Category: News

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News

Google is getting Desperate to Make Money from Orkut

I remember well, about a year ago, Google’s social networking site – Orkut started displaying Google adsense ads on Orkut users’ homepage below the ‘Community’ section. Infact, we posted about it on March 2008 here. But its really amazing to see Google getting desperate about generating more revenue from Orkut users. Guess what? This evening when I logged into Orkut, I was surprised to see the placement of Google ads between ‘Friends’ and ‘Community’ section.

Placement of Google ads changed on Orkut homepage

For your ready reference, I have uploaded a screenshot herewith wherein you can clearly notice how Google ads are interfering between ‘Friends’ and ‘Community’ section. 🙁

orkut gads

This time atleast, with change of placements of Google ads, its really very annoying as it interrupts while navigating between friends and community section.

Initiative to keep Orkut going?

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Though I was disappointed by these changes, immediately after seeing it, I started thinking whether this is an initiative by Google to keep Orkut alive? Actually few days ago, when Google shut down some of its services, their were rumors floating around the internet that Orkut too may get closed.

May be this move by Google is to keep Orkut survive in these tough time, but I personally feel this change very annoying. What do you think?

Related Reading: Orkut Started Showing Adsense Ads on User’s Homepage

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Offline Gmail May Soon be Released for iPhone Users! [Breaking]

iphone gmail Offline Gmail for iPhone! How does it sounds? Cool.. right? Yes, if you are a iPhone user, then this feature (Offline Gmail) may soon be rolled out for you if the talk with Google engineer turns out to be true. This guy named Vic Gundotra heading the engineering team at Google demonstrated offline Gmail for iPhone at the World Mobile Congress (WMC).

If you are a Google loyalist and follow their activities, you must be aware of the fact that recently they launched Offline Gmail for PC users and there were really good review of this feature that worked using Google gears. But for iPhone, report says, offline Gmail will work using HTML5’s AppCache and Database standards.

Here is what an article at Tech2 reads:

As of now reports are saying that Gundotra had stated that this was just a "technical concept" right now that essentially depends on HTML5’s AppCache and Database standards, that would have the application as well as all the user data on the handset.

Though, there is no official release about support for Offline Gmail for iPhone users, but the above report points that this feature will surely be rolled out for iPhone users in the days to come. 🙂

Related reading: Check Gmail without Internet Connection

[Image & Info Via Tech2]

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More Orkut Themes Released!

In my recent post published just 3-4 hours ago at Devils Workshop, I was talking about the old fashioned Gmail and Orkut themes that were making its users irritated. But if you are fascinated about themes feature, then its party time for you. 🙂 After the release of customizable colors option in Gmail, even Orkut have got 3 brand new Carnaval themes. Here are a glimpse of all the three newly released Orkut themes.

Characters of Carnaval: Characters of Carnaval

Carnaval in Rio!: Carnaval in Rio!

Elements of Carnaval Elements of Carnaval

Hope with these additions in their themes library, Google team will soon come up with theme creator that was being launched for iGoogle users a few days ago.

Thanks Sreejoy for the information. 🙂

Related reading: Now Customize Color of Gmail Inbox!

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Now Customize Color of Gmail Inbox! [New Feature]

gmail-logo1 Since the launch of Gmail Themes, there were rumors that Google may soon come up with features to customize the themes in Gmail and Orkut as per users choice as in iGoogle. Though, this time customizable themes option is not released neither for Gmail nor for Orkut, but using this new new feature we are talking about, you can color your inbox as per your choice. 🙂

Those you are excited to know more about this feature can have a look on the screenshot below, and imagine how your inbox would look after you customize its colors.

 

You can edit your Gmail inbox colors by clicking Settings-> Themes-> Choose your own colors

The above edited colors of my inbox may not look good and attractive to you as am not good with color combinations, still I feel this is a good feature and Gmail users looking out for add-on will love to use this feature. So if you were bored with the existing theme directory of Gmail then give this feature a try, its really worth giving a try. 🙂

Related Reading:

[Via Official Gmail Blog]

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Now Easily Sync Contacts of your Mobile Phone with Google Account!

mobile Syncing all your details on mobile handsets with computers have become really very important to avoid any accidental loss of data (especially contacts, memos and messages) on your phone. If you have ever lost your mobile phone or come across any software issues, then you must be knowing how important it is to make a backup of all the datas on a secure place.

