We all love the Thesis WordPress theme, and its multi-functional layout which can be highly customised. And we also love the Facebook Like button, which is in a way Facebook’s answer to the Tweetmeme button. So, why not I show you how to incorporate the Facebook Like button in Thesis WordPress button.

To do this, all you need to do is to go to your custom_functions.php file and open it in an editor. You can have a backup just in case things don’t go according to plan. Now, once you have it opened in an editor [ or in your dashboard editor ], add the following code.

You can customise the layout of the Facebook like button by changing what I have inserted in the

It all started for me when Google had something to offer. My classmates in Engineering College told me of a something called Orkut. It was fast becoming one of the emerging trendy keywords, and was supposedly the successor of email. The next generation of communication, as we call it, was here. It was late 2004 when I joined Orkut, and have been an active subscriber to it [ except for I deleted my account twice because of spam reasons ].

A few years went by, and my friends list exponentially increased till it was ready to explode. And then, in late 2007, I came to know of a something called Facebook. I was reluctant to join because of all the hassle involved to invite all my friends there, and importing contacts, and yes maintaining the account by participating in the discussions and replying to the posts. I had already been through quite a lot of other social networks like hi5, gazzag, myspace, bebo, multiply et al. My relation with all of the others remained limited to just a couple of months, as I retained my loyalty to orkut.

And then, something happened. All of a sudden, I heard all the social network gurus, the “in” crowd of the blogosphere – from Michael Arrington to Om Malik, John Chow to Darren Rowse- everyone was on Facebook. It was the place where everyone was there. And besides these people, my contact list from orkut had by now started sending me invites for Facebook. After a few reluctant logins to the Facebook, I got used to the interface. Long before I could realise, from celebrities to my local chai-walla to even my University professor – everyone was on Facebook.

Which brings me to this – Windows Live Planet. Really, who needs yet another Social Network in 2009? I do not. I am too old to keep shifting base. I am too used to the Blue and White interface to shift over to the Aero-Flow based Live presentation. I do not want my ‘space’ to look like I am living in an MSN World. And yes, I did check out the initial questionnaire, and it is filled with absolutely unfunny, non-sensical answers to some of the most badly placed questions. The only thing I liked about Live Planet was nothing.

One last thing, the Self-Cool image being posed on the homepage looks excruciating. And the tag-line – Match And Make New Friends – makes it feel like it is not a Social Network but a Matrimonial Matchmaker. The guy with the curly hair reminds me of Justin Guarini [ which is not a good thing ] and the forced usage of “Whats up” seems like a conscious attack to the teenage target audience. Also wtf is meant by the line: Find ur Twin?

I don’t know why I have so much negative about Live Planet. Hmm, may be because its 2009, and its TOO LATE for a Social Network to be born. But again, if I find everyone else is moving in that direction [ as in Windows Live Planet] , who am I stop? But do you really think people will adopt this new Social Network? My prediction- NO!

Morgan Stanley’s report ” How Teenagers Consume Media ” talks about the impact, reach and relevance of different forms of media on the target section of the population – the teens. The importance of this paper is the very fact that today’s teenagers will be evolving into tomorrow’s workforce and the ones who will be shaping tomorrow’s consumer market. This in itself means that the behaviour of the teenagers and their reaction towards media cannot be overlooked.

However, the report is written by a teenager, 15 year old Matthew Robson. The report reflects how a normal teenager perceives media of the current world spanning across traditional media like TV, radio and print, to new-age media like social networking websites, cellphones, game consoles etc. Although the discussion provided in the report does reflect teenage behaviour in a lot of sections, it has its shortcomings.

The basic problem with the report is that it is not a wide study on teenage behaviour and hence, market research figures are not reflected at all. Rather, the behaviours noted and reflected in this report are a biased sampling of the close friends and family of the writer. This certainly would not entirely represent the true behaviour of teenagers. Besides, the facts stated in the report should be quite obvious to market researchers who deal with actual facts and figures and carry out surveys based on age-groups or regions or income groups. The footnote of the report introduction states: While these trends will not necessarily surprise, their influence on TMT stocks cannot be underestimated. Now, if it takes a 15 year old for market researchers to realise such trends, I believe, we can see a lot more positions being made redundant.

Re-Analysing the Media analysis.
Radio: The popularity of traditional Radio or FM is still relevant inspite of internet radio stations and sites like Last.FM. The peak periods of radio listening are early morning – more so as a wake-up alarm, as a baathroom accomplice etc, in the car or bus to work, and in the evening on the way back home. Distribution of radio over FM transmitters have been reduced, and portable media devices such as a mobile phone or PMPs are where radio is being listened to. And in a country where Radio DJ are national celebrities and have shows running on National TV, can we discard the popularity of traditional radio?

