The Social Networking Beckons

"Rahul is no more working on the project , time to shift on another." One of my colleague read this on his LinekedIn network updates. The statement was followed by a motif just to remove my frustration on client. But this makes him to look over my profile more closely. Some times same thing happens when you publish something like this "I'm committed or is no longer in a relationship." You will be greeted with a flood of messages on your "wall or scrap book" that more or less enquires about your either current GF or broken relationship". Though I'm not a social network challenged person but this too much social media espionage scared me a lot.

Why this sudden need to constantly update the world about one's life man? That's mainly because an entire generation of people are addicted to social networking & that's a virtual kind one. Frankly speaking it's not just you & me, some people had reported on twitter that even their mom's adding them on Facebook, orkut & many more. One of my old colleague Disha, 22, a blogger was a self-confessed Facebook addict (no idea about her current addiction ;^]). Then who isn't? Even I'm addicted to Gtalk, Orkut & yahoo messenger. Her office hours use to start by signing into her Facebook account & even she use to manage to check her friends update, chat with them in the middle of her all activities.

Apart from this, all social networking sites allows us to upload pictures & videos, which makes your friends privy to your lives. I admit that some time I had taken pictures of mine just so I can upload them on my profile for everyone to gawk at it. It some times gives you an opportunity to show others what a wonderful life you are having. But there is a catch!!

Now day's recruiters are checking their candidates profile for everything. Don't be surprised if companies like Wipro, Reliance & many more are running background checks via our own social networking profile. So before you list your preferences for anything over here, think twice as your boss or colleague may get knowledge about it before you want them to know.

Social networking sites are becoming favourite time pass for teenager's. For working categories, it's place where they can kill their time or remove their frustration by playing different application like Slapster, Scrabulous, Crapster or watching videos. Most popular versions of chess , Scrabbles & Sodoku are available on various networking sites, play them with your colleague siting next to you or live on your virtual world.

Social networking sites are slowly turning into a virtual version of speed dating, where you know instantly what are their interest are - will you get anything better & faster than this? So if you are still single & ready to mingle, this is a most correct place for you to get your partner. What more could a dude want?

Yahoo Calls On Outside Developers to Knock Down their competitors

Search engine giant Yahoo is moving ahead with plans to open up its home page and e-mail services to third-party content.

The move comes at a difficult time for the beleaguered company -- earlier this year, Yahoo spurned an acquisition attempt by Internet rival Microsoft triggering vitriolic infighting among its shareholders over the future of the company.

Yahoo is the second major Internet company this week to announce plans to open up its sites to content from other Web-based services, such as social networking site Facebook and Google . Time Warner's AOL announced similar moves on Thursday.

Long Time Coming

The company is adding new features to Yahoo.com that will allow users to search for content from other sites. For example, Yahoo Music users will be able to look for music downloads from Amazon.com . Also, Yahoo users will be able to add links to their Yahoo home pages to services such as Netflix , a site that allows consumers to rent DVDs and have them sent to their homes.

According to me, Yahoo is a great asset that needs to be refreshed. You could call it a Web 1.0 leader that fell behind newer companies like Facebook.

Gillis credits Yahoo CTO Ari Balogh with pushing Yahoo in its new direction. Balogh started at Yahoo on Jan. 29.

"The story here is that there's a new CTO at Yahoo, and he's been hell-bent on opening up the platform," Gillis said. "Yahoo's been stuck as a declining asset with their current strategies while its user base fragments out to other sites like Facebook. It can continue that trend, or it can throw itself out to the world."

Calling On Outside Developers

On Friday, Yahoo hosted a "hack day," inviting Internet application developers to build new services that work off of the Yahoo platform.

The strategy is one that has made sites like Facebook and MySpace extremely popular, Gillis pointed out.

"Each Internet property has to make the decision," he said. "Facebook was the one that made everyone take notice."

The success of Facebook was largely due to third-party developers building services and games for the site. For example, one of the more popular Facebook features allows friends to send one another virtual cocktails. Facebook also offers trivia games and fantasy sports applications, and lets users form affinity groups and fan groups for specific pro and college teams.

"Those games engaged users and got them to get their friends to come onto Facebook," Gillis said. "Yahoo is letting the developer community innovate in ways Yahoo developers might never think to innovate."

Closing the Google Gap

The reason behind all these moves is the desire to bring more traffic to Yahoo in the hope that a new influx of users will click on online advertisements, thus generating more revenue. Right now, Google is the undisputed leader in that sector.

"How is Yahoo going to catch up to Google? Build new algorithms? Come on," Gillis said. "They opened up their platform to a new search results technology called 'Build Your Own Search Service' (BOSS) this past summer."

Developers, startups and large Internet companies can use BOSS to build and launch Web-scale search products that utilize the entire Yahoo search index.

BOSS gives developers access to Yahoo's investments in crawling and indexing, as well as ranking and relevancy algorithms. By combining outside developers' ideas with its search technology assets, Yahoo hopes to bring users search results and features that make navigating the Web easier and more relevant.

New war begins with Opera 9.6 launch which aim at Chrome

Google Chrome; what to say about this browser guys not worth to praise, still the developers at Opera aren't taking any chances. Opera had been voted as one of the best browser on the usability which not only looks brilliant but also gives a joy to it's user. Are Opera people, though they are most excellent (but much-neglected) browser in their pocket, fearing to lose market share to this new entrant?

As we can see core of Opera haven't change much as usual, but 9.6 will address almost all bugs and performance issues of 9.5 version we had faced. The new 9.6 beta also scores an 85 percent on the Acid3 test; Opera 9.5 scores 83. In the Human Computer Interface department, Opera 9.6 now lets you drag tabs between two windows -- not a big deal, but apparently someone saw Chrome do this and decided that Opera should too (industrial copy cat act).

Still some how I feel that their no death for Opera as Chrome has entered in this market as one can clearly see there are exceptions.

The most important thing you do today is download Opera 9.6. Have fun with new beta version!