Was it something we said? On Friday, we featured a snapshot of Googler Orkut Buyukkokten — yes, that Orkut. The photo appeared in Google engineering manager Niniane Wang's Smugmug gallery of a 2006 party held at colleague Orkut Buyukkokten's South of Market loft. The page now has a password, but it's trivially easy to guess: The street on which the party was held, all lowercase.

Blogoscoped, Phillip Lenssen's authoritative Google blog, just posted its 2008 predictions for Larry and Sergey's money machine. And if you're up for trudging through his 2,701 words, by all means, go. For the rest of you, here are the bullet points.

Who's the mysterious force behind "My World," Google's rumored foray into virtual worlds? Signs point to Google engineering manager Niniane Wang who's currently leading a "confidential project," which was thought to be a virtual world back in January. According to her resume, the project relies on C++ and Java — both languages are used in serious game development. Prior to her move to California in 2003, she was a lead design engineer at Microsoft Games working on Flight Simulator 2004 and racing games. Sounds like the perfect background for a fly-through metaverse.