Fully integrated chat in orkut– that's what I'm talkin' 'bout!

As so many of our friends are constantly on orkut, sending scraps, commenting on photos, and bumping hips on BuddyPoke, we figured it was time to make it easy for you to chat directly with your orkut friends whenever they come online. That's why we are excited to announce a fully integrated version of Google Talk that works seamlessly from within orkut, with no install or separate window required.


I'm sure many of you (especially you social butterflies with hundreds of orkut friends), are concerned about being bombarded with chat requests every time you go online. Not to worry! To get you started, we've come up with a formula that automatically predicts which of your orkut friends you probably want to chat with, and only tells those people that you're signed into Google Talk. Our formula takes a bunch of things into consideration, giving preference to people who you've labeled as 'best friends' or written scraps to recently, and people who have friends in common with you.

We realize that no one knows who you'd like to talk to better than you do, so we've also made it easy for you to add and remove people from your list of orkut chat friends. To make changes to the list, just go to the revamped Google Talk settings page. Don't worry, only you can see your list of chat friends, so there's no need to worry about any hurt feelings when you make changes. :-)

If you already use Google Talk, either on its own or as part of Gmail, then your friends signed into Google Talk in other applications will also be able to chat with you when you come online.


To sum up, the new Google Talk in orkut lets you:

* chat with your orkut friends in real time from directly within orkut
* control which of your orkut friends can chat with you
* chat with your Google Talk and Gmail chat contacts
* visit different orkut pages while keeping your chatboxes open


We hope you have as much fun with this new feature as we've had creating it. We'll be rolling it out to all of our users over the next few weeks, so keep your eyes peeled for a note from us.