Anant Shrivastava

hello orkut freaks,

in a silent move today orkut has introduced a new feature in its User Interface.

Now users with low bandwidth has an option to switch to light edition and this is prominently placed by a banner display if the page loading time exceed certain limit.

also the feature can be accessed through  setting also.

This low bandwidth version or what we can call lite  edition of orkut has following features most prominently visible one’s

1) Pictures ae not shown except profile pic.

2)  birthday list turns into a calender with name’s listing only.

Also Apps are by default minimized now and on selecting particular app its data is fetched.

In short by removing these picture’s a lot of bandwidth can be saved

But a lot more could have been saved if embedded object’s could have been reduced to links.

Tags: orkut

Many of you who will be working on firefox 3 beta 5 will be having problem’s to configure the plugin’s coz they are not compatible with firefox3b5,

YOU Don’t Need to wait til the official release you can try on your own that are the really not compatible with ff3b5

=== rest of the section is not for fainthearted people ===

The plugi’s of firefox are provided in .XPI package.

This xpi is nothing but a zip file renamed.

so to view the content of the plugin’ just change the extension to zip from xpi.

The extract the file in a folder and look for a file named “install.rdf”

This is the file that need editing

 Pasting a sample install.rdf from sparky - an alexa plugin 

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<RDF:RDF xmlns:em="http://www.mozilla.org/2004/em-rdf#"
xmlns:NC="http://home.netscape.com/NC-rdf#"
xmlns:RDF="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#">
<RDF:Description RDF:about="urn:mozilla:extension:file:"
em:package="content/" />
<RDF:Description RDF:about="rdf:#$qOePo2"
em:id="{ec8030f7-c20a-464f-9b0e-13a3a9e97384}"
em:minVersion=”2.0″
em:maxVersion=”2.0.0.*” />
<RDF:Description RDF:about=”urn:mozilla:install-manifest”
em:id=”toolbar@alexa.com”
em:name=”Alexa Sparky”
em:version=”1.1″
em:creator=”Derrick Pallas”
em:description=”Alexa Internet Statusbar Sparkline”
em:homepageURL=”http://www.alexa.com/”
em:aboutURL=”chrome://alexastatusbar/content/about.xul”
em:iconURL=”chrome://alexastatusbar/skin/logo.png”
>
<em:targetApplication RDF:resource=”rdf:#$qOePo2″/>
<em:file RDF:resource=”urn:mozilla:extension:file:”/>
</RDF:Description>
</RDF:RDF>

The lne to check out is already highlighted

em:minVersion=”2.0″
em:maxVersion=”2.0.0.*” />

This minVersion is the version number below which it will not install and maxVersion is the upper limit

To make it running on FireFox3 Beta 5 change the above lines to

em:minVersion=”2.0″
em:maxVersion=”3.0b5″ />


After this just recompress the folder and rename it with extension xpi.

and open it in firefox to install it.

more examples of such edit includes firebug and scribefire.

all three plugin are working fabulously on my pc and i keep using them around 12hrs a day so that can count to the stability issue.

Tags: firefox, web

I recently saw some ad’s regarding blog.co.in

The domain name seems catchy.

so i just thought about visiting it.

and guess what,
Its wordpress mu hosted.
all the link structure is same from that of wordpress,

a slight customization is being done on its part.

and the biggest part no reference of Wordpress powered anywhere around the site.

NOTE :
now the site do show powered by wordpress only on the footer at the first page.
but still no reference at user’s blog pages.

Tags: blogging

big time for orkut fan’s

first time opensocial has yielded some results.

orkut has launched orkut apps with some minor enhancements in cosmetics of orkut layout also.

currently the apps database has only 18 apps

1. Music iLike
2. Emote
3. Photoattack
4. horoscopes
5. TypeRacers
6. Top friends by slide.com
7. SlideTV by Slide.com
8. My Hangman
9. iRead
10. Flixter Movies
11. ChakPak Movies
12. Reading Social
13. Bible Verses
14. INdia Dekha
15. Teen Patti
16. Hangout
17. BuboMe
18. Music And Movies

But if you look at the list closely you find many applications resembling close to each other
Like we have 3 movies apps and 2 books apps.

so that should be avoided.

and i tested 3 apps till now
1) iRead - working fine with all features
2) Flixter Movies - Going smooth.
3) Music iLike - interface not opening on FF3 beta, hope it works on other’s

Well lets see what this leads to, if they can work properly then apps can realy make orkut a rocking place.

BUT STILL SOME ISSUES LOOM LARGE

1) many of these apps are available on facebook, can the users import their data here,
2) what about generic site data. mean’s like for example some one has account at flixter can hi import data on orkut app.

for reference my orkut profile is
http://www.orkut.com/Profile.aspx?uid=3169045171018903779

Tags: orkut

Today i was reading my RSS feeds and got this intresting article describing the status of social network’s in india.

The article  mainly states that orkut is still leading the India market and facebook (world no 2) is still no where to be close to orkut in India.

The reason for low usage of facebook in india is basically for few reason’s that i found while using facebook as well as orkut both.

1) orkut is more popular due to its straight forward approach, it offer’s limited features only.

2) most orkut user’s are just chat freaks and are their only for fun and time pass.

3) orkut captures a large crowd from college students who love to sneak and peak in others profile (got this point from one of the comment in the article above.)

4) facebook is a heavy site, specially if you have more then 30-40 apps installed, (mainly due to its AJAX style good for DSL connection but appears to be a pain in A** for the dialup users)

BUT there are a lot of reason’s which put facebook as my preference.

1) It provides privacy, more then what i can expect in orkut.

2)  with its app base used properly you can create a virtual  home for you in their, like i keep a tab of my movies as well as music with two apps flixter’s movie app and iLike app for facebook.

3) i am a social networker with my orkut profile reaching the 400 mark and my facebook profile now reaching close to 75, but still i prefer networking with people with whom i can interact and gain something from this interaction. and in this case i find facebook to be of much help.

Ex: i took an IQ test and now i can search for people with IQ level equal to me or greater then me, and then a simple message let me in.

4) Another great feature of facebook which many user’s in India are largely unaware of is photo tagging,by which you can tag each individual face on your pic collection with a name.

These are few of my finding’s

many people might disagree with me, and many might agree with me.

also for your references.

My orkut profile

My facebook profile

UPDATE

As per some comments on this post i am making a clarification here,

As per akhil’s comment

Privacy issue

1) well if you compare not able to check on other people’s profile without their permission is a hard head, then check it back on the critisim of facebook section, ther main concern is privacy only.

take for example email theft, any programmer with a bit of knowledge of data mining can get a lot more then just thousands of email id’s on orkut within few hours time coz mails are in plaintext format, compared to facebook which uses pic’s to show mail id.

regarding virtual home concept

2) well for the virtual home case, my point is our first network begin’s at our home and how we establish it by liking few and disliking few how his liking and disliking came in, they came by thier behaviour towards us or other’s as well as their liking and disliking.
In the same way facebook helps you to communicate with your friends circle not as a different id’s but as different person’s.

3) and for the privacy issue and regarding that article, that privacy concern is regarding the facebook owner’s side and not from the user’s point of view.
and to check some for the orkut side, check you orkut account and see that the ad’s displayed are content sensitive, (a google speciality), did you tried to guess how it comes from, and don’t you thing it is too easy for someone who stores your data to use it in what ever way he may like.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Google

http://www.google-watch.org/krane.html  : another good read out for those concerned with privacy.

Tags: facebook, networking, orkut