Anant Shrivastava : Techno Enthusiast

Orkut has recently done a lot of changes to its UI  engine,

most prominent being

1)light version of orkut comming to thewild covered here 

2) Theming Engine (finally out in wild)

3) Photo tagging feature : one of the few features of facbook which should have long been imported to orkut.

So this post is to let everyone know that they can now decorate their orkut profile with legitimate themes and not those creepy greasemonkey based themes.

for this you have to go to profile -> themes tab. or click here

or just select change theme on the top right hand  side.

currently orkut has a limited set of themes they will be increasing them, but the actual fun will start as soon as they start letting user’s build their own themes. (just like blogger.)

NOTE : one thing i would like to remove from all themes is the big header, it realy takes up quite a lot of screen portion.

PHOTO TAGGING.

A very much awaited feature which was one of the reason’s why i liked facebook a lot.

This will help those who are looking for old picture’s or unable to find their group photographs to catalog their pics properly.

and this also removes the limitation of uploading pics again and again on each profile (in case of group pics) , you jsut tag the pics properly and it will let everyone know that tagging is done (i.e a pic is found with thier name in it.)

NOTE : if some one tagged you in his pics you get a notification on your mail id that  you have been tagged.

TAGGING IN ACTION

I hope orkut keeps improving on its standard’s

hello orkut freaks,

in a silent move today orkut has introduced a new feature in its User Interface.

Now users with low bandwidth has an option to switch to light edition and this is prominently placed by a banner display if the page loading time exceed certain limit.

also the feature can be accessed through  setting also.

This low bandwidth version or what we can call lite  edition of orkut has following features most prominently visible one’s

1) Pictures ae not shown except profile pic.

2)  birthday list turns into a calender with name’s listing only.

Also Apps are by default minimized now and on selecting particular app its data is fetched.

In short by removing these picture’s a lot of bandwidth can be saved

But a lot more could have been saved if embedded object’s could have been reduced to links.

big time for orkut fan’s

first time opensocial has yielded some results.

orkut has launched orkut apps with some minor enhancements in cosmetics of orkut layout also.

currently the apps database has only 18 apps

1. Music iLike
2. Emote
3. Photoattack
4. horoscopes
5. TypeRacers
6. Top friends by slide.com
7. SlideTV by Slide.com
8. My Hangman
9. iRead
10. Flixter Movies
11. ChakPak Movies
12. Reading Social
13. Bible Verses
14. INdia Dekha
15. Teen Patti
16. Hangout
17. BuboMe
18. Music And Movies

But if you look at the list closely you find many applications resembling close to each other
Like we have 3 movies apps and 2 books apps.

so that should be avoided.

and i tested 3 apps till now
1) iRead – working fine with all features
2) Flixter Movies – Going smooth.
3) Music iLike – interface not opening on FF3 beta, hope it works on other’s

Well lets see what this leads to, if they can work properly then apps can realy make orkut a rocking place.

BUT STILL SOME ISSUES LOOM LARGE

1) many of these apps are available on facebook, can the users import their data here,
2) what about generic site data. mean’s like for example some one has account at flixter can hi import data on orkut app.

for reference my orkut profile is
http://www.orkut.com/Profile.aspx?uid=3169045171018903779