Orkut Privacy – Keep your scrapbook access private
Recently Orkut is focusing more on the privacy options available for its users. They have announced a new feature while allows you to keep Orkut privacy options. This means that now you can ensure that your scraps, videos, feeds and photos are only visible to your friends!
To enable privacy option, go to your profile and click on "settings" link. Then click on "privacy" tab on the right top. Then restrict the access of your videos, scraps etc. to "friends" only.
But why do you need to take this precaution? The reason is this – Internet has shortage of stalkers and criminals. So it is very important that your personal information is kept private. Also ensure that you add only those people whom you know personally as friends. Otherwise turning on privacy will be of no use!
Many people tend to post private information such as email or phone numbers in the scrap. Some even go to the extend of publishing their address in scraps. So it is better to keep the scrapbook private.
Pligg 9.5 beta released
If you are using Pligg to run your own Digg like site, you would have already noticed that it is painfully slow. I have been running Pligg on a shared hosting and it was killing everything else even with a small user base! It seems that Pligg team is beginning to address the performance issues in the latest beta version released yesterday.
Here are some of the key new features in Pligg 9.5,
1. Un-vote – Now users can un-vote stories they have voted for
2. Fixes for IIS – Fixes for the IIS cookie redirect bug.
3. Image upload module – Upload images and use the thickbox javascript library to view them.
4. Reporting/Burying Stories – Users can bury stories that are spam, inaccurate etc etc. Burying a story grays it out to signify you have buried it.
5. Major database query enhancements – A quick estimation shows that the database calls in version 9.1 was 170+ and now it’s 50-60. This should substantially increase the speed of your Pligg site.
6. Story page tabs – Each story page now uses tabs. There are 3 tabs, comments, who voted, and a new feature, related stories.
7. Upgrade to Template Lite 2.1 – Upgraded Pligg to the current version of Template Lite.
8. Upgrade to ezSQL 2.03 – upgraded to the latest version of ezSQL for better mysql query handling.
Bashing digg – stupidity of Wired
Wired is supposed to be a cool tech reporting site. But unfortunately it is owned by the same company which owns reddit. I have nothing against reddit. It is a good source to find interesting links.
But paying someone to destroy your competitor’s reputation is hardly commendable.
Here is a summary of what Wired’s reporter Annalee Newitz has done,
1. Annalee creates a blog about “photographs of crowds“. It is supposed to be very badly written.
2. Then she submits the blog to Digg.
3. Then she contacts user/submitter and pays $450(!) to buy digg votes.
4. The story gets over 100 diggs. Eventually it is buried.
Consider this. Suppose Pepsi hires a lot of bloggers to write bad articles about Coca cola. Is it possible? Obviously yes, if you pay enough you can find bloggers who do that. But is it ethical? Obviously No. Does that make all bloggers irresponsible? Obviously No.
What is interesting is this. She paid for 430 diggs and got around 100 only! On top of it, the story is buried. Frankly it only shows that Digg works, probably a bit slow.
I guess some people gets irritated when someone else becomes successful 
Do you have more than 1000 friends on Orkut?
I bet you don’t! Apparently Orkut has a limit of 1000 friends for a profile. If you want to add a friend after this, you will have to kick out one of your existing friends
I currently have 25 friends and I don’t think I will hit 1000 any time soon. So to me a limit of 1000 does seem logical. I don’t know how I manage if I did have more than 1000 friends!
Following is the message displayed when you try to add more than 1000 friends.
You can have only upto 1000 friends. Before you can add more friends, you need to remove friends.
We recommend you remove friends in your “haven’t met” or “acquaintance” categories. You can also delete selected friends from your friends book by clicking the Edit button next to the friend’s name and then choose Delete.