Sent this as feedback to Orkut today …

I’ve only been using Orkut for a few days, but so far I’m enjoying the environment. There are two suggestions that I think would make things a bit more comfortable. At the same time I appreciate you are in a beta phase, so it’s feedback not criticism!

– An option in user settings to set timezone would make it easier to keep track of forum activity. Right now, if I glance at the summary in ‘Communities’, I have to do a calculation to figure out how recent the posting is. Even though I deal with people in multiple timezones on a regular basis, it’s a pain in the arse. Localising the time to the user setting is more friendly

– Session timeouts are a good thing from a security point of view. However, it would be nice if it was configurable or could be switched off. I wander from my machine regularly (tea, smoke, chat etc. and when I return I can’t tell if my session is still active. Thus there are two steps involved in continuing my ‘session’ (click something to find if I’m still active then click again to login).

An alternative to this setting based approach would be to implement a session timeout method that updated the page. The page update could give me a timeout warning/message and present me with a login box (one click to log back in).