Are you a fan of Orkut? (social networking site of google). Then there is one more interesting news from the website. If you are using orkut , you might be having an idea of updates, the updates which appear on your homepage when friends add any images or text/URLs to their profile and vice versa. Cool, but are you getting enough attention? No? Don't worry, why not place an ad on your friend's page? Nice idea, but it will cost, isn't it? No , not now. Orkut has recently added a feature "Promote". By this users can promote things on their friend's home.Just see the image below, where a promotion by a friend appears on my homepage replacing ads.

UPDATE : This Promtion stuff is all of old orkut and with almost many people are on new orkut - the images may not be relavent, but still you can promote on orkut - but promote link doesn't appear on orkut home page now - to go to your promotions - use this link --> http://www.orkut.co.in/Main#Promote or http://www.orkut.com/Main#Promote

The above image is a screen capture of my homepage showing a "Promotion" , this occupies the normal space of advertisment, so this place show google ads and user's promotions.

Just click on promote link to start

Pretty Nice, isn't it? So you can place ads ( ya.. promotions) that too free- absolutely free (as of now). So start promoting.. but how? Can everyone do it? ya .. why not?

1. Click  promote on the left sidebar of your profile or homepage.
2. Enter a title and a comment.
3. Choose if you'd like to add more text, a YouTube video, or one of your public orkut photos.
4. As you add different elements to your promotion, the preview box will update to reflect your changes.
5. When you are satisfied with your promotion, click create promotion.

Another screen capture of my orkut page, On Clicking my promotions it shows how many viewed and how many clicked.

 By the way, When you first create a promotion, only your friends will be able to see it. However, if one of your friends decides they like it enough to promote it themselves, then all of their friends will also be able to see it, and these friends of friends too can share your promotion, and so forth.

So that is all about promote, so start promoting. Pretty nice, but drawback is even though it says it supports, scrap shortcuts... URLs don't parse as links, so when you post some link- users have to copy paste the URL to their browser to view it.. huff... and another thing, you can Promote those photos which are in your album and that too public ones and not from other sites..

Any way, why not try a hand and promote some business . From what I can see, google has got enough traffic and now thinking of ways to make cash out of it. May be the Google ads that are being displayed on User's pages are not paying enough, so Google is now encourage to freely promote and may this be helpful in visitors concentrating the area where ads are being displayed and may be Google might charge some fee too afterwards, for promoting.. Lets see....

So keep visiting for more updates.... Btw , if you can't get any thing from my such a long post - click here to see the help article and video by google.