Have your Orkut user interface look like Office 2007 visual style

Posted on August 14, 2007 at 1:38 pm

For all of the big time users of Google’s Orkut social networking service, you can now spruce up the kind of boring and clunky interface to look more like Office 2007. Office 2007 Orkut Styler will give you those nice looking tabs you have at the top of all the Office programs, a sleek looking scrapbook, and a lot more. In order to use the new visual style, you have to be running on Firefox and install an add-on. Unfortunately, there is no add-on for Internet Explorer at this time.

The way the plug-in basically works is that it takes the normal looking page from Orkut, put it through a type of filter, and spits out a better looking version of the same thing. So this means that it will only work on the computer that you install the plug-in on, not any other machine.

Here’s an example of how the front page differs with the plug-in installed:

As you can see, you have tabs across the tab rather than simply text separated by lines. Also, the background changes to white for the main area, which I prefer more than blue. The email, settings, help, and logout are moved down below the tabs for easier access. Here are some more screen shots of the updated interface:

Scrapbook

Friends

Topics

Other changed pages include Search, Login, Messages, Communities, and Settings. You can learn more about how to install the Firefox add-on or view more images of the interface at OrkutAddOns.

So if you’re an Orkut user, go ahead and get some style! Enjoy!