Its been around 18 months when we raised the speculations of Google launching the mobile feature for Orkut where users can SMS their orkut scraps and receive their scraps as SMS in their mobiles.

You will have to select your service provider and then register your phone in order to use this SMS feature of Orkut. More instructions can be found over here. Of course your service provider will apply some charges when you use this facility but I am sure everyone will happily pay these charges considering the addiction of orkut in India.

Not all the carriers are still available in the list but I am sure that soon all will join the bandwagon. The current list is:

• Aircel
• BPL
• MTNL
• Reliance
• Spice
• Tata

Unfortunately I use the Idea SIM.

Even though Google is WWW’s most successful company which we have ever seen and their are least chances that any other company will be able to grow with the pace that Google has BUT Google just couldn’t touch the heights of MySpace and Facebook when it comes to Orkut! They have tried their best to get somewhere close to some of the best social networking sites but they just couldn’t. And somehow even they do not know the reason. They have tried their best to do unusual things (the Diwali background the blog) but have failed always.

Recently Google added some applications to orkut which the user can use in their profile to make his/her profile more attractive. Those apps when activated are visible to the general public (that is the basic of a public profile..right?) and they can also interact with those apps as per the application’s features.

So why is this attempt in vain?

When you activate any of those apps then they will show up right below your profile and this steals the show. Usually people in Orkut have real lengthy profiles and below it are the testimonials which they receive from their friends. These apps will show up below the testimonials (or testi as we call them) and hence 90% of the visitors may not even know that you are using some of those apps. They won’t even scroll that much!

Also as Orkut is very famous in India so they have launched some of the applications targeting the Indian customer base only.

India Dekha has been developed by Zoomtra.com in an effort to connect Indian Travel enthusiasts with one another. How much of India Have you traveled or plan to travel to in the future? Make your India Dekha! Map and share it with your friends.

Teen Patti - Indian version of 3 card poker; also known as flash. A multi-player game that you won’t be able to stop playing - once you start. A must play before and on Diwali for most Indian families, even losing in this game is supposed to bring you good luck. Get together with friends and have fun!

I am an Indian and I won’t be impressed until these apps show up at a more visible space than the usual which they have chosen.

Let us hope that these apps give Orkut some extra hype but as far as I am concerned it has failed to do so.

After Bill Gates showed interest in buying Yahoo the Sunnyvale, California-based company has been trying its best to retain hold of the reader base which it has earned in years. Looks like they are not ready to give up their business and Yahoo Shine is another attempt to cash on the 40 million females visitors which yahoo has in its bag.

Basically shine is a blog with a magazine style theme which focuses very well on the various categories like parenting, sex and love, healthy living, food, career and money, entertainment, fashion, beauty, home life, and astrology.

The homepage also give you the option to create your own blog (once you are logged in) and you can even leave comments for various posts. This commenting feature will attract many bloggers like me so that they can publicize their tiny blogs.

I am sure this project will add some bucks to the bid which Microsoft will offer for Yahoo!

Number of social networking websites are spreading very fast these days. Every alternate day I get an email in my mail box where some friend of mine invites me to join a weird named social networking website. And the funny part is that every time these fellows expect me to upload all my images in their albums plus write down all my information (and mark what other can see and what others cannot) in their complicated looking websites. Then they want me to invite other friends of mine and start talking to them using their bandwidth. Alright, but why?

If they actually want users to switch to their kind-of social networking website then these people need to ease the login process. Working in this same direction leading developers from Google and Facebook, among many other, have recently agreed to be a part of DataPortability, a website which encourages online companies to leverage existing technologies to share user data across other websites. This means that you won’t have to re-enter details or upload photographs all over again on some new social networking websites you just signed on to.

For the end user this means that Internet will be a common platform which you can personalize to your tastes and interests with all data and information seamlessly accessible, while saying bye-bye to your privacy. Little hard work from the the big players of the game and I am sure this concept could actually be the one we all will love to use.

Orkut as a social networking website has achieved the status which many other social networking sites only dream of. There was a time when my friends used to open yahoo messenger as the first application after booting there computer and connecting to the Internet. Today they open orkut first as they get connected to Internet instead of yahoo messenger.

Orkut has become the de-facto for many internet surfers and many who do not even know the basics of Internet also boast of a live orkut account with many opposite sex profiles added in there list . To cash in and impress its Indian user base orkut recently launched a Diwali special background for there home page after user logs in. All you need to do is click on Happy Diwali link on the top of your home page after you log in.

You may not find me at my institute, at my home, with my friends or at yahoo messenger but I can assure you of a reply within 10 hrs if you scrap me at orkut.

HAPPY DIWALI TO ALL. Wanna be friends?