Tech News Beats

Just imagine what would happen to the online world without the internet. Your facebook, Orkut, etc will be all off. Well, I think I have already scared you. Please take heart that researchers have already found way to allow you to interect with your peers via Facebook even without internet access. They came up with an application called Peersonalizer which is a facebook application developed by Wipeer and can be downloaded from their website. This application is available free of cost and allows direct wireless communication between computers without internediate devices like rounters etc upto a distance of upto 900 feet.

Peersonalizer technology can also be applied in future to Orkut, MySpace, wifi enabled phones like iPhone etc. It also allows interactive multiplayer games to be played, file sharing, file searching, chat or instant messaging etc. This is for sure take social networking to a new level altogether.

We might have been Orkut-ing for long time now but mobile and sms thing came little late from Google. Please note that Orkut sms is a premium service and is charged by the mobile phone service provider(typically Rs 2 except MTNL which charge Re 1). Also, it surprised me that premier mobile phone connectivity providers like Vodafone, Airtel and BSNL are not included. These three controls the majority of the market among them. There seems to be no apparent reason for exluding these service providers. The mobile site can be found at m.orkut.com. To learn more, visit here.

But there are hacks which can be used to receive sms completely free of cost to your mobile phone. However, note that you will require to activate GPRS connection if you would like to access Orkut on your mobile phone. You can browse Orkut conviniently using keypad shortcuts on your mobile phone like 3 for Friends, 7 for Scrapbook, 5 for Logout,6 for My Profile, 1 for Help etc. So you can now stay connected with your friends all round the clock.

Google Friend Connect is a social network application wherein one can just copy and paste snippets of code into a site, and Google Friend Connect will show comments from various other social network websites like MySpace, Facebook etc

In Google’s own words, “Websites that are not social networks may still want to be social. But the barriers to offering social applications on the site have been considerable. Google Friend Connect changes this by enabling any site to offer dozens of social gadgets created by Google and OpenSocial developers to their visitors. This means more visitors spending more time on a more engaging website — with absolutely no programming required to make it happen. As a site owner, Friend Connect provides you the ability to add social features to your site, without writing code.

Visitors no longer need to create a new account or develop yet another friends list just to use the social applications on your site. We create the infrastructure that allows one login to be used across multiple sites and the ability to reuse existing friend relationships that the visitor has already established elsewhere.”

So we may safely say that Google Friend Connect is an interface which helps to connect your websites to other social networking sites seamlessly like Orkut, MySpace, Hi5, FaceBook, Linkedin etc. It collects data from big social networking websites as they make it available and display on third party sites like yours and mine in a seamless uniform way. Since it will be using your network of friends, Google Friend Connect lets you grow traffic by easily adding social features to your website. Which is a great thing for any site owner but more than that what it can really do is help brand a site among a particular network of friends. The big players in this space has already announced their version in this space. MySpace came up with Data Availability and Facebook with their version called Facebook Connect.

Google Friend Connect will be working with existing standards such as OpenID, OAuth, OpenSocial.
Also, it will access data APIs from MySpace, Google, Facebook and if any other website comes along. There is one flip side to Friend Connect, people using it will not be able to add their own data to it to create various applications. The code snippets are supposed to come confined in an iframe. So thereby Google keeping a sort of control on it. As of now the Friend Connect is in preview release and is available to only a few partner sites. However, if you are interested in participating to review it, you may sign-up with them. If you are approved, you will be notified as a partner.

Check a few example sites:

http://www.myfirstearthquake.com/

http://www.mylatestpiece.com/