Though you can easily take a back-up of all the data on your PC using the softwares that come along with the mobile handset, but what if the data on your PC too gets deleted? Recently, Google have come up with a new service – Google Sync using which you can sync all data of your mobile with your Google account and vice versa using GPRS on your phone.

Supported Devices:

  • Apple iPhone
  • Blackberry
  • Nokia s60 & s40 phones
  • Sony Ericsson
  • Windows Mobile
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The complete step-by-step procedure on syncing your devices is mentioned here.

Though I could not test out this service personally as am using a palm based handset which is not supported for this service, but to me it seems to be very useful service and of course reliable too, as its being provided by Google. 🙂 If any one have used it, then let us know your reviews about this service.

Thanks Johnson for the tip. 🙂

Links: Google Sync | FAQ & Setting Procedure

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“Bloggers for Advani” – BJP’s new online campaign!

bloggers-for-advani(India only)

Bhartiya Janta Party (BJP) is gathering support of bloggers with new online campaign “Bloggers for Advani”. They earlier launched a blog and massive online advertising campaign to create awareness about Prime Minister candidate.

In this new “Bloggers for Advani” campaign, they have created round-shaped badges which bloggers can put on their blog to show their support for Lal Krishna Advani.

Considering large size of Indian blogosphere, BJP will surely gather considerable support from this new campaign.

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No link juice…

One thing I have realized as a blogger is, if they (BJP) had put a listing like “bloggers supporting us” on their campaign page, more bloggers would have showcased these badges for extra link and traffic.

In blogosphere, easiest way to attract links is giving backlinks in return!

Update: Mallika informed us via a comment that campaign site now have a list of  bloggers for Advani.

Thanks Mallika.

Links: Bloggers for Advani Campaign

Related: List of Blogs by Indian Bollywood Celebrities, Politicians, etc

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Google Gears for Offline Orkut Communities?

Recently, one of our reader Jo has emailed us asking,

Is there anyway to save orkut topics or download topics/forums to view offline
later when there is no internet connection?

As a temporary and ugly workaround, I suggested him,

You can subscribe to RSS feed of individual topics and/or communities using our service Orkutfeeds.
Then using Google Reader’s offline mode or any desktop reader, you can view updates later when there is no internet connection.

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But what really struck my mind was possibility of using Google Gears to access for Orkut communities offline. Something, which will look like below…

Google Gears for Orkut

Even though Orkut’s long list of bugs and broken features stole all the limelight, many Orkut communities are really useful for their members. Moreover some communities have high volume of information exchange, so it is obvious for guys like Jo to not have enough time to go through them online.

It would be really great, if you can read updates from your communities offline using Google Gears. Moreover, people can reply to topics offline and then everything get synced automatically once internet connection becomes available.

This is just a suggestion, we are passing to Orkut. Do not wonder about screenshot. It is mock up we have created! 😉

By the way, do you think is this a good idea? Will you use it?

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Add Your Location Automatically to Your Gmail Signature [New Feature]

gmail-logo1 An exciting new feature has been added to Gmail Labs is “Location in Signature”. Just enable this lab feature and Gmail will automatically append your current location (the city and the country name) to your Gmail signature, like this:

location_in_signature
(Marco Bonechi is the developer of this new feature)

Note that this feature uses public IP address to identify your current location, so it may be inaccurate sometimes or may slightly vary.

