*** Now why is an Indian gaming blog talking about technology, orkut etc? Because we
are passionate about everything related to technology. At heart we still remain a gaming blog with
an Indian twist =) ***

I used to be an Orkut addict, I used to spam my own scrapbook to increase scrap count, I used to flood friends’ scrapbooks just to make their life hell, Orkut used to be open on one tab of my Firefox browser all the time; but that was back in 2006. A lot has happened since then, Facebook came, saw, conquered; Twitter got free publicity in media every time there was an earthquake or a bomb explosion (continues to get); the term real-time and cloud became the new web 2.0. In Short, a decade has passed in ‘technology time’.

Orkut meanwhile, continues to grow and still manages to attract a lot of people who’re getting started on the web. But the latest set of updates announced a few days back, just might bring them back to the top again. I’ve tried to sum up some nice things in the interface which I liked.

To start with, the new interface was designed using Google Web Toolkit, the same toolkit that was used to develop the quite impressive Google Wave. Once someone invites you, you’ll see something like this on the top bar.

Click on it and you’ll be led to the new homepage.

The first thing that strikes your eye is the blue box on top, the colour of it can be set to red, orange, pink, green or black.The box also poses a question “What are you up to” now where have we heard that before. (Clue:answer it in 140chrs). On home page there’s nothing on the blue box other than the question and the captcha that pops up below it when you post a link in your status message. In profile page, the blue box also includes your basic details (contact, status, age, location) visible only to your followers.

On the home page, below the ‘blue box’ it’ll you’ll find friend suggestion, the scroller system of which has been improved upon.

You can minimise this element and the next element is ‘What’s new’, here you’ll see birthday updates, friend requests etc and below this comes ‘Friend Updates’ which is quite similar to Facebook; you can comment on everything.

The list of friends on the right has a search option with real-time results. Not like in Facebook where name of the person is listed. Here their profile pics turn up in real time. I like it!

Now hit the profile link on top and you’ll be find this page. Below the blue box there is ‘about me’ section, followed by ‘your updates’ and then testimonials you received. You can click to edit the about me section and also optionally set a gadget as default instead of the ‘about me’ text. The gadgets you’ve added will be visible as tabs on top of about me.

The Orkut logo on to left the page is much more than a logo. It’s also a jump list. Mouse over and ta da a nice list pops up

Now getting to the most used part of Orkut — scrapbook. Apaprt from the inline replies to scraps you can also reply to scrap via chat.. yup gchat right from orkut. You can also post video scraps by clicking a small video icon present in the scrap, paste the link from youtube and that’s that. Videos you uploaded will be shown with a small screengrab, clicking it’ll expand the video and it looks like this.

Another process which underwent a massive update was teh photo upload feature. Try uploading photos in bulk. It’ll show a thumbnail image which you can caption, rotate even as the images are uploading, You can also set who can see the photo from the same screen.

Almost everything else resides in the ‘more’ tab after the videos tab. I like what they have overall, but like @manuscrypts pointed out via a DM, it needs to be seen how present users use it. Will they like it? Will they graduate to Facebook after getting used to Orkut Facebook like interface?

PS: I think the blue box on home page takes up too much space. Wouldn’t it be much better if it was like this?

PPS: Character limit for comments to status messages

I got Google Wave finally, today morning, thanks to abhaga. Been toying around with it since then. Here are my thoughts on the latest from Google’s stable.

1> As Scoble wrote, it can affect your productivity. So if you see a heated discussion and you don’t want to see that wave popping up on top again and again, hit the ‘mute’ button. You can view that wave later on by going to ‘All’ option on the left panel.

2> Don’t use it as a GChat alternative. Try to use it for professional needs. If you’re a techie, try coding with someone over wave. I wrote on my posterous blog about how it could help journalists like me and change the way media organisations work.

3> Don’t fall for the hype. It’s cool alright, but not as cool as I thought it would be. One of the reasons I rate down the coolness quotient is because most of my friends are not on it as of now. I have just 10 people, most of whom are not online now. Once more and more people join god knows what this can turn into.

4> Be choosy about whom you add in a wave. You add one guy he drags in 10 others and before you know it, your sweet little wave has turned into Indian parliament (read:unruly)

5> Have patience till more gadgets are available. As of now you get to play a few games, post to blogs, check on twitter among other things etc. It doesn’t have the number of apps Facebook has, at least not yet.

