A hugely popular Slide application called Top Friends has simply vanished from Facebook’s site. Users who had installed it don’t see it, searches for it in the directory turn up empty, and the URL for the application now redirects to the Facebook home page. It’s like it never existed.

CNET recently reported that it had the answer

Until Facebook suspended the Top Friends app, created by Slide, anyone could browse partial profiles of anyone else on Facebook who had added Top Friends to their page. CNET News.com confirmed that the security hole exposed the birthdays, gender, and relationship status of strangers, including Facebook executives, the wife of Google co-founder Larry Page, and one profile that seemed to belong to Paris Hilton. Basically, the app was not obeying the privacy settings specified by the user, enabling anyone with the know-how to bypass the security once they obtained someone’s Facebook ID number.

Recent stats on top friends:

According to Goggle, the three Orkuteers gave feedback on some soon-to-be-launched features, and also shared some common issues/pain points that the team can improve upon.

Following the meeting, one of the three Orkut superusers from India said,  “The invitation was really surprising for me…That day became the historic landmark for me. I will never ever forget that day that I spent there with Google. Google people are so careful about users and that day they cared a lot of me and my mates. I feel lucky that I’m a superuser. This was the first time for me that when anyone was asking question, I was listening with my full concentration.” [Source: Orkut Blog]

Now you can tell your friends what you are doing or how you’re feeling right this minute by changing your status message on your profile and letting it show up in your friends’ homepages.

Ever since Orkut added the Feed - updates from my friends on orkut homepage a lot of people have been requesting of this new feature so that they could stay informed on the latest developments from their friends.

It’s a fun feature to use, more at [Source: Orkut Blog]

The typerace gives you four different options to choose from i.e either you jump onto the racing arena directly or practice at your own pace. And yes, you can throw or take up a challenge with friends too. The interface is quite simple with no jazz attached, you get a sample text which you need to type race with your competitors, every comma, full stop, punctuation is well looked for as you pound the keyboard. Keep a lookout for the warning sign which yells out ‘Fix typo’ every time you are tempted to type ‘wht’ for ‘What’ else you lose out on points (wpm) or the speed. The Typeracing application does not count the actual number of words typed, it counts the total number of characters in the texts, using the convention of 5 characters per word.

The application can be perked up with audio files where one can typerace as the narration of either a song or a passage goes on. It can also be made funnier with the user speed typing the text in a foreign language.

Bottom line of this whacky application is that it is a well made and extremely addictive application to have in your profile.

Details:

Writing Apps for Orkut and Other OpenSocial Containers

The web is better when it’s social

The web is more interesting when you can build apps that easily interact with
your friends and colleagues. But with the trend towards more social applications
also comes a growing list of site-specific APIs that developers must learn.

OpenSocial defines a common API for social applications across multiple
websites. With standard JavaScript and HTML, developers can create apps that
access a social network’s friends and update feeds.

Many sites, one API

A common API means you have less to learn to build for multiple websites.
OpenSocial is currently being developed by a broad set of members of the web
community. The ultimate goal is for any social website to be able to implement
the API and host 3rd party social applications. There are many websites
implementing OpenSocial, including Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem,
LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart,
Tianji, Viadeo, and XING.

Overview of the talk

• What is OpenSocial?
• OpenSocial current status
• Building an OpenSocial Application
• OpenSocial container
• What is next for OpenSocial?
• Where to find the information about OpenSocial?

About the speakers

Rajdeep Dua

Rajdeep is with Google Developer API Evangelism team working on OpenSocial
Advocacy. He has around 10 years of experience in Middleware, Web Services and
Integration space. Before joining Google he was leading development effort for
CSF: Connected Services Framework Initiative in Microsoft India. He has also
contributed to JBoss Open source development in the Past.

Rajdeep holds an MBA from IIM Lucknow, India.

Rohit Ghatol

Rohit is part of Google Developer API Evangelism team working on OpenSocial
Advocacy and support. He carries around 6 years of experience in Java Enterprise
and Web 2.0 technologies space. Before joining Google he was a Project Manager
with a firm in Pune working exclusively on Ajax Technogoly.

Slapster, the game that is topping the Orkut application directory from the past couple of days grabbed my attention. The game enables users to “virtually slap” their friends and have fun. The motive for the slap also can be mentioned during the whole process which adds an extra bit of spice when shown up in the news feeds.

Slapster, is one of the most famous games by Games2Win. The flash based game allows you to use your friends face along with the dummy body to be slapped by your hand. Below is a screenshot:-

The idea is to click and drag your mouse with force across the game area to land a tight slap. The faster you move the harder you slap.Also Slapster delivers personalized experience to Orkut members. Users can personalize it by adding a male or female avtar for a friend’s profile picture.

