Managing your friends (online)

Do you have a lot of friends on orkut? Do you sometimes want to find all your school friends, send a message to all your co-workers, or check out your best friends' karma?

Friend groups have been on orkut for some time now, but we're now making them more accessible throughout the site to make it easier for you to create new groups or add new friends to them. Here's what's changed: when you add a new friend or accept a friend request, you can now select which group(s) you want to add them to. You can also modify these groups (rename them, remove them or add new ones) either when you add or accept a friend, or on the friend management page. And we've turned friendship levels into groups for you, so that you can send messages to all your best friends, or see all the friends on orkut that you haven't met offline yet.

If you're not sure what groups to create, we've made a few default groups to get you started. This will make it easier to categorize your friends. You can always change the name of these groups if they don't suit your particular need.

We're also planning on a bunch of new features so you can use your groups to make the orkut experience more tuned to your needs. Stay tuned!

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orkut trends: The State of orkuters

A question came up in the orkut trends community: What is the distribution of orkut users among the different states in the US? Here's a peek into where US orkuters come from.

All 50 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico are represented. The #1 state is my adopted home (and that of so many other US Googlers), California, with 20% of US orkuters. Next comes the great state of New York (11%), and then two southern states, Florida (8%) and Texas (7%).

In fifth place was Massachusetts, the home of my alma mater, MIT. This state's name had the distinction of being spelled the most incorrect ways by our users. Misspellings including: massachussets, massachussetts, massachusets, massachusettes, massachustes and even massachuster. (I confess to using spell-check to get the right spelling although I resided there for ten years. I guess what they say about engineers and their lack of English skills may be true.)

Rounding out the top ten were New Jersey -- referred to by some as "Joisey" -- at 6%, my home state of Illinois (4%), Georgia (2.5%), Pennsylvania (2.5%) and Virginia (2.4%). Other states making up more than 1% of our US user base were Washington (2.3%), Michigan (2%), Ohio (2%), Connecticut (1.9%), Maryland (1.7%), North Carolina (1.6%), Arizona (1.4%), Minnesota (1.1%), and Colorado (1%). Least represented were the sparsely populated states of North Dakota (.07%), South Dakota (.07%), and Wyoming (.06%).

I was intrigued by the number of US orkuteers residing in "states" which I had never heard of. One such state is Fakelandia (4555 residents) and its presumed capital Fakecity (158). I was disappointed that there were more residents of Hell (367) and Inferno (356) than of Heaven (135). I would enjoy visiting the residents of the magical states of Disney (346) and Hogwarts (247), or the neighbors of the fictional Simpsons in Springfield (175). While I have spent many happy hours observing Sim City, unlike 107 orkut users, I do not reside there.

Until next time, may your state be a happy one!

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