We've got great news for users of orkut and Google Chrome (Google's awesome and free web browser): We've just launched a cool orkut extension for Google Chrome.

This extension adds an orkut icon on your browser's toolbar and shows the number of unviewed updates from your friends. When you click the icon, you'll see a drop-down menu with quick links to main orkut pages, plus the number of updates currently on your orkut homepage and scrapbook. This extension also has a "Share this page" link, so you can tell your orkut friends about interesting online content with a single click.

The orkut extension also includes a universal search box that lets you search for content on orkut and jump directly to a friend's profile in a matter of seconds:

The extension lets you work online, or browse the internet while staying up-to-date on the latest happenings on orkut. It pops up new updates on photos, scraps, videos, status messages and applications from your friends as they occur. And you can set the notification interval that works best for you.

To download this new orkut extension visit the installation page. Have fun using orkut on Google Chrome, and don't forget to share your feedback with us!

Posted by Megha Gupta, Satyanarayana M. and Shishir Birmiwal, software engineers

Watching fireworks burst over the Harbour Bridge in Sydney? Having a barbecue with your friends and family in Perth? Today people are gathering all over Australia to celebrate Australia Day, one of the country's largest national celebrations.

Not to be left out of the fun, the orkut team created a special doodle to commemorate the occasion:

If you'd like to learn more about Australia Day, try visiting this Australia community on orkut. If you're celebrating today, be sure to share the good times with the rest of us by posting some photos or a video from the festivities to orkut.

Hope you have a good one!

Posted by Roger James, Google Australia team

It may not have popped up in your birthdays list, but today is orkut's big day: the site is now 6 years old! In the past 6 years we've learned to walk, talk, and color inside the lines, among many other achievements. We've even shaken things up and reinvented ourselves not once but twice!

More importantly, we've made a ton of great friends along the way (over 80 million worldwide), and are happy to include you among them.

To celebrate the day, you might have noticed that we created a special doodle:

Thanks for sticking with us for all of these years. There's plenty more to come from the orkut team, so we look forward to many more birthdays together!

Posted by Ariel, on behalf of the orkut team

As more and more people are switching to the new version of orkut, we thought it would be nice to show you what's new in your new orkut homepage. Check it out:

If you're still using the old version of the site, simply click the "try the new orkut" button, on the top of your old homepage, and try it out!

Once there, explore our new features, and stay posted for more launches coming out soon. If you'd like to share a comment, visit our help forum or official community.

Posted by Ariel, orkut operations team

Have you ever wanted to see updates only from your family members or colleagues? Or have you ever tried to share a photo with college friends and had to select each recipient manually? If you have a lot of friends it could mean selecting dozens of people, one at a time. What if you could easily group them and interact with all of them at once?

As managing a large list of friends and keeping it up-to-date can be very time-consuming and not much fun, we came up with a solution: Auto-Magic Groups, a new feature that, as the name suggests, "automagically" figures out any friend groups you may have and also suggests labels for those groups.

Clicking the "edit groups" link will pull up groups you previously created, as well new groups suggested by orkut. You can reject orkut-suggested groups, or further customize them (the way you do with groups you've created yourself) by naming them and deleting or adding people to existing groups. Also, orkut tries to identify communities most closely related to each group.

This new feature makes it easy to filter your friends' updates based on relevant groups, right on your orkut homepage, so now you can easily see only the updates from a specific group of people at a time. Try it out by selecting a group from the "groups" drop-down menu on your homepage!

Another cool thing is that when you add new friends, orkut will recommend appropriate groups in which they might belong. So, no more selecting groups while making friends -- orkut does the heavy lifting for you! Of course, you can still add them to other groups if you want, and reject any group recommendations made by orkut.

Feel free to share your feedback, and remember to stay tuned -- more features will be added to groups management soon.

Posted by Amogh Asgekar and Sandesh Tawari, software engineers

UPDATE: If you're not seeing this feature yet, don't worry, it's being implemented to all users during the next hours.