Here is the step by step procedure to turn on this feature-

  1. Log in your Gmail inbox.
  2. Go to Settings -> Labs and scroll down a bit to locate the “Location in Signature” feature.
  3. Check the Enable radio button to enable this feature and click on save changes.
    gmail-labs-1
  4. Now go to Settings -> General and go to the signature settings. Check Append your location to the signature.gmail-labs-2

That’s it. Now your signature will always contain your current location. As this feature uses your IP address, guess you must have understood how exactly this feature works. It tracks the location of your IP and appends the same location as your “location signature” and hence, as said earlier, your location may vary slightly. 😉

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[Editor Note: This is the first post by guest blogger Mayur Somani, who blogs at HackTrix about softwares and tech stuff. 
If you too like to write for Devils Workshop, please check this. Details about our revenue sharing programs are here.]

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WordCamp, Mozilla Camp, Yahoo’s Open Hack Day and Other Tech Events

This month is full of tech-events organized all over the places in India and abroad. Below is brief list of events. If we are missing something cool happening around in your city, please let us know via comments.

WordCamp

WordCamp LogoWordCamp is unconference centered around WordPress community. Among all camps, WordCamp is most frequent and organized event. You can always have a look at upcoming WordCamps on this central site. They have WordCamp scheduled till October 2009 already!

This time, India is having its first WordCamp on 21st and 22nd Feb in New Delhi. Key attraction of this event is presence of Matt Mullenwag, founder and lead developer of WordPress itself.

Apart from Matt himself, other celebrities which will be speaking at this event includes Amit Agarwal (from Digital Inspiration), Pavan Duggal (Advocate, Supreme court of India).

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Registration Fees: Individual day ticket : INR 250, Full event ticket : INR 400 

Venue: Noida, Delhi

Links: Register for Event 

MozillaCamp

MozillaCampArun Ranganathan and Seth Bindernagel form Mozilla team are already travelling across India, meeting and collaborating with Mozilla community.

Mozilla Camp has already started and we missed them in Delhi  on 10th Feb. Below is schedule of remaining tour. (source: Mozilla blog)

  • Feb. 12th – 13th, Kanpur:  The duo will be participating in the inaugural FOSSKriti at Techkriti.  Arun will be leading a workshop on Web development & Open Source technologies on the night of the 12th and then a HTML5 talk on Feb. 13th.
  • Feb. 14th – 15th, Pune:  Arun and Seth find themselves at GNUnify where they will be leading a mini Mozilla Camp covering localization, Web tools and more.  On Sunday morning from 10 a.m. – 1 p.m. they will be joining PuneTech.com for an open meet up.
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Even though they are visiting Pune, I won’t be able to attend this event personally. But if you can catch up with them, do not miss it! 🙂

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Venue: Kanpur, Pune

Link: Kanpur Event | Pune Event

Yahoo’s Open Hack Day India

Open HackAs its name suggest, this event is more centered around Yahoo technologies like BOSS, Blueprint, YAP, YQL and more. Still level of skills and demos it carries is really awesome. This is invitation only event and as far as I know, list of attendees has been finalized.

Still if you are in Bangalore and have some really good friend in Yahoo and/or among event organizers, you can take a chance!

Event Date: 14th-15th Feb, 2009

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Venue: Bangalore

Link: Official Link

Other Tech Events

Apart from this, you can attend…

  • GNUnify in Pune on 13th & 14th Feb. This includes MozillaCamp Pune among other tracks.
  • FOSSkriti in Kanpur from 12th to 15th Feb. This includes MozillaCamp Kanpur among other events they are hosting.
  • Sun Developers meet in Pune. Link and other details about this event will be made available soon.

That’s it! So much to do in February! I am not (yet) sure which events I will attend personally. Still let us know which event you are attending. May be you can post about your experience at that event on Devils Workshop (and earn some bucks)… 😉

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Preview Google Docs Files Before Printing! [New Feature]

Another new feature added into Google’s online documents management solution – Google Docs is the ability to preview any documents before printing, similarly as you see while using Microsoft office.

This option will really be of immense use to you, if you use Google Docs much. As shown in the image below, to print preview any Google docs file, just select the ‘print preview’ option from ‘File’ Tab inside Google Docs.

google docs

And here is another image taken after the preview is being displayed

print preview1

[ Via Google Docs Blog]