Enjoy Orkut Apps By Changing Your Country To Estonia!

From last few days I was surprised to see many users changed their country to Estonia. At the same time orkut blog was driving me mad by unveiling about new apps everyday but not giving any link to use them outside orkut sandbox.

All this end when a scrap-all spam appeared in my orkut scrapbook saying change your county to Estonia and see magic!. Normally I never act on spam scraps but I decided to give a try as I wanted to figure out Da Estonia Code. πŸ˜€

So I changed my county and surprised to see application directory link appeared on my normal profile as shown in following screenshot.

image

So the crux of this story is, if you want to enjoy orkut apps before they will be released for rest of the world, you can enjoy them right now by changing your country to Estonia.

The Apps Menu and Edit link will let you add as many orkut apps as you want. But there is a catch! All this is for Estonian orkut users, so even if you add some cool apps to your profile, non-Estonian orkut user will continue to see your normal profile! πŸ™

Now as I have access to sandbox as well as this Estonia hack, FYI I will continue to test apps via Orkut sandbox methods. About Estonia bug, all I can say another lame move from orkut team. And things I feel lame include…

  • First no official post regarding this on Orkut blog!
  • Orkut should not allow to change country for any number of times! There must be limitation like once in 3 months
  • Why Estonia, if they wanted to roll Orkut apps they should have gone to Brazil, which is largest and oldest base of orkut users.
  • The whole idea of country specific testing is wrong. Things should have been tested only in sandbox and they made public once for all countries.
  • If there is some another purpose of going for a particular county, then atleast they should have checked IP address of user for some sort of Geo targeting.

Anyway another such lame change was used long time back by us to find dates on orkut in your city. It still works! πŸ˜‰

Related Links: Orkut Sandbox | First Orkut App | Orkut dating trick to find date in your city

Disclaimer: Although I have mentioned in this article that I acted upon a spam scrap, I used a fake orkut account first to check the things. Please bear in mind that for your safety we encourage you NOT to act on any untrusted or spam communication! Read more

11 Comments

Darnell Clayton April 5, 2008

Thanks for the tip Rahul! Although I am a little underwhelmed that Estonia was chosen (and not Brazil and India).

Oh well, at least everyone else will be able to test these apps out for themselves.

Rahul Bansal April 7, 2008

@Darnell
Thanks Darnell for dropping by here… πŸ™‚
After going through wikipedia entry about Estonia, I guess only reason for its choice is its small population!

margo April 9, 2008

One tiny fact more. Skype and Kazaa are made by Estonians πŸ™‚

Rahul Bansal April 10, 2008

@Margo
Cool one. I did not know it! :O

sidharth October 27, 2010

i tried nothing hppned