Major Design Makeover: Orkut!

Many people have been predicting that Orkut will shut down shortly! But nothing is convincing Orkut management to shut-it-down. The pig-headed discipline continues, and they are rolling out a major design enhancement shortly.

There is no “invite only” dramas; everyone will see the new design in 2 weeks time. Orkut Team is said to be busy in rolling out the new designs to all the Orkut users.

orkut_themes_en

orkut_home_en

orkut_profile_en

orkut_3col_largephoto

Source: Orkut blog

So, here are the interesting design changes:
1. Left navigation: To help you get to the most popular features easily.
2.Larger profile photo: A popular request. [Be sure to upload a higher resolution photo of yourself!]
3. Full profile view: Lets you and your friends see your info, interests, badges, testimonials and recent photos and videos.
4. New fullscreen slideshow for photos. [Similar to that found in Facebook!]

As far I’m concerned, I’m somewhat happy with the new design.
If you have forgot your Orkut password, then recover it and have a look at the new design.

All the best Orkut; I don’t know why, but, many of my female friends spend a lot of time in Orkut. Not sure how they spend their time in Orkut!
Orkut needs to add more modules: I mean, it has to add some more useful/engaging features. Otherwise, it’s hard to spend time in Orkut.

Upload Videos Longer Than 15 Minutes: YouTube!

Recently YouTube extended the (upload limit) video length from 10 minutes to 15 minutes for all YouTube users, it was a welcome sign for people who wanted to create lengthy video tutorial, how-to’s, entertainment videos etc.

YouTube Partner benefits:
We all know, YouTube Partner’s enjoy a lot more feature, opportunity than normal users; and why not, they bring in huge profits to YouTube and make people comeback to YouTube again and again.

Some of the exclusive partner benefits being:
1. Revenue share.
2. Possibility to upload lengthy videos.
3. Ability to customize the channel page. Make it look like a custom landing page.
4. Add or remove ads from their videos. etc

Good News For Normal Users:
In recent developments, YouTube has started rolling out a new feature to normal YouTube users, where-in people who abide by the rules(hopefully) get the opportunity to upload videos longer than 15 minutes.

YouTube-videos-longer-than-15min

To know, if your account has been enabled to upload videos longer than 15 minutes: log into your YouTube account and hit on the Upload button. Now at the top, you should see this message, if your account has been enabled:

Congratulations! Your account is now enabled for uploads longer than 15 minutes. Click the Upload button below to select a video.

if not, then you need to follow all the rules and wait some more time.

YouTube Promoted Videos
Another new thing added is, a link to YouTube Promoted Videos section, where you can promote any of your videos to target audience and pay only when people click on your videos. Well, this is a old thing for people who are familiar with YouTube advertising. But for those who had no clue about the videos that were displayed in the right hand side of their YouTube homepage, will now come to know that they are promoted videos! Every user has a link in their profile’s “Account Settings” to promote their videos now, making it more transparent.



Is this feature enabled to your YouTube account? What’s the maximum length video you have ever uploaded to YouTube so far. If enabled, what kind of videos you intend to upload?

Awesome Picnik photo editor: now on Orkut too

Picnik is a photo editing application which connects with all the major photo sharing sites like Flickr, PhotoWorks and integrates seamlessly with a variety of websites including Facebook, MySpace, Picasa Web, Webshots, Lexmark, Box.net, Photobucket etc (and now Orkut)..

PikNik On Orkut

With all these integration, picnik has bought us the facility of editing our photos seemlessly without ever having to leaving Facebook or Orkut.



Twist:
Picnik was acquired by Google on 3/10

Some helpful resources:
Chrome extension of Picnik.
Picnik Facebook App. (You will get confused, if you open Facebook as well as Orkut picnik app at once in the same browser. It will show the same edit session in both apps.)
Picnik Facebook fanpage.
Picnik for Drupal.
Picnik Mozilla add-on.
Picnik on Twitter.

Business Strategy used
Picnik has a premium version of its editing tool that will give you more advanced features for around $25 a year. Users can use the tool even without registering an account, but the free version is ad supported and the low cost premium account gets rid of these ads. Pretty simple and straight forward strategy.

Picnik On Orkut
You can find picnik app integrated by default, when you visit your photo album and click on any individual photo. Picnik has a rich set of features to spice up the photos and to make the sharing experience great.

locate PikNik On Orkut

Award:
In Dec 2007, Picnik won the Macworld Editors’ Choice Award in the Web category.

Facebook Phonebook: Gone missing!

