Orkut improved their status update feature by adding facility to send update on Orkut homepage. Now one can say they have completed copying this feature from facebook. 😉
As you can see above, this improvement will surely increase use of status update feature.
Notably this feature suffered from a bug few days back where users exploited it to display any images when it suppose to contain plain-text update messages. Now with this change, it will be interesting to see if this feature breaks again.
Rolling out first in Estonia, then in India, Orkut Apps finally became available worldwide. Orkut Developer Blog announced yesterday that they have finished rollout of OpenSocial apps to all orkut users.
This means you no longer need to change your country to enjoy Orkut apps. I have noticed many Orkut users, including famous InsideOrkut blogger Darnell Clayton changing their country to Estonia or India to enjoy Orkut Apps.
If you are a developer and this country specific restriction kept you away from OpenSocial apps, you may start coding now. Here is a beginners guide to Orkut & OpenSocial Apps.
I personally don’t have much time to use Orkut apps. But one I find cool is Orkut Times (India) developed by Ashish. Ashish also created its Brazilian counterpart, Orkut Times (Brazil).
HtmlOrkut has around 2000 graphics and glitters, over 625 High quality games, over 1000 orkut themes. Many fascinating and amazing generators, exclusive widgets, ASCII arts, musical scraps and much more.
Good thing is that all above mentioned stuff can be used with other social networking sites like Facebook, Myspace, Hi5, Bebo, Tagged, Friendster etc.
There are many sites which provides stuff like this but none of them is even close to HtmlOrkut in terms of quantity and quality.
So check HtmlOrkut to add spice to your orkut life. 🙂
Update: Gigya Integration
Forgot to mention this most important part which makes using HtmlOrkut better than other sites.
Whenever you like some content which you want to post on say orkut look for Gigya form just below content. Using that form you can directly post to orkut and other social networking site right away from HtmlOrkut.
Unfortunately new search filters which appear good in terms of visual appearance lacks advance control they used to provide in past. This also means our dating trick will no longer work and you to take lots of efforts to find a right match for you.
Anyway good news is that search filters are now expanded beyond orkut to cover global search filters like county & language specific filtering.
There are some filters now to filter out communities based on some categories which orkut suggests based in your community history. While topic filters are blank as of now. I hope orkut will add more stuff their.
As of now there are 57 services are available to add into your account which includes famous services like Facebook, Digg, del.icio.us, Flickr, Google Reader, Twitter, Tumblr, YouTube, LastFM.
When you start adding services at Lifestream, it gets all past content as well so creating sort of your biography over one page. One can look at Lifestream as twitter for your entire digital life.
If you are blogger then you can show this steam on your blog as well using Lifestream badge.
For easier access, the service already have desktop interface ready via an Adobe Air app. This means all Windows, Mac, Linux users can enjoy this service from their desktop.
I hope to see support for more services, specially my favorite Orkut soon at Lifestream.
As of now the service is in beta but their country manager Fabian Posada arranged few invitation codes for our readers. Thanks Fabian. 🙂
Invitation Codes for Lifestream:
63f6a6a6
33b93d53
ec4281f1
66186574
b9997de1
5bf212dc
e60d016f
0eb5403e
3753e15f
While signing up for Lifestream use any of invitation code above. Note that each of above code can be used only once. So hurry up! 😉
Update: We are unable to help you with your technical queries regarding mCheck. Please contact their official support: support@mchek.com. Thanks Pralhad. 🙂
mChek is a new payment system that link your debit/credit card or SBI bank account to your mobile phone, allowing you to make payments from your mobile phone. Once registered you can pay your phone bills, transfer talktime to your friends accounts, book tickets for flights, movies etc from mobile via simple instructions.
They have tie-up with Airtel which allows Airtel subscribers to download mChek application which provides simple graphic interface to use mChek. There are no charges for downloading as well as using mChek as of now. I tested it and its working really nice.
Download instructions:
SMS AIRTEL to 543219
You will get a reply containing a link to download mChek.
In Firefox, it is always easy to save images. All you have to do is right-click on an image, and select “Save Image As” option. But many time it happens that when you right-click on an image, this option does not appear. Even worse a small transparent image is saved like in case of Orkut profiles. Sauravjit had similar problem while saving a pic from fashion website.
This happens because, image you are viewing is set as background using a CSS trick. Technically you can just open source code and find image path without much trouble, but many people would like to make it simple.
Backgroundimage Saver is a simple firefox extension that provides help in such cases. When installed, it automatically detects such background images when you click on them and shows “Save Background Image As” option, as highlighted in screenshot below.
Finding a nice domain name is toughest part while starting a website or blog. Earlier we used Xona’s domain hack tool to find domains like del.icio.us or ma.tt. Today I am posting about Ixquick’s Domain Name Finder which makes finding a .COM job easy.
This can be used in two-ways.
First say if you have long list of keywords to search, then you can put entire list in First Words box there and click Search. It will output available domains from list in few seconds.
Next say if you are looking for hybrid domain like InsideOrkut, OrkutPlus or OrkutFeeds then you are sure about half part. Now create two with prefix in one list and suffix in one list.
Example:
List 1: Orkut, Facebook, MySpace, …
List 2: Times, Daily, Feeds, Plus, …
Now you can put List 1 in First Words box and List 2 in Second Word box and when you click search all combination from lists are checked. Following image taken from Ixquick’s page demonstrate whole thing graphically…
I guess many blogger who want to blog about a particular service will find this interesting as they can find a related .COM domain name easily.
Update: Issue is fixed by Orkut.Looks like Orkut team is reading DW! 😉
And those who think orkut.co.in does not exist, check this post for screenshot.
Yesterday, I came across one more side-effect of orkuts countywide domains. I was using Friend Finder on Orkut, when I lost secure connection with Orkut server. I stumbled on following error, “Secure Connection Failed”…
As solution, there is not much a user can do apart from adding orkuts country specific domain, in my case orkut.co.in, into firefox exception list.
Just click on ‘Or you can add an exception…’ option as highlighted in above screenshot. Firefox will warn you about exception, but if you want to use Friend Finder and may be few more feature on Orkut, you have to go ahead.
Orkut team registered many country domains but they just forgot to buy SSL certificate for each domain. SSL certificates are domain/IP address specific.
When you access orkut from India, Brazil and few other countries, all orkut.com requests are automatically redirected to orkuts county level domains for whom digital certificates are missing. I am not sure how this will affect your security but the way Firefox 3 alert users, many users may feel scared.
Well, one should not blame firefox for there scary alerts as they are just doing their job, the best possible way. Misconfiguration in secure area just proves how serious Google is about orkut users security, again!
Orkut Buyukkokten, creator of Orkut is married to his boyfriend Derek Holbrook recently. It was expected as the California Supreme Court has made gay marriages legal recently. The ceremony was witnessed by Marissa Mayer, the Vice President of Search Product and User Experience at Google.
In the above picture, form left to right you can see Derek, Marissa and Orkut himself. (Photo by Drew Altizer via SFluxe)
When we tried to figure out who is Derek Holbrook, first Google result taken us to Derek’s facebook profile. I guess now two are married, Derek may consider deleting facebook profile in order to strengthen bond with Orkut. 😉
From their scrapbooks it seems that they got married around July 1.
You can use Orkut’s or his boyfriend Derek’s scrapbook to send your greetings to them. Most of their scraps are in Portuguese. I used Google translator to translate some of them and shocked to see that some orkut users showing displeasure on this marriage. Some of them even posted some of their personal pics on Internet. Don’t ask for links! 😉
mChek
