War of Online Social Networks

You all know about what is social networking. Through social networking, people keep in touch with current friends, reconnect with old friends, create friendship with people who have similar interests or similar groups. Apart from connectivity people can share their ideas or experiences with other like-minded people. Some networking can also help members find a job or establish business contacts. This is the most demandable business on internet. It grows exponentially and generate huge-huge traffic on internet. There are plenty of social network websites, believe me each and every website is making millions or billions of dollers. If any one is not making that much still it's buy out price is in billion. I use Myspace, Orkut, Facebook and Hi-5. These are some leading social network website. I looked closely these sites and compared their features. See the table which I made,


MySpace has 191 million members. This site is massive, bragging the largest membership of any social networking site on the Internet. Facebook just reached the milestone of 100 million users. It was initially intended for college students. Orkut and Hi5 have 60 and 50 million registered users.
I divided the features in 4 parts.

1. Profiles: User's personal profile is the heart of any social network website. This is the place where user can do whatever they want. They can express their emotions and feelings. So, this thing should be in favour of users. Users will decide which type of theme, color or background they want to set. Myspace supports these things. You can use your own html or css code and can make own template. Only HI-5 and Myspace provide personal url for every user.
2. Security: Internet is a dangerous place to put your personal information. But we don't need to worry. These sites are secure.
3. Networking Tools: It includes additional features like chat room, personal videos, music, blog, forum etc. Only Myspace provides blogging facility.
4. Search: Efficient and Fast search is the backbone of any social network. As you can in above table, different type of search parameters. These parameters make search fast and efficient. Common parameters are search by email, name, city/zip code. Orkut is backward in searching. Orkut need some improvement in search part.

Their are several like friendster, tagged, linkedIn etc. Which one are you using?

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BarCamp Mumbai is coming

BarCamp Mumbai is coming again. This time it is being hosted in Rajiv Gandhi Institute of Technology, Versova, Andheri(W) on 27th of this month, different from it's usual place IIT-Bombay.
What?
BarCamp is an international network of user generated conferences — open, participatory workshop-events, whose content is provided by participants — often focusing on early-stage web applications, and related open source technologies, social protocols, and open data formats. You can get a good opportunity to share ideas, start conversations and build connections with people and organizations.
Who?
Anyone who is interested in Blogging, Algorithms, Networking, Social Networking, Mashups, WEB 2.0 can participate in this event.

I have registered so I will be there. If you are planning to attend the BarCamp and want to discuss over my blogging experience then let me know. I hope we both will gain something from it. Leave your message as comment or mail me, my id is ranjeet4u@gmail.com. Lets meet up. It would be great to discuss ideas and blogging experiances with you over a cup of coffee. :)

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Easy Ways to Increase Blog Traffic

In the last post you have seen "10 ways to make money online". Thanx to Tamal, a professional blogger, who requested me to publish his post on my blog. Thanks dude for sharing such a nice post.
So, Now I will tell you "how can you generate traffic for your blog?". I will tell you, what I learned from blogging. These things really work. Here we go.

1) Unique subject: Whenever I sit to write any post, I just keep on thinking about my world wide readers. Will my post give them, what they are looking for? If some one is spending his/her 5 minutes to read your post then your posts must have that much potential. Your content should be worthy of being read by thousands or millions of readers.

If your blog has good content then It will force the user to come again and again to your blog. At the time of deciding the topic, just think about the best thing you can give to the reader. The topic selected by you should also be of your interest, then only you can write a good post. Next thing is to narrow down your topic. Your blog should be of some specific topic. For Example: There are thousands of tech bloggers and I also wanted to be the one. Since tech is a relatively large area, I narrowed my blog topic down to internet. For example, if some one is interested in writing about "computer networking", he/she can select a particular topic from a whole lot of topics in computer networks like wireless (802.11) network or wired network or for wireless sensor network. So start thinking about the topic on which you are going to write a blog.

2) SEO: For any website the main source of traffic are search engines, mainly from google, yahoo, msn live and ask.com. Optimize your posts for search engines. Ohh, SEO is a very large concept. It will take few weeks or months to understand properly and implement. Dont worry, Just keep few things in your mind which I am going to describe below:

• Use your primary keyword as domain name for your blog: At the time of purchasing domain name for your blog, try to ensure that the url should contain the word which you want to optimize.
  
• Put primary key phrase in your blog header tags and the titles of your post:
• Submit your blog to search engine's directories: Submit your blog to directories like mozilla directories, yahoo directory, google directory, ask directory. Directories are essential for getting high-quality links back to your blog. I have submitted my blog to all of the above directories.
  

3) Top blogger directories and forums: Reading forums and participating in forums will help you a lot to become a good blogger. It also generates huge traffic and back links for your blog. Here are some of the top forums. You can join any one or two forums which you like most and actively participate in discussions.

