," Evans Data Chief Executive John Andrews said in a statement.
Google has released new domains specific to India and Brazil as a result of the popularity in those countries.
Update on recent Orkut maintenance
Many of you may have noticed or heard from friends that orkut experienced some downtime. On Monday July 21st we discovered a bug that affected the profiles of a small set of orkut users. Starting at 14:30 PST, our engineering team disabled access to orkut.com while we worked on this issue. We brought orkut.com back up as soon as the bug was fixed, although we temporarily disabled a small number of profiles while we were restoring them. Less than .1% of all orkut users were impacted.
At no time was any user's login information at risk. Additionally, our team has fixed any impacted accounts automatically. As always, you should not click on any links that you receive in your messages folder, scrapbook, or email as we are already taking care of this bug.
At this time, we have notified all impacted users on their orkut homepage (see example below). If you have not received this notification from our team, then your account was not affected. Your safety and security on orkut is the number one priority for our team, so we wanted to be as transparent with you as possible. It's important that we continue to work with our users to provide a safe community for all to enjoy!
New orkut search filters
You may have noticed that lately it's been easier to find what you're looking for when searching on orkut. For example, when you search for a person, we now show people in your network or country at the top of the results list , and we also suggest other terms if we think you've misspelled something. We're always looking to improve search on okrut, which is why we just launched some new search filters that we hope will further aid your searches. Here's how search filters work:
Say you are trying to find a person you met yesterday, but you can't remember his or her complete name. As always, you can type in what you remember of the person's name and hit search. After that, you can refine your search by applying the filters that appear on the right side of our search page. You might start by restricting the search to the languages you speak or the country you're in. To get even better results, try restricting by gender, age, relationship status, children or sexual preference. The more filters you combine, the more specific results will you get.
If you're searching for a community, you can now refine your results to communities that focus on only one specific category. This may help you find what you're looking for faster.
Making orkut more accessible
Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. We know that for visually impaired users, it can be difficult to navigate through orkut using a mouse to point and click on various links. In order to make orkut more accessible to all users, we recently added accesskeys for some commonly used links on orkut. With accesskeys, you no longer need to click your mouse to visit different pages on orkut. For example, if you are using IE, when you press "alt + s", the focus is moved to the "Scrapbook" link at the top of the page. Pressing "enter" will then take you to your scrapbook page.
Please note that different browsers use different control key combinations for accesskeys. On Netscape Navigator and Mozilla Firefox, "alt + shift + s" should take you directly to your scrapbook (you don't need to press "enter"). Similarly, if you hold down "alt+shift," simply press "h" for home, "p" for profile, "b" for friends, "c" for communities, "l" for logout. Almost all browsers support this feature, so please consult your browser manual to find the right key combination for your browser.
Sharing YouTube videos on orkut made simple
Have you ever been watching a funny video on YouTube and decided halfway through that you must share it with your orkut friends? Previously, you had to go to your orkut "favorite videos" page and copy-and-paste the video URL to post these clips. Now you can share videos on orkut directly from YouTube! Click on the orkut logo under the video you are watching on YouTube, and you'll be taken directly to your "favorite videos" page on orkut. The URL of the video you're watching will already be loaded, so all you need to do is hit "add video" to post. Now that it's easier than ever, go ahead and share videos with your friends on orkut.
1
|
.