If You Were An Orkut Engineer For A Day...

(Warning: Another very long post, but there is a cool video at the end which every human, geek and Googler should enjoy)

Thanks to Death Eater I was able to partake of an Orkut survey (not to be confused with the user feedback survey) asking users to rate Orkut overall, suggest new features, rate Orkut against competitors (MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.) and talk about what you enjoyed most about using Orkut.

Although I listed a bunch of features where Google could improve on (as well as highlighting some of their major strengths) I was wondering what three major features would I add to Orkut (aside from RSS feeds and Picasa Albums) if I was a Google engineer for a day?

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Google Calendar: After my palm died (which is another story for another time) I suddenly found my life to be slightly chaotic without a way to quickly organize those ever important details (like meetings, reminders, etc.).

Although my cell phone has been keeping me on time (and on task) I've been slowly transferring my schedule onto Google Calendar which allows my friends, family and manager see how open (or cluttered) my time is throughout the week.

I think adding Google Calendar would be very helpful, especially for businesses using Orkut to network each other, not to mention aiding employees and employers scheduling job interviews.

Note: With Google Calendar allowing users to embed this into web pages via html or RSS, this should not be too difficult.

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Adding Personal Blog: Although having a scrapbook is nice, I think it would be really cool if Orkut enabled users to add their personal blog to their homepage.

Now I am not talking about the type of blog that a user might find in Orkut's cousin Joga, but rather allowing users to add a blog outside of Orkut via site feed and have the top five posts show up on their profile.

Of course if users do not have a blog site Orkut could give them the Joga default, although with such cool blogging tools like Wordpress, Vox and Blogger (of course!), users may prefer to use a blog tool on the outside rather than in house.

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Allow non-Google Videos: One thing I like about the new video playlist is that it enables me to add my favorite videos from Google Video (which I could not do before) and YouTube (which required a separate login account, which I found to be annoying).

Although this saved me much grief in finally collecting all of my favorite videos in one spot, I ran into a major problem: not all of my favorite videos were located on any of Google's video sites.

A perfect example of this is this video which I highlighted on my personal blog as a "must have" computer (which I bet every Googler would love to run at their desk).

I think if Google enabled users to add videos from a host of different sites on Orkut (starting with those that we can already embed with our Google Reader).

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Well, those are my three top features I would add to Orkut. I was wondering, what three features would you add or wish Google included to make your Orkut life easier?

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