Soon Orkut will no longer provide support for IE 6

One of my colleagues and a good friend Chandrasen had sent me a snap-shot of his fiends Orkut profile which displaces an important message, rolled out to most of Orkut users who are using Internet Explore 6. 

When you log into Orkut with IE 6 you would get the following message:

Important

We will be phasing out support for your browser version (Internet Explorer 6) soon. Please upgrade to one of these more modern browsers: Internet Explorer 6 -> Internet Explorer 8, Google Chrome, or Mozilla Firefox

Google is recommending IE 8 at first place and then its own bowers Google Chrome at second place, but fact is Firefox stands at second place for browser by market share. However core part of this message is to upgrade your browser if you are using IE 6 with Orkut as soon as possible

Thanks to Chandrasen and Venkatesh for sharing this update and snap-shot. Please do let us know if you noticed any new updates / changes / bugs etc. in Orkut with us and we would be happy to share it with others.

[Image source: Market Share]

New Contact Chooser in Gmail

Gmail recently introduced contact chooser which would help the users to choose the contact from their list of contacts when you are composing a mail. This feature was available in Google Docs, Google Calendar as well in most of the mail clients and webmail services but Gmail dint had it till now. There’s a saying “Better late then Never” so lets make the best out this feature as it has been introduced now.

To use this feature you just have to click on “To” when you are composing a mail, which will give bring up a pop up having the list of contacts from where you can choose.

Some great features of Contact Chooser:

1. Just by clicking “To” get the list.
2. You can even search contact from the list.
3. Choose the contact from your group of lists in a drop-down menu.
4. Easily remove selected contacts by clicking it.
5. You have an options to “Select all”
6. This feature will also work by clicking “Add cc” and “bcc”

So from now onwards do not forget any people to include on your email using contact chooser. Also do let us know how did you found this feature by sharing your experience with us.

[source: Official Gmail Blog ]

Gmail introduce import mail and contact for everyone

Almost 3 months back Gmail had come up with a feature to import mail and contact from your old webmail's account like Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL etc. which was only available for new users so that they can get the most out of Gmail and I must say it is pretty good feature to attract new user.

However Gmail dint forget their old time users who were using Gmail before this feature was introduced. So yesterday they introduced this new feature for everyone which is now available for new users as well for the old time Gmail users . Now anyone can get their old mails and contact imported to Gmail.

Following are the steps:

1. Click the Settings link.
2. Under the Accounts and Import tab, click the Import mail and contacts button. 
   
   
   
3. In the new window that opens, enter the email address of the account you'd like to import contacts from. Click Continue.
   
   
   
4. Enter the password for your other email account and click Continue.
   
   
   
5. Select all the checkboxes that apply: 
   
   
   
   • If you choose to import contacts, the information in your contacts list in your old account will be imported to your Contacts section in Gmail.
   • If you select the Import mail checkbox, your existing messages in that account will be imported to your Gmail inbox.
   • If you want, you can also select the Import new mail checkbox so that messages sent to your old account for the next 30 days will be imported to your Gmail account. These messages won't appear in Gmail immediately once they're sent to your other account, but should update within a day or two.
   • Finally, you can automatically apply a label to your imported messages to indicate that those were sent to your other account.
6. Click Start Import. The import will continue if you leave the Settings page or sign out of Gmail.
7. Your contacts and/or messages will be imported. It may take 24-48 hours before you see your imported messages, so don't worry if they're not there as soon as you click OK.

    

You can check the status of your import by clicking the Accounts and Imports tab on the Settings page. Once the import is complete, you'll see a confirmation message at the top of your inbox.  

For me it has been more then 24 hours and I’m still waiting, lets hope by tomorrow Gmail import’s all my old mails as well as contacts. However I personally think with this new feature Gmail wants pass a message to all old time Gmail users that they are as important as the new users for Gmail.

[source: Official Gmail Blog ]

How to Promote Your Stuff on Orkut

Recently Orkut has come up with a free new feature called Orkut “Promote” to help you guys promote your stuff with all your Orkut friends. Before you had to scrap each and every friend to spread the word but now with ‘promote’ introduced to Orkut things will be much easier and quicker.

Features of new promote tool:

1. You can promote text, photos from your Orkut albums and YouTube videos.
2. Built-in “Spread” can be used by your friends to promote your stuff with their friends. Its like re-prompting your stuff.
3. Built-in “Trash” to remove the promote which you do not link.
4. “my promotion” tab shows you numbers of users viewed, clicked, deleted your promotions as well how far they’ve spread.
5. You can stop or delete a promotion any time which you’ve created.

Google knows how to promote things very well that's why they have placed the promotions on the upper right corner friends home and profile pages which would replace Google advertisements above my friends.

      

Steps to create a promotion:

1. Click on “promote” on your left side of your Orkut profile.
2. Choose a title of your promotions.
3. Give the description of your promotion in comment. 
4. Select Text, Photos or YouTube video for content.
5. Click create promotion button.

Advantage of promote:

Using Orkut promote you can promote almost anything and everything that too in no time with a bigger audiences. Google charges advertisers for promotion while regular Orkut members don't have to pay any fee for using Orkut promote.

Check out the short  video made by Orkut to learn more:

Note: Promote is in the process of rolling out to all Orkut users around the world and in India this feature would be rolled out in coming moths.

Let us know what do you think about this new feature and also do share your experience if you have promote in your account by leaving comments.

[source: Official Orkut Blog ]

Google Chrome Official Themes Gallery

Google chrome has come up with 29 official themes from which you can choose any one at a time as per your liking. However I have to say that few themes once used will make you feel never use Google chrome again but the best part is that now you can give a new look to Google chrome.