Slapster, seems to be getting the same viral element that Poke has on Facebook. The application also has levels, an amateur Slapper starts with the rank of ‘Second Leiutenant’ and climbs up the Corporal Ladder as top ranked ‘General’.

A nice application to have on your profile. The profile part also shows which of your friends have been slapped and who has slapped you along with your fastest slap.

Well, the application could achieve more if there were other props to hit with like Duster, Husk,Chain, Belt, etc. Using different props with different strategies could result in varied score thus keep users guessing and hence more fun and addiction.

Ideacamp Pune, an unconference organized at Persistent Systems, Pune saw huge gathering of people coming in from various corners of India. I was there at the event too.

Here’s my take on the event:

Well… “a picture says more than a thousand words…”

Take a look at photos here..

Well, I reached at the venue at around 10:30 am and the event had already started. The registration was a breeze, I moved up straight to one of the 2 hall’s. The discussions had already started and the topic was, “how to convert your idea to a market ready product”. The speaker showed up videos from the american inventor show and it brought in a debate on invention vs innovation. Everyone actively participated in this since it’s one of the oldest, argumentative type topics. My straight view on this topic was “innovation is when you are not trying to re-invent the wheel, any other original work never done before is invention”

Next up was Abhay - (semantic web - 42) who talked about semantic search, he gave several examples of how this new method would change the way people look at search results. Also, the semantic search pulls out relevant information in the form of photos, videos & content. There is really no doubt about the success of these kinds of innovations but it’s still a long way to go.

Large number of students also showed up to the event, one such talk was ‘Swarm Intelligence Algorithms and Applications’ by Harshvardhan Pande and Hasan Poonawala, they talked about the ant methodology and also showed a visual simulation of how it works.

It was about 1pm by this time and we moved straight to the top floor for lunch, the arrangements and the food was really superb and very well organized indeed. I happen to share thoughts with Rajesh Moorjani, Ilaaka.com during lunch time and we exchanged thoughts on how online advertising is really not working in india and the social web in general.

Then we moved straight downstairs to the post lunch sessions and the first up was the talk SMS-based micropayment service by Shashikant, he talked about how small payments of denominations Rs 1, 2, 5, 10.. can be made by introducing a new model into the current telelecom industry. What you could do is introduce a model similar to paypal but which works on the mobile and you are done.

At the same time in the other hall was a very inspirational talk which i missed by Dr. Anupam Saraph who talked about his vision for pune and how we all can help work towards our dream Pune!! Well, after his talk the whole ideacamp theme went from tech to a more social one with talks about NGOs and how to help rural income generation. Another talk which i personally liked was the talk by Freeman Murray (mp3 player based learning for students), he talked about how mp3 players can redefine the way in which knowledge can be transferred. The idea was to put all the content which is suitable for learning via voice on to the mp3 player which is now very cheap (less than Rs.300) and distribute it amongst students. The idea is self explanatory since we all are aware of the fact that “listening is much more effective than reading”. Freeman is also working with several NGOs to bring up this concept and has already started with a small trial in one of the schools.

After this was the talk caled “India, I care!” which i almost missed but the theme was social again and ran in the line of how we could make our city the best place to live in and how could one go about taking initiative and make the world a better place.

Well, after these the theme moved again to the tech world with the talk “Eco friendly IT labs” in which he shared thoughts on how to save power and it’s impact on world, since i had researched on this topic in my engineering days by writing a paper titled “Green Monitor” it was really great to find someone thinking on the same lines.

Next up was my talk “Do you need to go to Google?” in which i expressed the need for a single dotcom or a single localized search which would prove to be more effective than using google for localized search. My whole idea behind this thought was to see how pune reacted to the new concept since we are working on several products focused entirely on pune. It was good to see people’s reactions on this one and i got the feedback i was looking for.

After this we went straight to the snack corner where Tea & Samosa was served and this was actually the best time because we could network with other people and share views.

Post tea where sessions by a few other talks like “how to eliminate waste and increase value” , “how to ideate?”, “Single login system” and a few others. By this time of the day it was about 6:30 pm and it gave time to sum up the discussions we had through the day, we also discussed the next steps that should be taken to keep the tempo going.

My Views on Ideacamp:-Ideacamp as a concept is very good but there are a lot of debates surrounding it like, people might not reveal their ideas thinking someone might steal them which is very true indeed and there have been some many incidents especially in the tech industry. Also, we saw this live at the event where people did not disclose lot and things went mysterious but at the same time you can have 2 people thinking about the same idea in different corners of the world, so it all depends on how people take it.

Another thing which we be good to incorporate is to separate the tech & social tracks since it could make it more streamlined. Also, there should be a platform ( a website maybe ) to keep track of how the progress has been since the idea was out.

