Entries from November 2007 ↓

Its Diwali today, one of the most exciting festivals in India. India is a country dominated by Hindus but still people from other religions can never find a better place with such cultural harmony. Every religion’s major festival is a national holiday for us. Diwali is the festival of lights, people celebrate by lighting candles and is now more of a multi religious festival with everyone enjoying the spirit. I will stop talking about Diwali here and you can find more about the festival at the Wikipedia page for Diwali.

Okrut today had a link in the top header when clicked toggled the theme to a Diwali theme which lookied like in the screenshot below.

Much attention has been paid to the footer to make it look more web 2.0

The logo has been slightly changed to belnd with the theme

Incase you don’t use Orkut, this is how the original theme looks like.

This Diwali theme just showed how ready the site design is to implement clean and blended themes. It might as well be an indicator that Orkut is getting ready to be themed. And the recent Open Social launch makes the okrut team more busy as they have to make it Open Social ready. Till now there is no sign of adding applications to Orkut.

Orkut does not allow customization like MySpace, but they have recently added many features like ability to embed media in messages, show updates from friends in the user’s homepage, ability to add feeds to user’s profile and more recently an Ask Freinds feature.
Orkut is one of the major social networks and is watched closely by analysts because its from Google. Intially Orkut was like a Brazilian social networking site but the scene is fast changing. It noew enjoys a strong presence in India. The Demographics page from orkut proves the point.

In India you can rarely find students who don’t have an Orkut profile. There are many home grown social networking sites trying to get a pie of this but most of their users overlap with Orkut. Online social networking is more a wild phenomenon among the youth and the college going crowd than with the working class. This might be more because of the censorship at offices than lack of intrest to network online. More schools and colleges are starting to block the use of social networking sites in India.

Google is silently rolling out a new version of their email offering. GMail has features that made the competition jealous and forced them to build new easy to use interfaces. GMail has been and is still popular because of the wonderful interface with an intelligent use of AJAX.

Today my account was automatically upgraded to the new version and though the features or UI have not drastically changed they have left an option to switch back to the old version.

The more actions menu has new options added to it. Select a message and select Filter messages like these from the menu and you are prompted with a new page to create a new filter.

There is also a mute option which allows you to stop the message received sound alerts while you are using the Google Talk integrated with Gmail.

GMail’s contact manager was definietely better than the competiton and now it gets even better. Earlier Gmail added the option to group contacts and new the contact manager in itself is a great applicaiton.

Click on image to view larger version. Sorry for the crappy editing, was feeling a bit lazy to edit in Photoshop.
Google announced introduction of IMAP for GMail and if you havent got the upgrade yet you are going to get it in this big upgrade.

GMail is the first web based client that changed the way people thought of email storage or may bethe one that made people to never think of storage. And whats a GMail upgrade without a storage increase. The new version has added 2GB to the existing 2.7GB making email storage more ridiculous to be worried about.

And changing between Basic HTML version and the standard AJAX version is easier than ever. There are links in the footer to make the switch.

The colors are now a bit softer. The notifier which used to tell us of our actions now uses a lighter yellow and it sure is better looking now than earlier.