Social networking

Problem with Orkut Chat: its Solution

Can not chat with some friends in Orkut ?

Orkut Chat feature has been rolled-out to almost all the Orkut accounts. And many people are facing some annoying problem with it. i.e., they are able to chat with some friends and are not able to chat with some other friends, even though both of then have enabled and are available for chat!

This is due to the permission set in your Orkut account settings.

Solution:
Goto “Settings ” and click on “Chat” tab. Now click on the group of friends that you want to chat with and block the friends with whom you don’t want to chat. You can individually select, with whom you want/don’t want to chat with, by clicking on the small arrow symbol(which is highlighted in the above image).
After selecting/deselecting the friends to chat/not to chat with, click on save button.

Facebook Further Explaining Their Policy

A couple of weeks ago, Facebook updated their “Terms“. And there was a lot of discussion about it in the blogosphere, forums and on twitter. According to the new Terms, Facebook now reserves all rights to the “User Content”, means any photos, text, link, audio, video, designs, ads and anything else that you Post on or through the Facebook Service. “Post” means to upload, post, transmit, share, store, link to or otherwise make available on or through the Facebook Service, even if you choose to close your account on the network or if your account gets banned or disabled for some reason.

While its a good practice to read the privacy policy and then signup for any service, but have a look at the lengthy terms on every social networking, social bookmarking, social media sites. If you keep on reading them, you will just have to keep on reading them(as they get updated now and then, making it more complex!).

After reading the changes made by Facebook many people expressed their disappointment. Totally Facebook was in News at many places.

Meanwhile Mark Zuckerberg(Founder of Facebook) wrote a blog post to clarify the issue. You can read the entire story, at On Facebook, People Own and Control Their Information.
Here is an important excerpt from the post..

Our philosophy is that people own their information and control who they share it with. When a person shares information on Facebook, they first need to grant Facebook a license to use that information so that we can show it to the other people they’ve asked us to share it with. Without this license, we couldn’t help people share that information.

Another concern was, Facebook reserves all rights to the “User Content”, even after you choose to close your account on the network or if your account gets banned or disabled for some reason. Here is what Mark Zuckerberg has to say

When a person shares something like a message with a friend, two copies of that information are created—one in the person’s sent messages box and the other in their friend’s inbox. Even if the person deactivates their account, their friend still has a copy of that message. We think this is the right way for Facebook to work, and it is consistent with how other services like email work.

Mark Zuckerberg also assures(in the blog post) that they wouldn’t share your information in a way you wouldn’t want.

One thing to note here is people who want full ownership and control over their information can turn off access to it at any time, by changing things in their settings panel.

Facebook claims that these changes in their Terms will be made simpler and more clear over time.
For now the issue is bit cleared and Facebook got a lot of attention in a short period of time(Kind of viral marketing 🙂 ).

Update: Facebook reverted to its previous terms of service, with this public announcement from Mark Zuckerberg.

In the blog post, he writes, “Going forward, we’ve decided to take a new approach towards developing our terms. We concluded that returning to our previous terms was the right thing for now. As I said yesterday, we think that a lot of the language in our terms is overly formal and protective so we don’t plan to leave it there for long.”

Add colourful wordings, videos, smilies, links to your Orkut profile and scraps

I have been getting many emails from my readers (who read my about me section in Orkut) about how to write colorful letters in orkut profile and scarps?
We had thought that this is a small thing that almost everybody using orkut will be knowing. But to our surprise many people wanted to know about it, so here we go:-

Scraps to friends
Now, you can paste in photos, videos, audio, and flash widgets in scraps to your friends. Here’s how:
Add images

Copy and paste urls ending in .jpg, .gif, .png or .bmp and the image will appear in the scrap.
for example, http://example.com/example.jpg
Add videos from YouTube:
Copy and paste the url and the video will appear in the scrap.
for example, http://youtube.com/watch?v=videoid
Add podcast/audio:
Copy and paste the url of an audio file and an audio player will appear in the scrap.
for example, http://example.com/example.mp3
Add html-embeddable objects:
Create or upload your content at sites such as photobucket.com, imageshack.com, rockyou.com or slide.com. Copy and paste the html embed code to share it with your friends.

Scraps to everyone(See below image for the symbols)

To change the font color of your text, type the name of the color you wish to use in brackets.

