The popular video sharing website, YouTube.com launched its Indian avatar, www.youtube.co.in. The site is exactly as the main international version, but this would carry more “desi stuff”. News sites report that they have also got some partnerships with some media groups in India like NDTV, UTV, EROS, and a lot more. Apart from that I don’t think there are much changes to the site.

Happy Diwali everyone.

I just logged into my orkut account and saw a “Happy Diwali” message and a picture of deepak next to the logout button. And when you click it you get a new skin based on the festival of Diwali. Looks nice, but can’t use it forever, so there is a revert option, click on the”Happy Diwali” message on the top of your screen, and it changes back to the blue theme.

Orkut also added a new feature, “ask friends”, it lets you ask some questions to your friends in private. It can be found in add stuff option in the left navigation. And you can now add upto 100 images in your album, hmmm…now thats a lot.

Here is a screenshot of the new “Diwali skin”

Great news for every AdSense user! You can now recieve your payments from Western Union Money Transfer. Thats awesome thing really, AdSense just keeps on getting better and better. Although initially its only available for users in Argentina, Chile, China (Mainland), Colombia, Malaysia, Pakistan, Peru, the Philippines, or Romania, but more countries will be added soon enough, and I can’t wait for India to add in the list sooner rather than later. No more checks, just get your money the simple and easy way. Great going Google!

Source

IMDb just keeps on getting better and better. They’ve now added a new feature which lets you search for characters from a movie, say you wanna know who all played a certain character from a movie, so it will give a list of the actors who have played the character. Though not everytime you need to search for a character, but when you need to, you know where you have to look.

Its Google’s 8th Birthday today. Wishing Google a very Happy Birthday! May god bless you and may you keep on growing like this and keep on making internet a better place.

Just a few days back I made a blog post about the new look orkut was coming up with, and when I logged in today I found that new design on my orkut account. I asked my friend to check his, he was still on the older design. So that means like orkut said this is still being done in phases. So I expect it will take some days for everyone to get the new look.

Although the page structure is still pretty much the same, I think they just changed the CSS and images and tweaked the layout a bit to make this new look. The good thing they’ve done is that they’ve put a scrapbook link too in the top navigation, its pretty handy when you want to goto your scrapbook from any page.

It will take sometime getting used to it. But yeah it does look good.

I had been expecting this since sometime now…and orkut finally had this small message today signaling about upcoming new look.

Here is the official blog post about it on the orkut Blog

And here is the screen shot of the site

I have mixed feelings with this look, there is just too much white, the communities and friend list look a bit odd on that white thing…although the design is still pretty good and neat. Anyways good that they are improving this after recently winning the 2007 Pepsi and MTV Youth Icon. Great going guys!

I’ve been noticing some changes in the left navigation at my orkut account for the past few days, and I did feel that something new was coming up. And then it was there today. They’ve added feeds to orkut, so now if you want to share your photos from Fotolog, Picasa Web Albums or Flickr, or have a blog on Blogger, WordPress or LiveJournal, you can show that content in your orkut profile. What I didn’t like about it was, that every feed appears as a part of the left navigation.

Now as you can see in this screen shot, there should have been a single button for feeds, and then all the feeds inside that. Maybe they will iron this out in the future. But then Google always brings out something interesting for orkut! Cheers!

I logged into my Orkut account as usual, and I noticed something new. Yes!!! Google finally did it! I wanted that feature so badly, Google integrated Orkut and Google Talk this morning, which will now allow you to import all your orkut contacts into the Google Talk messenger, and now chat with all your orkut buddies. This will be a great thing to all those who use the scrapbooks like a chat window, so thats a great news. Google keeps getting better and better. Whenever anyone of your friend will be online on Google Talk, their online status will be visible in the friends list as well, so you now know who all are online. And Google Talk has got some more buttons which is due to the orkut integration. Prominently the scrap button (it opens the scrapbook of the user) and other the view profile button (it opens the user’s profile)
Get Google Talk from here if you don’t have it…
http://www.google.com/talk/