Facebook Phonebook displays contacts you have imported from your phone, as well as your Facebook friends.

Facebook may use this information to create friend suggestions for you and your friends. If you disable it, the friend suggestion tool may find it difficult to analyze and detect people who are using Facebook and may know you at the same time.

facebook-phonebook



If you would like to remove your mobile contacts from Facebook, you need to disable the feature on your mobile phone(make sure to disable the Facebook synchronization feature on your phone first, if you have ever enabled it) and visit this page.

Facebook Phonebook makes sense, because of the recent integration between Facebook and Skype. Skype may use this data and people may place a call to their friends without manually entering their phone numbers.

Since Facebook rolled out new layout to all its users, people are searching for the link to get to their Facebook Phonebook. Hope Facebook fixes this link shortly.

If you want to know the path for Facebook Phonebook in the new layout: Click on “Account” link, a drop down menu will come, now click on “Edit Friends“. Now on the left hand side you will find the link to your Facebook Phonebook.

Here is the direct link to see your Phonebook on Facebook.

Attack On Orkut: Ruim Sabado!

Its ruim sabado (BAD saturday) for Orkut and Orkut users. From today morning a virus has been spreading like wild fire!

computer-bug

If you are not aware: There is a virus attack( cross-site scripting attack ) on Orkut and once your profile gets infected, it will automatically start sending mass scrap reading “Bom Sabodo“(which means “Good Saturday” in Portuguese, which is also the official language of Brazil).

This script also automatically joins you to some porno kind of community. If you saw your friends joining some porn like community on Orkut, then congrats, within minutes or seconds your friends will be notified that you have also joined such a community. You are infected too!

Only suggestion I have heard so far is, not to use Orkut until there is official words about this by Orkut team – Orkut blog.

Update: Everything seems to be under control now. The virus is not spreading now. But you have to mannually unjoin from those automatically joined communities.

Go Pro With Twitter ( hmm..not really! )

We can see some people tweeting valuable links, always. How is that possible? How can they find these valuable, interesting links always.

And to your wonder, you might have also noticed that, some people keep on tweeting valuable links without much delay. Are they really reading all those stuffs and selecting the best one and tweeting? They tweet links to YouTube Videos, blogs, Some photos, Digg story etc. How can they be all around the web at a time?
Stuff-To-Tweet
Now you can also be that pro….by using a tool or aggregator called StuffToTweet.com. It is an aggregator site, which has links to popular stories on Digg, Del.icio.us, CNN, New York Times, Amazon, YouTube, Some popular blogs, photo sharing sites etc.
You can also get the links to the tweets which are popular on Twitter.

Interesting enough, this site is built with the most wonderful tool WordPress. For many of the geeks or webmasters, building such website may not take more than 30 minutes. We can simply use the feed of some popular sites and aggregate it on to our website. And WordPress will make the process even simpler.

If you know of any similar service, then please share it with us in the comment section.

Now, only thing that we must make sure is: “Do not spam Twitter, with your valuable Tweets 🙂 “. Some people do not even bother to look at the story once, before tweeting it.

I prefer to use Twitter as a communication tool, rather than using it only to share links. But I was always wondering, how these people are tweeting valuable links from all over the web? Now we have the answer!

Twitter HomePage Re-designed

Twitter has finally re-designed its homepage. And it has taken upon the search and hot or trending topics as their main objective of the re-design.
To view the re-design, log out of Twitter and visit Twitter.com. Only the front page has been changed and everything else remains the same.

Twitter has finally re-designed its homepage. And it has taken upon the search and hot or trending topics as their main objective of the re-design.

Many people use the Twitter website for knowing the latest trendz and for real time search. And mostly use other Twitter clients for tweeting.
old-twitter-homepage.jpg

New-twitter-homepage.jpg
Here is a quote from Twitter blog:

Defining a “tweet” for the uninitiated and explaining how to create an account doesn’t resonate with everyone. “Why would I want to do that?” is a common reaction. However, demonstrating the power of Twitter as a discovery engine for what is happening right now through our Search and Trends often awakens a sense of wonder which inevitably leads to a much more compelling question, “How do I get involved?”

Twitter is smart enough and know that they need to keep on working for the betterment of their site and their service by getting constant feedback from its users.

This posts main purpose is to document the old homepage and the first re-design of Twitter.

To view the re-design, log out of Twitter and visit Twitter.com. Only the front page has been changed and everything else remains the same.

One dis-advantage, with this new design could be – It takes one more click to get that log in form! Think how many clicks you may need to do in a year or two 🙂

Did you like the new design? or You think the old one was better?