Television: In the UK, due to services such as BBC iPlayer, Sky Plus and Virgin Record, and similar services offered by ITV, Channel 4 etc, prime-time is quite non-existent. BBC has no system of advertising based revenue. Whereas Channels like ITV and Channel 4 are freeview channels and completely rely on advertising based revenue system. With On-Demand viewing which enables users to skip advertisements, ad revenues are set to decline.
For teenagers, the trend of watching their favourite shows depend on
a) no. of televisions in their respective house
b) Availability of a computer with broadband. As most channels offer online catch-up facilities.
c)The channels subscribed for by the earning members of the family.
Since more than often, teens are not the earning members of the family,the final decision of what channels their TV is subscribed to is decided not by them, but by their parents or elders.

The choice of Virgin Media over Sky on the price criteria is another example of sample bias.
Sep 2008 figures: Sky has 9 million customers, which is almost thrice the size of Virgin Media, which holds the second place. Television viewing hours are again dependent on the demographic of teenagers selected.

Internet:
The popularity of social networking websites is evident amongst teenagers. While Facebook remains a favourite, Twitter seems to be not so popular amongst the teens. Even when Twitter occupies much of the attention in the internet buzz-zone, it is absent from the buzz-words amongst the teenagers, primarily because of lack of connectivity, or the cost of it. More of this will be discussed in a later post.

Much of the other information shared in the report regarding Newspaper, Viral Marketing, Cinema and Music is basic common sense stuff. Print media is struggling to get revenues; Viral Marketing works; Cinema has to look for other avenues to compete with Home Entertainment – hence 3d films, Movie experiences etc and Music industry keeps struggling with Piracy.

Please comment below and let me know your thoughts on the observations stated in this post. Thanks!

Image Courtesy: Service-Now’s Flickr Photostream

But now almost after a week, when the smoke has faded away and users have already got accustomed to the new look or redesign of Facebook, here’s some reason to cheer up. Here are 5 reasons why I like the new Facebook and possibly you could as well. 

1. The News Feed can be filtered.

In the Home page, where we see the Twitter Like feed of the activities of the friend of a user, it displays all the activites of friends. This display can be filtered as well, based on Filters available, such as : Photos, Links, Videos etc. I have some more filters in my profile viz. YouTube, Twitter, Flixster, LivingSocial etc. If you have grouped your friends ( I have grouped them such as :-Social Network Contacts, University, School, Work etc.), then the NewsFeed could also display feed from only the members of those group.

2.Application on Bottom Bar

Very uncluttered look and organised. Only six of them are displayed, and the rest can be accessed by clicking on Applications. A sort of a drop down menu appears. This UI is much better than the previous version.

3. The Wall can be filtered as well

The Wall on the profile page can now be filtered to show posts by self and friends, just self, or just by friends. 

4. Friend Activities in HighLights

New Groups joined by friends to New photo uploads can also be accessed from the Highlights on the Right Sidebar on the HomePage

5. Updates and Invitations are shown on the Home Page

All invitations and updates etc, are visible directly on the Homepage unlike the previous version, where the Right Sidebar showed 5 updates awaiting etc. Lesser links to click.

So, there you go, 5 reasons to like the new Facebook. Tell me, do you agree?

Hopefully you all will enjoy this one. Have a blast!!

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

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.

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:

(Click here for the full screen snapshot)The List of Apps include some familiar ones and some not-so familiar ones. And not so suprisingly, it has some India centric applications too like Chakpak, India Dekha, Teen Patti and myHangman which is brought to you by C2W aka Contest2Win.The total list of the apps so far are as follows. (Click the links to go to the official App description on the Orkut Blog).

Music iLike
Emote!
PhotoAttack
Horoscopes
TypeRacer
Top Friends
Slide TV
myHangman
iRead
Flixster
Chakpak
Reading Social
Bible Verses
India Dekha
Teen Patti
Hangout
BuboMe
Music N Movies

However, this is not the exhaustive list. The Orkut Blog contains some more like MyMiniLife (which at the first glance looks like the SIMS meets Second Life, or is it?), Viibee- which is similar to “Are you Interested” app on Facebook, Crazy Story Game among other soon-to-arrive applications.

Though it is a good thing that Orkut is finally moving ahead with the inclusion the so far promised OpenSocial API based Apps, but it is still yet to see whether Orkut will stand and succeed in this race of the social networks. Orkut has so far always been criticised as the network with a fair amount of anonymity, and which has lead to a lot of criticism when it comes to fake profiles invading privacy of other accounts. All this came to the notice of the admins, and they finally included the privacy policy, with settings enabling users to disable non-friends of a profile to be not able to view their scrapbooks, photo albums etc. And now, with the applications being added, Orkut has to monitor it’s privacy policies and settings more closely. It is a common thing these days to see Orkut in the headlines (in India) for all the wrong reasons. All I wish it is all the luck, and may we not see Orkut again being judged.
Lastly, when it comes to uniformity and sorted out interface, Facebook knocked down MySpace. I wish the Apps inclusion in Orkut also remains clutter-free, even though it might add the provision of skins and themes very soon. And yeah, I hope to cover more of Orkut in the near future.

Update: Praxy tells me , he also can see that status update that Facebook allows, on his Orkut Profile. Now it hasn’t happened on my Profile as yet, but here’s the proof of what he says.

Hopefully, it will be rolled out for all accounts soon. And we might even see a Twitter integration for it too.