6> What about the brands? Should they step-in? Yes they should, but through an app. The app can have integration with a service provided by them online or to their twitter account, to suggest a few.

7> It’s still in beta sorry preview, so a few nuts and bolts will be lose/missing so don’t hate if it crashes once or twice. It’ll improve.

Like I told you, things do go wrong once in a while

Update

8> I don’t see an option to delete any wave permanently. You can move it to thrash and that’s that. It stay there. May be a cat from google will lick the trash clean, other than that I don’t see a way to get rid of them. Gautam John has an interesting theory on that. He’s tweeted it here.

Must read: @_dinu has written about some interesting points/ways to use Google wave

I’m surprised that music business is still thriving in India. It beats me why more and more people are quitting jobs to pursue a career in music when piracy is so rampant (one of my colleagues did). Where is the money? Isn’t piracy making a big hole in your pockets yet?

Amit Agarwal has posted a list of top mobile websites by country, and in India, songs.pk, which is notorious for letting people download songs for free comes fourth on the list. So people download tracks on the move too? Isn’t there any way to put an end to this piracy? Doesn’t anyone have any solution? I would have stopped at these questions if not for two amazing services I saw yesterday and today.

The first, from Nokia, lets you download tracks for free. Yes you heard me right; you can download without shelling out a penny. At least for now, provided you have a coupon code. Along with a lot of Bangaloreans, I was given codes at Nokia Music Boot Camp and a chance to give the product a run. You can download tracks from mobile or from your desktop using apps which run on Nokia handsets and windows systems respectively. Overall, it’s pretty impressive except for the fact that these tracks have a DRM. But there was also a mention of taking-off DRM later on and a promise of bringing in social-networking features. Vinu Thomas and Raghu has written about the event in detail here, here and here.

The other product is from Hungama, and to put it bluntly, is an Indian version of iTunes. You can access their list of songs via mobile, desktop app or via browser, so Linux and Mac users are not left out like in the case of Nokia’s music store.

However, they have a smaller collection of songs – around 2,00,000 as of now — and is in closed-beta. Also unlike Nokia they will be charging for songs, but I like their pricing-plans. Rs10 for a single song (no DRM), Rs20 for a pack of four songs of your choice (no DRM), and unlimited downloads at (Rs99) per month. Good or not?

Well the goodness doesn’t end with the pricing actually, from what I was told, they’ll soon be allowing people to log-in via facebook connect and even Orkut-id (via an app I think).

The main problem if you ask me, is that there were only artists who came up through labels present on the site. Someone from Radio Verve had asked a similar question yesterday at the Nokia event too. But Nokia’s store doesn’t restrict itself to mainstream movie songs, which is what Hungama is doing now. But it’s okay considering they’re in closed beta. More updates on the service to follow, once I get a month’s trial tomorrow.

According to monthly report by Kaspersky Labs for the month of August, the attempts to infect computers via the web have been the highest in China at 39.4%, followed by the United States at 8.7% and then India at 7.2%.

As a global trend number of malwares will grow and Kaspersky forecasted a growth by 20 times in 2009. According to Alexander Gnatusin, Director, Channel SA, Kaspersky Lab, “The percentage in India is definitely growing, however number of malwares from China are growing much faster. Just recently, couple of big banks were infected with different type of threats. The Indian market is growing and so there will be a growing number of threats and malware targeted to steal someone’s data and money”

The first Top Ten list of malicious programs, adware and potentially unwanted programs that were detected and neutralized when accessed for the first time, i.e. by using the on-access scanner.

#   Malware  |  Change in ranking    |  Number of malware created

1    Net-Worm.Win32.Kido.ih    0    48281

2    Virus.Win32.Sality.aa           0     23156

3    not-a-virus:AdWare.Win32.Boran.z    New     16872

4    Trojan-Downloader.Win32.VB.eql       -1          8030

5     Trojan.Win32.Autoit.ci -1       7846

6      Virus.Win32.Virut.ce            0        6248

7      Worm.Win32.AutoRun.dui  -2        5516

8      Net-Worm.Win32.Kido.jq      0        5446

9      Virus.Win32.Sality.z                -2       5157

10     Virus.Win32.Induc.a            New     4476