Steps to install:

1. Go to official Google chrome themes gallery : Click here
2. Choose any one and click “Apply theme” button.
3. Theme will get downloaded and will be applied automatically or else go to download manager by typing “chrome://downloads/” in chrome address bar and you will see all the downloaded stuff so click on the theme_name.crx link.

After you have installing new theme  you feel like to switch back the default theme then you’ll see an option to return to the default theme below the address bar or else you can even apply the default theme from the gallery as show in the snap shout.

Switch back to default theme 

 

I have taken out few themes snap-shot and displayed below. You can make it out that some themes are just made to drill your eyes

                             Baseball                                                                 Brushed

     

                                Dots                                                                         Grass

   

                           Late Night                                                                 Legal Pad

   

                            Pencil Sketch                                                                Quilt

   

                              Topography                                                          Transparent

  

REQUIREMENT: To apply any of these 29 official themes your Google Chrome browser should be Chrome 3.0 or its above Beta version.

Drawback:  Most of the themes are distracting and some of the themes are having really bad tabs and buttons.  

Advantage: At least you can give a new look to Google Chrome.

Please do let us know if you can make out any drawbacks or advantages in using any of these themes.

[via: TechCrunch]

New in Gmail Labs: Remove Labels from Subjects

Google has come up with a brand new experimental feature in Gmail Labs: Remove Labels from Subjects that allows to hide labels from the messages in your inbox and giving you a plenty of space for the messages subjects.

Gmail label is one of the most useful feature to categories incoming emails automatically or manually to get the mails at the right places. However given labels are marked in front of  the subject line and due to this it becomes difficult to read the subject of emails if the size of the screen is smaller.

Remove Labels from Subjects – Disable  

This new feature would a great help for those people who have a habit to browse through emails based on the subject and having a smaller screen size. By enabling the new feature Remove Labels from Subjects would automatically hides the labels from the subject line in you inbox which would give plenty of space for subject to get displayed.

Remove Labels from Subjects – Enable  

Steps to enable Remove Labels from Subjects :

1. Login to Gmail.
2. Go to the following path Setting –> Labs tab and scroll down to locate “Remove Labels from Subjects ”. 
   
3. Select “Enable” and then click “Save Changes”.

4. You are done – No more labels in the subject line !

I personally like Gmail labels and its pretty useful too however I don't have this issue because of my wide screen laptop, but for those who has a smaller screen they can try using their personal abbreviation for labels like for example:

• Important – IMP
• Different types of bills – Bills / MBill (mobile bill) / IBill (Internet bill)
• Different banks – Banks

Which would use small amount of space of the subject line and you can get both the labels as well as subjects on your screens.

Abbreviation Labels 

Please do let us know if above information helped you or if you have any more suggestion like these by leaving comments.

[via: Official Gmail blog]

Firefox 3.5.2 Has Been Released

Last month Firefox 3.5.1 was released which fixed critical security vulnerability. Today Firefox 3.5.2 has been released which fixes some additional security and stability issues. The list of fixes in Firefox 3.5.2 are as follows

Fixed in Firefox 3.5.2

1. Heap overflow in certificate regexp parsing (Critical) – More Info
2. Compromise of SSL-protected communication (Critical) – More Info
3. Data corruption with SOCKS5 reply containing DNS name longer than 15 characters (Low) – More Info

These are some of  the major bugs which has been fixed in latest version of Firefox. However if you want to get a complete list click here.

How to get Firefox 3.5.2

• You can update to Firefox 3.5.2 from click Help -> Check for Updates option to update your browser. (You would have to restart your Firefox after updating to Firefox 3.5.2)
• Direct link to download Mozilla Firefox 3.5.2

Orkut Sharing would also request all its subscribers and Firefox 3.5.x users personally to apply this update as soon as possible.

[ source: Mozilla ]

[Giveaway] Demonoid Invitation code Giveaway-3

UPDATE:

This giveaway has been closed..!

From the day I started sharing invitation code for Demonoid I’m getting lot of request for it so today Orkut Sharing is back with giveaway–3 for Demonoid invitation code. This time I  have 3 Demonoid invitation code which I would like to share it with you all.

You can win one of the free invitation code to open an account for popular private torrent tracker Demonoid.com by following these two simple rules.

RULES:

1. You must be our email subscriber, if you are not then please subscribe to our feeds and verification is must.
2. And post a comment in the comment section below saying why you really need a Demonoid invitation code.

Each participant can post as many comments as he/she wants in order to increase chance of winning. However, each participant can only win one invite code. If the same winner is again picked for the second time, it will be ignored and will be redraw to another winner.

To be fair I’ll use Random.org to pick 3 winners randomly who will receive an invitation code by which they can register themselves at Demonoid account.

Deadline Date: 9 August2009, all the comments posted before or on this day will be valid. Please make sure you give a valid email address as you will be contacted by the same email id.

Orkut Sharing reserves the rights to change the terms and conditions of this giveaway at anytime without prior notice.

Announcing  the winners:

Random numbers are taken out as shown in the below snap-shot

And the winners are

1. Anonymous (ara)
2. raiderblog
3. Judas

Congratulations to all the winners, you will be contacted by email id which you have provided and the invitation code will be sent to you soon.

Orkut Sharing would like to thank you all for taking part and supporting this giveaway. People who have not won an invitation code in this giveaway don't have to worry as whenever I’ll get any more stuff to share I will surely share it with you guys because, I believe Sharing is Everything.

NOTE: Many of the participants dint follow the first rule due to which they were ignored and I had to redraw for the participants who followed both the rules. I would request all the participants to follow the rules next time as next giveaway might come soon…