*** 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

When Google made the announcement about their upcoming Chrome Operating System, the first question that struck me was – What about gaming? Because I use Linux once in a while, (and when I do it is generally Ubuntu) the only way they can get me to use Chrome OS would be through a wider range of games made available through the service.

As of now, Windows continues to have a monopoly over PC based gaming, as there are very few existing games and very few being developed for Mac and Linux . But what needs to be kept in mind is the shift in gaming to browser environment, moving away from PC-hardware intensive gaming. The advantages include — reaching a wider audience, cost-effectiveness, easy distribution and control over piracy, albeit bandwidth intensive.

3D browsing as of now

Business Week had an interesting story a while back on how easy it has become to handle 3D graphics within a browser environment. They even mentioned the effort being put into building 3D games on iPhone, which till recent times, I thought, had very few genuine games. Most of the so-called games were touch-screen implementation of  flash games or just bling elements. The recent launch of games like Doom and the recent news of Duke Nukem being ported to iPhone, all sounds like good news, because if iPhone can handle those games, so can a Netbook with 1GB RAM.

I had earlier blogged about Vector entertainment who are developing a 3D racing game which will work within a browser using v3D engine. In the same story, I even mentioned the progress being made in Java to accommodate 3D objects within an applet. But java applets continue to be resource intensive and until this problem is sorted, the basic objective of games within a browser fails.

Window’s loss, is Google’s loss

If PC gaming move to a browser, Linux will gain a lot much more than any other OS, because primarily it’s free and more flexible than most OSes in the market. Secondly, Chrome is targeting Netbooks, which are low-spec, cheap and well, internet friendly. Gaming on such a platform is inconceivable, if not for a browser approach.

Apart from getting people to use Chrome OS, what does Google gain with an increase in browser based games? Well, most of these browser based games used in-game ads (remember Quake Live ?) for revenue, rather than charge users to play a game. We all know that Google is the king of contextual advertising, they can definitely use their platform to sell ads within a game. That said, in-game ads are a different ball game altogether. There is no option to click on an ad, you can leave a few bullet marks on the ad if you may. So technically speaking, in-game ads function as hoardings and lack the interactivity/customisation associated with Google ads.

But if they find a good work around and contribute to the developing support for 3D in browsers, they have a chance to push Windows out. Until then, I will happily stick with the “evil-empire”.

On Netbooks

When Google announced that the OS they made it pretty specific that their OS will be tailored to Netbooks. It needs to be remembered that the Netbook trend caught up just because of recession. What after recession? Will people continue to splurge money on high-end systems or will people opt for cloud based packages? If the latter turns out to be the future, Google just be able to do what they intend to do.

It is not very often that google screw up.. So when they does its kinda strange. So you may ask, where did they screw up, rather you should be asking what did they screw up with?

And my answer is with gaming consoles.

Lookie here.. (click image for bigger view)

In a story about PS3 they have used an Xbox 360 pic.. so sad =(

(agreed the second optional link is about Xbox 360, but the main story is about Sony saying no price cuts for PS3)

Google news can’t differenciate between PS3 and Xbox 360 and what is the difference folks? Oops way too many to put here. But Sony should be really pissed and Microsoft.. well they are suckers for PR so definitely happy! And Google ah, I really don’t think they give a dime!