Web Shots

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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How to Watch and Download HQ videos on Youtube

by Sujoy on April 27, 2008

**UPDATE**

If you are looking for Youtube HD, please look at the following posts

Search for HD videos on YouTube

How to Watch and Download Youtube Videos in HD

YouTube HD for Dummies : Search, Watch, Download

Youtube HQ

We all know that Youtube had introduced the option of uploading High Quality Videos and also given the option of viewing these Videos in the High Quality Version. Now, out of the millions of videos out there,

only a few have the option shown on the video page itself which reads : Watch in High Quality. Now the HQ version definitely take longer time to buffer. But here’s how you can even watch those videos in HQ where the “Watch in High Quality Link” is not available. Here’s the hack: Just add &fmt=18 at the end of the URL of the Video (i.e. The Youtube link in the address bar of your browser), and the video which will be shown will be the HQ version.

Now, some videos do show a significant difference in the Quality of the Sound as well as the Video Quality. But for some, the Video remains as compressed as the Low-Q version. But one thing’s for sure. The audio bitrate of the HQ version is definitely much better. So that’s it: Just by adding &fmt=18 at the end of the Video Link, you can watch the HQ version of the video. (It is advisable to opt for the HQ version only if you have a fast broadband connection, else you might just be spending ages for the video to even start buffering).

e.g. Here’s the original Low-Q version of Paul Pott’s on the Oprah Winfrey Show, and here’s the HQ version. The Video doesn’t show much of a significant increase in quality here, but the audio is definitely much better.

Second example: Here you will watch a smudged, compressed Low-Q version of Paul Potts’ Hello Message. And then, here the sharper,a bit pixelised, but definitely Higher-Q version. Not only did the audio quality increased, but there is an evident increase in the Video Quality as well.

And how to download them. Although there are many Firefox extensions to do the same, here I’ll suggest a one-stop solution. Just visit KeepVid.com. It has a very green address bar. Just paste the URL of your Youtube video you wish to download and hit the Download button on the right. You’ll be given two links. One is of the Low-Q version (which is in FLV), and the other is the High-Q version (which is in MP4 playable on your PMPs,iPods etc.). So there you have it, you have learnt to view your Youtube Videos in High-Q and now how to download them as well. Now thank me. C’mon, be a bit generous to the services

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All About Facebook Chat. It is HERE!

by Sujoy on April 23, 2008

Awright!!! It is finally here. Facebook IM. It is cool, it is handy and it’s almost non-existent, at least by the looks. It is really cool , coz you don’t have to actually browse away to some other application to chat with your buddies. And this is what you get. On your Facebook page, on the bottom right corner, you’d have noticed a change today. Yes, it is IM integrated into Facebook. See the screenshot below.

Facebook IM

Unlike orkut, which just shows who’s online on GTalk, with that green dot beside your profile pic, Facebook IM is what it is!! A simple and functional IM within the social networking giant. It is very easy. You can check who among your buddies are online and well go ahead and strike a conversation. The functionality doesn’t work with IE 6 or below. But then, who’s using that? Works on Firefox and Flock just perfectly. Haven’t checked on Opera or Safari.

If you are facing any problem seeing Facebook Chat, here’s the official help page.

Inside Facebook has the details in their story here.

Check out Nick O Neill’s post as well on the new Facebook IM .

And for those who are still hungry, here’s the Official Facebook Blog Link titled “Now we’re talking“.

So you chat hungry people, enough reasons to throw around those emoticons. Oh did I mention, it is Emoticon READY!!! *wink* *wink* ;D

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Facebook App Blogfriends is Down Forever

by Sujoy on April 19, 2008

I use a very few of those Facebook apps…NOT. I actually use quite a lot of them. Right from the different walls, to the Addicted to TV Series , and Flixsters and iLike etc etc. But I was glued to BlogFriends due to the wonderful functionality of letting your Blogposts known to your Facebook pals. But of late, I hadn’t seen any updates of my posts on my page. I wondered what was wrong. The latest post that was showing on BlogFriends was a post that was written on 28th March -
Saturday Night at Bangalore circa March 2008. This had already got on my nerves, when I saw even Flog Blog wasn’t updating my RSS feeds. I went to the app page of BlogFriends to find out that they have decided to let it all go DOWN. As in forever. The notification available on the app page reads:

Blog Friends is closing
Dear Blog Friend, We’re very sorry to announce that Blog Friends is to close down.

When i-together raised some seed funding back in the summer of 2007, Benjie, Jof and I fully anticipated taking Blog Friends onto great things, and we worked as hard as we could to make that happen.

Although it appears simple on the surface, Blog Friends is actually an unusually complex and resource-intensive application to maintain and grow. It also is pretty original in the way it combines your extended, fuzzy social network and your interests as filters for your blog recommendation River.

Because Blog Friends was so original and quite ambitious, we had no way of projecting accurately just how many users we could welcome before our solution began to creak. We hoped for 100,000. It turned out that 20,000 was closer to the mark. And now that we have around 27,000 users signed up, Blog Friends has been brought pretty much to its knees (as you will have noticed from the increasing frequency of the error messages you may have been seeing).

For the full screenshot go here.

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