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.
by Sujoy on April 16, 2008
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.
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:
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by Sujoy on March 6, 2008
As Bill Gates gets dethroned from his spot as the World’s richest man, Microsoft has launched the new version of Internet Explorer ( aka the IE 8 ) at the MIX08 conference. The beta is out for download for testing purposes. Though at the MIX08 conference, the browser has been shown to have passed the Acid2 test, some users aren’t still happy about it. Phillip Lennsen writes :-
You know you’re installing an important program when you need to reboot your computer to finish the setup. When you need to reboot twice, you know you’re installing something really important. Well, that was what happened when I just installed the new Internet Explorer 8 Beta on Vista.
Neither do I have Vista running on my laptop, nor do I have any affinity for the new IE8. Especially after hearing of the dual rebooting requirement. The interface from the pictures available online doesn’t seem different from its predecessor.
So what’s new about it? [Continue Reading]
by Sujoy on January 3, 2008
2007 has been a year like never before for the world of Technology and Internet, abuzz with so much to talk about, so much to debate upon, so many doubts to be clarified and so many rumors and speculations made. I was lucky enough to cover a few of these topics and hot news on my previous blog. In my three odd months of blogging for Techkeyla so far, I wrote on topics ranging from Facebook’s “is” in status message being (not) removed to Google’s Opensocial Project to Mixx to Tech rumors floating around to even some random lists generated by my alter-ego. Surprisingly enough, people dug them and even replied to me with their comments. Based on the number of comments, MyBlogLog’s record of visits for each topic, here I have compiled a top 10 list (yeah, yet another one) of the Hot Posts of Techkeyla for 2007. So, here they are:-
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