All in all it was a great event, special thanks to the volunteers and organizers who made such a big event possible. Hope we have many more ideacamps in the future…
Take a look at photos here..

Pangea Day is a global event bringing the world together through film. The concept behind pangea day is in a world where people are often divided by borders, difference, and conflict, it’s easy to lose sight of what we all have in common. Pangea Day seeks to overcome that – to help people see themselves in others – through the power of film.  The event took place at 18:00 GMT on May 10, 2008, locations in Cairo, Kigali, London, Los Angeles, Mumbai, and Rio de Janeiro all linked for a live program of powerful films, live music, and visionary speakers.

Thoughtwoks, Pune did a public hosting for the event, the maximum entires were limited to 100. He is our take about the whole event.

Since, we  attended the event in India it was a night event starting at 11:30 pm till about 4:00am.  We reached before time and were happy to see enthusiastic people already gathered up for the event. The arrangements were really great, they managed to assemble a very big screen at their main hall along with great speakers. We were quite unclear with what was going to happen at the event but the volunteers really gave us indepth information of how the event would actually take place. So, the basic idea was that 24 short films were to be featured they had been selected from an international competition that generated more than 2,500 submissions from over one hundred countries. The films were chosen based on their ability to inspire, transform, and allow us see the world through another person’s eyes.

The idea was straight and simple so we just thought we should just wait patiently until the event starts. Thoughtworks had arranged some snacks so we headed straight to the cafeteria and got refreshed, we felt like a new energy within ourselves, we headed straight back to the main hall quickly because the event was about to start. By now a lot of people had gathered at the event and everyone was really keen and excited to watch the upcoming program.

So, the event started sharp at 11:30 pm IST and we had the first talk by Jehane Noujaim, she shared thoughts about how she won the TED Prize, an annual award granted at the TED Conference where she was granted $100,000, and more important, a wish to change the world. Her wish was to create a day in which the world came together through film. Pangea Day grew out of that wish.  It was really an inspiring talk and a different viewpoint that she placed. Later the program featured a number of exceptional speakers and musical performers. Queen Noor of Jordan, CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, musician/activist Bob Geldof, and Iranian rock phenom Hypernova are among those who took part.

The shortfilms that were featured were really touching and really gave a different perspective to life. The event also had brought close people from Israel & Palestine to bring out and emphasize on world peace.

All in all it was an amazing event, at the end we realized “it’s just not about me and you, it’s about us!”

Ideacamp, the next happening event in Pune is scheduled on the 17th of May, 2008 at Persistent Systems Pvt. Ltd.  Ideacamp is all about bringing out your ideas in public and see them shape by applying divergent thinking. The objective of the camp is to get people from different roles and have their opinion on the ideas you come up with. Ideacamp brings people like like designers, entrepreneurs, financers, creative minds, technology evangelists, product managers and marketers together so what happens is each one of them views your idea from a different viewpoint thus giving you many different viewpoints you might not have imagined before.

Since this too is an un-conference very much like barcamps instead concentrating on the core aspect the ‘idea’ there is no restriction to what ideas you can come up with except that it should make some business sense and should be useful to at least a group of people. You can share with the community how your idea solves an identified problem or serve any observed need.

Often our ideas remain ideas and we are not sure whom to discuss them with, now is a good time to come and discuss so register yourself and get your idea out there!

Where -
PERSISTENT SYSTEMS LIMITED
” Pingala - Aryabhata “, 12A/12, off Karve Road,
Erandwane, Pune 411004.

More Details:-

• Blog: http://ideacamppune.blogspot.com/
• Group home page: http://groups.google.co.in/group/ideacamppune
• Group email address: ideacamppune@googlegroups.com

DESI Tags, by Sanjay Aggarwal, Ravi Shankar a facebook application which allows you to tag your friends. The application is really very sleek and cute. The tags are associated with cute caricatures which make the whole process more funny and desirable.

Some of the tags are… solid anda, shy tomato, chalak lombdi, computer dimag, Maggie noodles, Einstein ke baap, pressure cooker, latoo in love, bijli ka khamba, aag ka gola and it just goes onn.
You can also tag multiple friends at the same time. The Desi Tags features about 50 such tags.

http://apps.facebook.com/desitags/

InsideSocialWeb Review:

The facebook applications main catch is the funky tags & the caricatures. The application plays its tagging part very nicely but there is a chance that people will get bored with the same tags so developers need to keep on constantly keep adding more tags.T he User Engagement for the application is moderate but it can heat up if they let people upload their own tags. The app could also put in some general tags and reach a global audience instead of restricting them to just India. All in all a great start with a unique idea could go a really long way if they remove the “India” only limitation.

InsideSocialWeb Rating:

User Interface:- 3/5
Concept/Idea:- 4/5
User Engagement:- 3/5
Overall Rating: 3.3/5