TheAnand

Guess what I found when I searched for myself on Google?

Looks like Orkut is being integrated into google search results now. That is good news! Suppose I want to find any other blogger or a friend, I only need to do a google search with his name. Neat, but it seems that the results are personalized to the person signed in. Which means you will probably not see it when you do the same search unless I am in your friends list at orkut.

Open Social, the Facebook killer by Google is fast approaching launch I guess. Its possibly only hours before everyone announces the launch of the much awaited Orkut Killer Apps! Orkut Killer? Yea, just the sort of thing that will kill Orkut. The new favorite pastime of millions of teenagers in India/Brazil.

Since the past week, pagination errors have been too much and other minor bugs evident on the system. I should have guessed something was coming up. Logging into my account today I noticed this:

Since the facelift, Google’s Orkut has been silently adding new features to the Indian/ Brazillian MySpace (is calling them that justified?). Along with better spam management in communities, choosing what you want to show to the world and other numerous features tell us that Google is dead serious about making it big in the US market.

Today I was browsing Orkut and came accross a profile that had a lock on its album. It was only then I noticed that now Orkut has a option to show certain parts of your profile only to friends, like the album, testimonials. This will stop prying eyes on those privacy concerned girls out there.

Today the much awaited Google led Open Social went live and there is a large buzz in it since a lot of social communities are a part of it including Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, and XING. Though MySpace was not on the list, it seems to have joined the party. Wonder what will happen to facebook now. Here is a beautiful video which covers the all new Open Social.

This post is sponsored by OrkutBase – Free HTML codes for Orkut scraps

I today loooooged (Goooooogle way! ) into orkut, which is a Google attempt at social networking which clicked only in the Indian Subcontinent and Brazil and has mass following here with every teenager spending lots of money and time “orkuting”.

I used to be very active in this service, but these days I am restricted to my close group of friends. Today while logging in, I found this:

This post is Sponsored by OrkutBase – Your Orkut HTML Codes base!

If you are a regular user of Orkut you will find out that they have added a new friends update feature which shows what your friends have added to their profile. This is a very useful feature which I liked a lot in Hi5. But it can be a reason for embarrassment too as I recently discovered my friends interest in hot videos )

Well, its time! Seriously.

I think its time we call internet as Google, considering the amount of influence they have on internet and its users now. With the acquisition of Feedburner last week, Google has totally taken close to full control over how we receive information to our computer. The search, the emails, the RSS reader, the feed channel, traffic statistics, online advertising, social networking, blogs, firefox and host of other services. How can this affect us?

I am a active user of the social community Orkut, not simply because its a Google company, but due to the fact of its simple yet addictive social networking capabilities. The other day Pallab was telling me that Orkut is not the most popular network in the internet. MySpace is indeed the biggest, but then this trend of social networking is new in India and it is only likely that with a simple interface and a good sticky service called scrapping, Orkut soon becomes the favoured site of the teens in India. Indians constitute around 14% of the total user base of Orkut as of now. Not a bad number at all.

Today I was doing what every teenager does online, using the most popular social networking site on the net – Orkut.
But what was different today was a new button on the sidebar – Video. Naturally curious, I went on to check it out, I was surprised, it enabled users to share videos. It is out, Orkut and YouTube have been merged. I tried to read the official “Learn More” page, it was empty when I tried, what did you read?

The other day I was banned from my company community on Orkut due to some misunderstanding with the owner. When the issue was solved, the owner was at a loss on how to unban me and get me back to the community. After gooogling for a while I found this important post in Devil’s Workshop which helped me for get into the group again.

Here are steps to unban a banned member!

1. Right click on any link (profile, scarpbook, etc) related to that banned person.

2. Press “Copy Link Location” (in firefox) or “Copy shortcut” in IE or similar option in ur browser!

Few days ago, I was kind of disappointed when I found that Orkut is not accessible on my mobile phone. The problem is the same with rediffmail too. They use javascript which the Opera Mobile and the built-in browsers are not able to decipher. Recently, I found this link which allows you to access your favourite social community – Orkut through your cellphone using GPRS.
Here’s the link:

https://www.google.com/accounts/ServiceLoginBox?service=orkut&nui=2&uilel=1&skipvpage=true&continue=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.orkut.com%2FRedirLogin.aspx%3Fmsg%3D0%26page%3Dhttp%253A%252F%252Fwww.orkut.com%252F&followup=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.orkut.com%2FGLogin.aspx

The link is pretty long. Things are easier of you to click the tiny url for the above link. Remember to bookmark this page once it loads up.

My ideology is simple; you should be rewarded for your efforts, how much ever big or small.

Look around the World Wide Web, one either has to own and MAINTAIN a community with a large number of users or have plenty to original content to attract internet users to earn and generate a decent income as pocket money or as a means of livelihood.

Who is making all the money now? Look around again, you will see that the big players like Google, MySpace, eBay, Orkut, Hi5 etc. They have something you and I lack, content and community.