A new bug in Orkuts “Updates from my friends” feature redirects user to his/her own profile when link is supposedly pointing to some other profile on Orkut.

As part of updates from friends, an entry is displayed whenever your friend receives a testimonial from someone on orkut. Structure of this entry is like below:

It contains three links

1. Link to Profile of the person who received testimonial
2. Link to testimonial itself
3. Link to Profile of the person who sent testimonial

Out of above three, link to profile of sender is broken. In orkut, all profiles links have a uid parameter whose value uniquely identify a profile on orkut as shown below…

First Link (valid)

Last Link (invalid)

As you can see in above screenshots, value of uid is missing in link to testimonial senders profile. When a user click on such links, he is redirected to his own profile which is confusing as he was expecting someone’ else profile.

This bug is not at all severe from security point of view but it highlights (again) careless attitude of Orkut team towards their social-networking service. What is more embarrassing for Orkut team is timing of this bug, which coincides with recent announcement regarding same feature on official orkut blog.

Thanks Imroz for tip…

Related: Adding Custom Images to Orkut User Status Updates

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