A Proper Goodbye for the login page faces!
October 1st, 2007 | Published in Google Orkut
As the new look of the site was rolling out several weeks ago, we were paying especially close attention to the feedback you provided via the help center and help group. There were some minimal bugs, as to be expected with a launch of this size, but for the most part, the feedback on the redesign was pretty minimal. Instead, we were surprised to find that a lot of you had more comments about the new login page. We got a lot of questions like "where did the faces go?" and "when are they coming back?" Apologies for the delayed reponse on this one, but thought I'd let you know that those login faces have been retired (at least for the time being). Why? We work every day to keep the site up and running and to improve the experience that you have on orkut. This includes launching new features like Updates from my friends and feeds and adding new languages like Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Tamil and Telugu, as well as some less glamorous tasks like keeping the "no donut for you" messages to a minimum. We believe that a faster site is a better site, and we understand that there is nothing more frustrating than waiting for pages to load! And though beautiful, the orkut faces that greeted you on the homepage were slowing down your experience. So while you may miss these smiling faces, you'll get to your homepage to check out your friends smiling faces faster. And as much as we liked showing you our pictures every day on the homepage, we know you care about your pictures a lot more ;)