Paul Krill
Editor at Large

Google fixing bugs in Orkut social network

news
Jul 9, 20102 mins

Orkut product manager cites issues related to frequent updating of open source software as a factor in spotty service

Google’s Orkut social networking site has been beset with bugs lately, leading the company to apologize for spotty service.

Orkut is an online community intended to make participants’ social life more active and stimulating. The Orkut engineering team is working to address recent issues with the site, said Eduardo Thuler, Orkut product manager at Google, in a blog post on Friday. He cited issues related to the frequent updating of open source software as a factor.

“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,” Thuler said.

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“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,” he said.

Google also has had to deal with getting viewer and owner information via data pipelining, a process that broke. The company was working to fix this as of Friday, according to Thuler.

This article, “Google fixing bugs in Orkut social network,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the latest developments in business technology news and get a digest of the key stories each day in the InfoWorld Daily newsletter and on your mobile device at infoworldmobile.com.

Paul Krill

Paul Krill is editor at large at InfoWorld. Paul has been covering computer technology as a news and feature reporter for more than 35 years, including 30 years at InfoWorld. He has specialized in coverage of software development tools and technologies since the 1990s, and he continues to lead InfoWorld’s news coverage of software development platforms including Java and .NET and programming languages including JavaScript, TypeScript, PHP, Python, Ruby, Rust, and Go. Long trusted as a reporter who prioritizes accuracy, integrity, and the best interests of readers, Paul is sought out by technology companies and industry organizations who want to reach InfoWorld’s audience of software developers and other information technology professionals. Paul has won a “Best Technology News Coverage” award from IDG.

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