What happens when one man uses his favorite social networking site to share his dreams, inspirations, and ideas? In the case of Pawandheer, it snowballs into a community of over 3000 members that hosts more than 40,000 photos and boasts hundreds of topics related to subjects as varied as yoga, blood donation, and great literary works.

Pawandheer, a 21 year-old media student in Andhra Pradesh, formed the community Orkut Photo Gallery MPG to share poetry, short stories, quotes and photographs with like-minded others. Through the active participation of its members, MPG has blossomed into a platform to discuss an incredibly diverse array of topics. Thanks to the hard work of its group of 30 odd moderators known as Team MPG, the community has turned into a true online resource. Take a look at this discussion on numerology and you'll find more than 700 posts focused solely on defining each of the numbers and the characteristics of people associated with them. Now you know where to go to read more about yourself or your partner!

Though most of MPG's members and moderators have never actually met in person, the goodwill and respect they have for one another allows the community to flourish. What’s next for this enthusiastic bunch? Regional meetings to plan the launch of a youth magazine later this year.

The orkut team is thrilled that orkut has helped to connect such an interesting and engaged group of people. Have a similar story that you'd like to share? Visit the orkut Help Forum and let us know. We'd love to feature you on the official orkut blog.

Posted by Robin Schriebman and David Wu, software engineers

Orkut is all about bringing real friends together no matter where they may be. Now that we've made it possible for all of you to chat with your friends inside orkut, we figured it was time to make the chat experience even richer. That's why we're so pleased to announce the launch of orkut video chat– a great new way for you and your friends to keep in touch face-to-face directly from your orkut homepage.

Have a webcam connected to your computer? Just take a few seconds to download a small plugin, install it, and you'll be all set to go.

Once you're signed in to orkut, you can tell which of your friends are also ready to video chat by the small green camera icons next to their names in your chat list.

When you find a friend you want to chat with, open a chat window and click on the "Start video chat" link in the "Actions" menu. If you want to get a better view of your friend, you can pop out your chat window and increase the size all the way up to full-screen.

Video chat makes it easy to keep in touch with everyone you know by letting you chat with friends signed in via Gmail and iGoogle, even if they're not orkut users. We hope this new feature helps you stay connected to the people you care about and makes orkut an even more fun place to hang out. If you've got feedback about video chat you'd like to share, we'd like to hear it– so just head to the orkut help forum and let us know!

Posted by Robin Schriebman and David Wu, software engineers

If you're as much of an orkut addict as I am, you probably spend a decent amount of time visiting friends' profiles and seeing what they're up to. While browsing, I'm often surprised to find people that I know (friends of friends), who I didn't even realize had orkut profiles. While I often use the search feature to find specific friends I want to add, up until now, there hasn't been an easy way to find those friends of mine I wouldn't think to search for.

We on the orkut team figured we could make things easier on everyone by offering suggestions of people you might want to be friends with on your orkut home page. With the new orkut friend suggestions feature, we use an algorithm to automatically create a list of people on orkut who you might know, and display it right below your birthday reminders.

Not only does the friend suggestions feature make it easy to find new friends, it also lets you add them to your friends list and send them a short message without ever leaving your home page. Just click the "add as friend" link below your friend's photo, customize the message you want to send (or use the predefined message we've created for you), and click "send invite."

We originally developed this feature to help people who were new to orkut to quickly and easily find all of their friends who had already joined, but soon realized that it could be just as useful to any orkut user, regardless of how many friends they have. As such, we've decided to make it available to all of you. We're currently in the process of rolling it out, so if you haven't seen it yet, don't worry, we'll be sure to get to you soon.

Have feedback about orkut friend suggestions? Visit the orkut Help Forum and let us know.

Hope this new feature helps you make even more orkut friends!

Posted by Eduardo Tejada, software engineer