by Sujoy on April 29, 2008
Like 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.
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.
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
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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