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Orkut goes Private

by Sujoy on April 29, 2008

OrkutLike it or not, Orkut is potentially one of the largest social networks around. While people in general, and industry specialists in particular have always termed it as Google’s unsuccessful social network, to be only successful in India, Pakistan and Brazil, but they always ignored the number of users that Orkut has from these three countries. The communities that Orkut brings in have recorded members more than a million. Yes, as huge as that!! Anyway, this post is about how Google is actually revealing more and more new features into the social networking site.

In the latest post on Orkut Blog, Orkut’s Vlad Patryshev talks about the new privacy features that Orkut has brought into the forefront. We aready have been seeing the changes in the add-friends section. The appearance of the check box and manage friends section. The blog says,

In addition to having your privacy settings to be just “friends” or “everyone,” you can now select also “friend of friends.” We feel that this is a good choice for those of you who may wish to share your information with an extended group of friends without making it public to everyone. We hope this additional flexibility helps you manage your experience on orkut better.

What could be next from their sleeve? Guess, we just have to wait and watch. At Techkeyla, we definitely are watching.

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Earth Day on the Web

by Sujoy on April 22, 2008

You see the following logo on the Google Homepage today. It is 22nd April, the Earth day and Google is celebrating it.

Green Goog

The interesting thing is, Yahoo is also showing it’s green colors. Should we say, it’s “green with envy”. LOL. See the logo below.

Green Yahoo

Anyway, Google has many plans rolled out for the Earth Day. Google ‘s Official blog reports the following:

1. A Google Desktop gadget called the Energy Saver. It is a plugin for the Google Desktop and will manage power settings for your computer and turn it to sleep when you are not using it for a long period.

2. The post also tells us of many other blogs who are celebrating Earth Day . One of them is a story of the reduction of paper use by using the online ( read Google docs) alternative.

It’s 9 pm, and HBO is showing “An Inconvenient Truth” here in India. It is indeed high time that we all geared up and acted positively to make our planet Earth a better place to live in . From today onwards, I shall be actively blogging about environmental issues and also about news from all across the world related to it. Do remember to check out the category GREEN to stay updated with my posts. And what better to call this little project as “Project Green”. So all my posts pertaining to Project Green will be indexed on a single page as well, and expect PG on the titles. Peace! Green Peace!!

And to all my readers, and also to all who do not read this: Happy Earth Day :D

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GMail Blog Notifier on the GMail Homepage

by Sujoy on April 18, 2008

Here’s what I mean by the headline! Look at the pic below.

Gmail Blog

GMail as well as Google is for sure going through a lot of changes and has been continuously trying to improve and implement innovations in their wide range of services. This one is definitely a welcome change,which will prompt more people to read the Blog. Is it a stunt to push the Technorati Rank further? LOL. C’mon. What a week it has been for Google. First, the Opensocial Apps on Orkut, and now this. Btw, the post that’s showing on the GMail page is this . “9 Reasons to Archive“. The best reason here is no.6 which says-

6. Winning arguments
“But on May 5, 2005 at 8:43pm EDT you said….”

Fantastic post. Adios!

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Okay, I will not wrap this up in any form of introductory bullshit. Lemme get this straight and right to the point. The Apps on Orkut are ALIVE..finally. I was buzzed on my GTalk today by my friend Praxy, who told me that he noticed certain changes in Orkut, right as we were speaking. It was a bit hard to digest coz I had just logged out of my Orkut account a few hours back and I had noticed nothing. So, what was next? I logged in to find the first surprise. My account Homepage showed the following pick.

Orkut Home

Just like the introductory Facebook message which invited us to install more and more apps. Well, for me, it was high time. Remember OpenSocial Alliance had been formed and announced way back in the 1800s, I mean in November last year. And now, it’s more than 3 months over of 2008. Still, I hadn’t seen any signs of anything to do with OpenSocial out here on Orkut. (A brief tutorial for all those who do not know about Orkut. It is one of the most visited Social Networking sites by Google, on which the entire online society of India, Pakistan and Brazil resides. And that means, it has a HUGE user base. It’s true that Facebook has invaded a space which was ruled previously by MySpace, and arguably still is. But then, Orkut is HUGE in this part of the world, much like Bebo is still much larger in the UK than any other social network.) The brief ask the question addition was at best an annoying and minuscule addition which didn’t even qualify as an application. But the wait is now over. The apps are here for you , and this is where they are. The page is called the App Directory, and the list looks like the following:

[Continue Reading]

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