Gops

Today my friend was complaining about orkut saying she is being irritated by unknown persons impersonating as somene else. Well, this is the most common complaint of today's orkut users. Other misuse being misuse of photos.Orkut is famous for having a user base virtually restricted to Brazil and India, understandably has almost half its user base in Latin America, almost half in Asia-Pacific, and almost none anywhere else. Why do indians stick with this social networking site when there are lot of other alternative sites available? Moreover orkut does not have features that make it as Web2.0 service. 95% of orkut users comprises of age between 18 and 25. Other 5% being "spam-bots" flooding the "scraps".

Orkut

There was lack of knowledge of social networking sites available those days in India, Hi5 being only big thing for youth that time. Orkut was made popular by word-of-the-mouth in schools and colleges and this became the next big thing after being starved for death in Hi5. When the hype about orkut hit, everyone rushed to make accounts and invited people to join the madness. The lack of privacy controls in Orkut was so tempting for Indian youth and it drives them to sneek and peek into another person's profile and so called "scraps". Then comes the 'scraps'-as the word itself refers largely as unwanted rubbish- why the hell you want to scrap someone else knowing anyone else can see and misuse them? For most Orkut users,a person's "scraps" and "friend count" and so called "testmonials" represents character of that person. These users just scraps only to "increase" their scrap count. Then comes the communities. Yes i agree that communities are the places where we get to find the old friends. But how many of users participate in community? Communities are flooded with posts by spam-bots. I saw one of my friend having 957 communities in his list!! Now you could have guessed whether that person really participate in them or not.

Orkut-misuse

Web 2.0.. before you get red-faced with anger, i will tell you i am not talking anything "technical". You got to know about Web 2.0 if you use internet atleast 3 hours a week.

The version number is no way related to updation to technical specification of web, but its all about services offered in net which aim to facilitate creativity, collaboration and sharing between users- Social-networking and folksonomies and a lot!!

Web 2.0 services i enjoy everyday are

• Digg - Social bookmarking site
• Clipmarks - another Social bookmarking site
• StumbleUpon - Social bookmarking
• Last.fm - Music community
• Youtube - popular free video sharing Web site which lets users upload, view, and share video clips.
• Flickr -The best way to store, search, sort and share your photos
• del.icio.us - social bookmarks manager
• wikipedia - biggest multilingual free-content encyclopedia on the Internet
• Vox - my favourite blogging site :)
• and lot more.

There is lot in internet than Games and Mails and Orkutting :)

Come on. Be a part of Web 2.0 community.

Here is the another music site!! last.fm.

Here is what Wiki says about this site.

Last.fm is a UK-based internet radio and music community website, founded in 2002. It is the world's largest social music platform with over 20 million active users based in more than 232 countries.

Using a unique music recommendation system known as "Audioscrobbler", Last.fm builds a detailed profile of each user's musical taste by recording details of all the songs the user listens to, either on the streamed radio stations or on the user's computer or portable music device. This information is transferred to Last.fm's database ("Scrobbled") via a plugin installed into the user's music player. The profile data is displayed on a personal web page. The site offers numerous social networking features and can recommend and play artists similar to the user's favourites.

In short, it goes like this. You hear a song.. you tell that you love it or you hate it.. next song it plays will be depending on the taste of your previously heard songs. The site keeps track of all the songs you heard till now and learns YOUR taste and plays those.

Another cool info.. There is social networking too!! You can add friends, you see what your friends hear, there is comparison meter that compares taste of yours and your friends!! Isnt it that cool??

My God i love it. From my experience..its like..WoooooooooooooooooW!!! I love it. How did i miss this one!! Sorry Deezer..you are no way near to this. ;)

I happened to come across Deezer while searching for an online music site. If you want to listen to a certain song or specific album from one of your favorite artists you can depend on Deezer.. but dont forget to have high speed broadband unless if u want to hear a single song for half hour.

btw.. Deezer is a free on-demand music service that allows you to listen to specific songs & artists and lets you build and save custom playlists. Music is user contributed (uploaded by each user) and then analyzed and cataloged in Deezer’s database.  After building your playlist, you can embed a custom player on your site using Deezer’s Blog/Share tool that auto generates the code for you.

Here’s a link to Deezer’s site: http://www.deezer.com/