A couple of weeks ago, Orkut, a Google owned social networking site which primarily has users from India and Brazil, rolled out its "new version". Upon going through the site and the screenshots, there there appeared to be very little that was "new" about the new Orkut in terms of features; only an updated user interface. During the course of a conversation with Google India Product Manager Rahul Kulkarni in Bangalore last week, we learned that this is among the biggest changes to Orkut yet, only, the changes are primarily under the hood. The New Platform All this while, Orkut had been running on legacy code which made it difficult to experiment with. Kulkarni said that they needed to switch to a platform with which everything is fast, scalable and easy to iterate with. "We're using the Google WebToolkit, which is also used for Wave. With it, we can program in Java, and it automatically gets converted for Javascript optimized for various browsers; we don't have to worry about hard-coding Javascript just to optimize little things. The platform will enable us to pilot changes more often: what we have put out right now is the first revision of a user interface that will continuously change over the next six to eight months or a year. What we are going to try experimenting with is to try surfacing things selectively and ranking things better." The transition took them almost a year, and Kulkarni says they were aware there wouldn't be "big…
