Orkut Promoting Google Chrome (But Will The Masses Defect From IE?)

(Hat Tip: Ajay from Techtites)

Unless you have never visited the Google homepage during the past week, turned on the television or even read the comic book (which TechCrunch sold for almost $3200 USD) then you probably have heard of Google Chrome.

Google has been promoting their latest browser on several of their corporate blogs (not to mention launching two corporate blogs for Chrome), and it looks as if they are now promoting Chrome on Orkut as well (which I took a screen shot within Opera).

The link leads to the Google Chrome home page, and after successfully downloading Chrome (and logging back into Orkut) you are greeted with this page:

Note: For those of you who do not get the donut joke, it goes back to the days when Orkut was really unstable.

Anyways some people may wonder why Google would be promoting Chrome on Orkut, especially since their are other great browsers such as Firefox and Opera?

My theory is that Google is trying to get users off of Internet Explorer (aka IE) which most of the Orkut population uses.

Hopefully people will consider switching away from IE (especially IE6 which is a hackers paradise), although Orkut may have to implement extra features (note: perhaps Google gears for Orkut scrapbooks, profiles?) in order to convince the masses to leave.

Related: For Firefox junkies desiring to also make the switch, Gaurav from Orkut Plus posted a great hack on how to make GreaseMonkey scripts work with Google Chrome.

Google Secret? Orkut Mail To Receive A Facelift?

I guess I was not the only person who saw this. On the official Orkut blog, the Google team published a post (which they now have deleted--it was originally posted here) highlighting a new look for Orkut email.

Here is the full post (with their screen shot) below:

(Official Orkut Blog) We are constantly working to make your orkut experience better, and while this includes adding new, useful features on the site, like new search features and support for applications, it also includes improving your experience when you are not logged-in to orkut.com. Recently we released a better orkut experience for your smartphone, and now you'll see snazzier emails from orkut.

We decided it was time to change our emails to give them a look and feel more like orkut.com pages. We started by giving a new look to the emails that are associated with orkut's most popular features: scrap alerts, testimonials, friend requests, photo tagging, crushes and teaser alerts, as well as the emails for social events, which is a brand new feature.

Now, you will be able to feel like you're inside orkut even before you click the links sent in our e-mails.

Posted by Diogo Kropiwiec, Software Engineer

I do not know why they pulled the post down, although you can see "shadows" of the post thanks in part to a Google search (note: how ironic?)

Fortunately a copy of the post was saved in my feed reader, although I am wondering if anybody else came across this in their site feeds? (or email subscriptions?)

Update (9/27): Google finally republishes post on their blog.