1. Authority Blogger Forum:
   
2. Blog Traffic School Forums:
   
3. Bloggeries Blog Forum:
   
4. Blogger Forum:
   
5. Digital Point Blogging Forum:
   

Also join some blogger's social networks like blogcatalog and mybloglog, and create your own group there. The members of your group will be your regular readers.

4) social bookmarking and sharing: Put social bookmarks and sharing links in your every post. In blog you can find few links after each post. This link creates a high quality back links and spreads your message to millions of reader. Adding social bookmark links to your blog or web site makes it easy for readers to save and share your content. The most famous are digg.com, technorati.com and del.icio.us.

5) Surfing:

1. shout box: Install a shout box on your blog. It will help you to communicate with other bloggers.
2. Blog Hopping: Keep on visiting other's blog. Try to comment on top blogs. It will help you to create good quality back links for your blog and your page rank will increase.
3. link exchange: Do not hesitate to exchange the links with other bloggers. If possible, try to exchange with only those who have higher page rank than yours. Install alexa toolbar in your firefox to find the rank of any website.

I hope these words from my experience will help you with your effort to increase traffic. Feel free to ask any questions that may arise in your brain.

Thanx for your patience :)

PS: Try to write short and impactful post. :P

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10 Ways for teens to make money online

'Make money' is the favorite topic for any one specially for teenagers who always want to look something they love to do and to make some extra cash. Teenagers look for those sources which are easy to do, have adventure and the source where they have to invest little to no money. Here are the 10 Ways for teens to make money online,

read more | digg story

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The Longest Comment

I received this comment for my post Google Suggest on Main Search page from one of my readers. In this post I had asked a question as PS. The question was this:
what happens when a kid starts a search by typing in some letters than also happen to be the beginning letters of something dirty?
The answer which I received by this unknown, intelligent person is this:

You pose a very interesting question on your PS, one that should be given much more consideration that what has been given so far. If a child accidently stumbles upon a lurid site because of the letter or prefix of the search, and while that is on its face is not a very acceptable, what happens when that same child is doing homework late at night and is half asleep? Will it cause a post hypnotic suggestion? I believe that it may infringe upon one’s ability to have freedom of thought and can confuse someone if they are not 100% aware of what is happening. A good analogy would be a quick change artist who starts counting numbers in the middle of a cash register person making change. The same result is possible and that is a complete unconscious change of thought. While the intentions of the product seem innocent enough, its consequences could have an impact far beyond a typo and could actually change someone’s mind. What mind control? Now that's the way a conspiracy believer may look at it. As for me, I'd rather think of it as a product that may hinder, rather than help the average search user. I would eliminate it if I were google (but then again, they have poeple working for them that are a lot brighter than I am). Also, what happens when more people use it and you lose innovation of the change in which people search for products, are their seach patterns now going to reman constant for services and information? I know Google is trying to help make a better experience for the user - that's their job and if they want to keep market share and grow, they must innovate, but this may be a feature that has the opposite effect on what it is trying to achieve, a better and easier search experience. Advertisers may start writing copy around the pre indexed terms in hopes of rising organically in the search ranking and it may stifle creativity in the long run. Thank you for bringing up this topic as it has meaningful consequences that reach further than its intentions. It really seems innocuous at first, but it isn't.

This comment is 5 times larger than my post. I would like to thank AFS Personal Loans Online (I don't know his name but this is his blogger profile link) and this is his web page.

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Chrome, Google's New Browser.

The browser war is back on. This time It is not between Firefox, Internet explore and safari. The big boss of internet world also joined this war. Ya, you got it, I am talking about Google. On Tuesday(today) in 100 countries, Google will release a free Web browser called Chrome that the company said would challenge Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, as well as the Firefox browser. But the question that I have in my mind is "Are Internet Explorer and Firefox ready to do battle with Chrome?"
Current scenario of browser market is like this: Microsoft still holds 73 percent of the browser market. The market share for Firefox has climbed to 19 percent, while Apple’s Safari has 6 percent. Last week, Microsoft released Internet Explorer 8 beta 2, which includes improved security and new browsing aids. Earlier this summer, Mozilla released Firefox 3, which garnered 8 million downloads in 24 hours.
So Why google is launching new browser??
According to google official blog "Because we believe we can add value for users and, at the same time, help drive innovation on the web." (Directly from google official blog).

What's new?
Google Chrome is an open sourced browser based on the Webkit HTML engine, but adds a new Javascript engine, and some UI changes. To advertise it, they've made a comic, showing the browser's features. Isn't It stupid but brilliant idea, Google is launching its product with a comic. This comic is also available on Google Books There's all sorts of other promises - stability, speed - and Google does have lots of stored sites to test it on.

Interesting: Chrome also puts Google in competition with a friend, the Mozilla Corporation, which manages the Firefox project. Just last week, Google renewed its deal with Mozilla. Under the arrangement, Google Search is the home page for Firefox and Google is its default search bar, and Google makes substantial payments to Mozilla. The agreement runs through November 2011, and will continue.

Its not surprising, after all Google is 100 percent on the web. It would be more surprising if Google didn't do something in the browser space.

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