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!
