Orkut App Issues Being Addressed

The Orkut engineering team has been hard at work addressing some recent issues and we would like to provide a status update and apologize for the inconvenience our spotty service may have caused you. We’re not done yet, but we wanted to explain to you what happened and what corrective measures we’re taking to ensure it doesn’t happen again:

First, Orkut is based on open source software that is subject to frequent updates, which we then pull and merge into the Orkut code tree. A result is that this can sometimes makes bugs harder to discover and fix. We accidentally began overwriting user app preferences, which resulted in the activity updates not getting posted, but this has now been fixed.

Another unexpected effect was that getting viewer and owner information via data pipelining also became broken, and we’re still working to fix this.

Lastly, we had a problem with our directory listing that led to some featured apps being reported as “being reviewed.” We’ve already identified how to fix this permanently, and the fix should be live in a few days.

Once again, we would like to apologize for these bugs. Thanks to everyone for their patience these past weeks as we’ve focused on fixing these issues, and don’t forget to check this forum thread for status updates.

By Eduardo Thuler, Orkut product manager