Ex:- [ColorName]Your text that you want to see in red color[/ColorName]
[red]Text will appear in Red, in Orktu[/red]

To show an emoticon, type the key shown above for each emoticon in brackets.
To make text bold, italic, or underlined, use [b], [i] and [u] accordingly.
To make a word a link, use [link]…[/link]

I am [red]feeling[/red] [b][i]lucky[/i][/b] ! [:)] –> I am feeling lucky !
[link=http://www.orkut.com]orkut[/link] –> orkut [http://www.orkut.com]
[link]http://www.orkut.com[/link] –> http://www.orkut.com
Source:- Orkut

These are some of the basic things to make your scraps and about me section of Orkut colorful and attractive. And if you like any thing in someothers scarp book or about me section and you have no idea of how to do it, then you can just select the whole thing, drag and drop into your scrap book[Not recommended. Do something creative yourself]

Happy spammers-Orkut allows Export contacts in CSV format

Spammers job is to keep collecting email address of active internet users until they get a deal(spamming), so that they can mint some money from those spam mails.

I know a guy in India, who asked me 75$ and he could send my blog link to 5 lakh people in one day. And he was very good at convincing. He told that I would get back my money from the one day of campaign with him(spamming).
But guys, I don’t like spammers. And I hate when someone interferes in my privacy without my permission, so how could I interfere in someone else privacy!

One sad part is, these spammers are very intelligent. They know all sorts of things from where they can get the email ID’s of active internet users.

Now anyone can get large number of active email ID’s from Orkut!
Log in to orkut, then click ‘Friends’ along the top navigation. Next, click ‘Download your contacts’ on the bottom of the page to save your contacts as a CSV file.

In Orkut, its not so difficult to add 1000 friends(which is the limitation presently, but we hope Orkut will soon remove this limitation too) by creating a fake account(in the name of a girl and with a sexi pic in the profile). After creating some 10 accounts you can keep checking these accounts and just accept the friend request you get. There are applications which will help you to accept all the friend requests in one click. So by a month are so, you will be acquiring 1000 contacts in each of the profiles i.e., 10 x 1000 = 10000 / month. Now just goto ‘Friends’ link in the top navigation. Next, click ‘Download your contacts’ on the bottom of the page to save your contacts as a CSV file. SO you will have 10000 active email contacts per month.

Now the “Big G’s” “Orkut” is a hot place for spammers to get the email ID’s of the most active internet users. Because, people who are using social networking sites are mostly addicted to that social networking site and they check it almost every day like a daily ritual.

To prevent spammers from getting your email ID for some extent:
Don’t accept/send friend request of/to those who put fake sexi pics in their profiles(to attract others).
And observe their activities before sending/accepting request.

I have been getting lot of spams to one of my ID and the others had just 2 or 4 spams. So I wondered why only one ID is getting full of spam mails?
So we did a bit of research and found that, the same spam messages where present in many peoples orkut scrap books, and finally we could get to know the source of spam and discovered that the guy who spammed us, got our ID from Orkut.

And I am sure, Orkut is one of the main place where these spammers collected huge number of active email ID’s.
So be careful the next time you send/receive a friend request in Orkut or any other social networking sites.

Orkut adds a Family Friendly Feature – “Safety Filter”

Social networking site is a place where we can connect with people and have a good, healthy relationship with. If these sites become like porn sites, then where is the meaning for social networking ?

Its good that Google has come forward to implement this feature in its famous social networking site Orkut.

Google is changing things in Orkut so fast and its improving almost day by day. And We can say that Orkut would surly be a tough competitor for Top 1 place in social networking sites, in the coming days.

This “SAFETY FILTER” feature is automatically turned on in all profiles and you can turn it off anytime by going to “settings”. You turn it off or on, orkut’s tough policies against explicit content will still be in place.

The new “Safety Filter” automatically screens for content that may not violate Orkut Community Standards. With the “Safety Filter” on, whenever you come across a page with photos or text that you might be bothered by (such as sexually suggestive phrases or images) , you’ll receive a warning and the mature content will be replaced by special icons. No filter is 100% accurate, so if you see a page that you think should be blocked, just flag it as always and let the Orkut team know about it.

Orkut has been criticized and even sued in courts of India, not so much for sexually explicit content, but for political content, including communities on the site that criticize the country or some of its politicians.

The filter in Orkut is however oriented to filtering out sexual content and not political content. Filtering political content is far more difficult as there is always a gray area as to when the filter would come in the way of freedom of speech, – said Rahul Kulkarni, product manager at Google India, on Thursday.