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Had you heard about the gold rush in California in last century ? Many of us would have only read about it in books because if you are reading this blog then you would not have born at that time ?

Something similar happened last night when facebook opened its vanity url to public. It took 3 minutes to reach 200,000 user names  and till date 3 million user names have been claimed.

Oh my god!! Looks like techies did not sleep through the night.

I could not get mine but most of the popular urls were gone within no time. This was nothing less than the gold rush of last century. It has been a tiring day for all.

But that was a great move facebook. And they handled the  traffic very well.

Facebook the social networking site , is always adding things and making Facebook more fun . Apart from the fact that come June 13th , you can have your own username which will enable your friends , family to direct to your profile. The other interesting feature is the number #1 crime game on Facebook ” Mafia Wars”..

Mafia wars on Facebook has several cool things . It is a simple text based, number crunch game, that puts in a Mafia with all your friends who play Mafia wars .  You have three categories to choose from
> Mogul,
> Fearless
> Maniac.

Maniac seems good as it recovers energy faster.

The player starts out by doing jobs, with energy, for cash and moves up to buying properties for sustained income. The player then uses this income to buy bigger and better weapons from the inventory screen, which then can give them the upper hand in multiplayer fights.

As the player does more jobs, they earn experience that allows them to go up levels. As a player goes up in levels, they gain more profile points which allows them to become stronger, and to better fight rival Mafia groups.

Its extremely interesting and keeps you hooked  .Well from now on Logging onto Facebook would be great fun each day:) Go on get hooked onto the game….

I admit it ” I  am addicted to the Internet”. I google all day!!! Just a few days back i was on the internet,  I came across this very interesting website snopes.com. It hooked me on for a long time, let me tell you all about it . Well to start of it is a site  which has checked out each and every rumour that is around and then rated it as “true” “false” or “undetermined”.

In the year 1995, it began as a hobby for the Mikkelsons and has now grown into Internet’s most trusted authorities, and a full time profession for the Mikkelsons.

It has been estimated that about 6.2 million people visit Snopes each month. The New York times recently put snopes on  its short list of essentials that every computer user must know about.

Just heard a rumour ????log on and confirm it..

Xbox was Microsoft’s first foray into the gaming console market. The integrated Xbox Live service allows players to compete online. Microsoft then worked with popular social networking site Facebook, to make it work right with the Xbox.

Facebook users will be able to hop on through the Microsoft Xbox Live service, and bring Facebook right to their television screen. It will allow you to perform all kinds of Facebook actions, like updating your status , check out your news , listen to music and browse photos.

For gamers that use Facebook, it will be added advantage, as that will give them the ability to show off their gaming prowess. Gamers can publish screenshots and other things right to their Facebook account.  You can also take your Friends list on Xbox Live and, if you’ve linked your accounts, send out friend requests for those people on Facebook

So you might be glued to the television set even more

Today social networking sites are doing really well. But in the latest news Yahoo has announced the closing of its Yahoo 360 social networking service. Yahoo 360, opened in the year 2005,and they hoped to pose a threat to the other networking sites like Facebook and Myspace, but it never happened. First they had announced the closure of the site in 2007, but then pushed it several times and now its finally closing this year in July.

Users will be transitioned to the new Yahoo Profiles service. The Yahoo Profile service , incorporates  basic social-networking functions, giving people the ability to publish information about their lives, create a list of friends, broadcast status updates and keep a blog with text entries, photos, videos and Web links. However, it still doesn’t match the features of 360, something Yahoo acknowledges.

Yahoo’s search engine has already been dominated by Google for a long time now and the failure of Yahoo 360 has been an another setback for Yahoo.

Only time will tell if the Yahoo Profile service does well.. Lets just wish them all the best..

In the latest statistics announced by StatCounter Global Stats Microsoft’s search engine Bing overtook Yahoo as the number two search engine in the United States. Microsoft’s revamped search engine Bing, which they choose to call a “Decision Engine”, is designed to empower people to gain insight and knowledge from the web and making quick and important decisions.

To gain the number two spot Bing was able to grab the market share from Google. Google was and is the leader in the U.S search engine market on Thursday with 71.47%. Yahoo! moved into third place with 10.22% while Microsoft’s Bing was able to grab 16.28%.

Globally Bing was also able to move up to the second spot, but with a narrow margin the global results were:

Google – 87.62%
Bing -  5.62%
Yahoo – 5.13%

Currently Microsoft must be celebrating their success , with their launch of Bing.. But only time will tell if Bing is still able to hold on to their spot after a few months.

Meanwhile do check out their search engine or must i say decision engine!

Due to the recession, it is no surprise that  amongst many other companies ,Dell  the computer manufacturer declared that its profits were down compared to last year. Thankfully they were not losses like Sony and Palm.

Dell reported a a 63% drop in profit but still managed a net income of $290 million, compared to $794 million during the same quarter last year. One major reason for the decline is that the business and government sector  makes up three quarters of its business. Due to the recession and also the possibility of Windows 7 coming up, many business and government sectors are not buying computers now..

Another reason is also because of its competitor Acer. Acer is able to sell their computers for much less than Dell in consumer sales. Though for Dell the consumer market is secondary , but it is important if Dell wants to continue the way it is.

But Dell is optimistic about the year, since the release of Windows 7 might end up increase the sales of the computers as many people would like to upgrade to the new OS.

Lets hope Dell is right!:)

In my earlier blog I was mentioning about the growing popularity of social networking sites. Among all these social networking sites Twitter is gaining importance. The people who are on Twitter will agree with me that Twitter’s search engine,is not one of the best.

To solve this problem comes Topsy. Before you get any ideas, Topsy is a search engine that only searches tweets. Unlike Twitter’s search , Topsy doesnt just show you what everyone has been retweeting or just repeating about a topic.

It searches the links posted by Twitter users, and how often they were retweeted. By counting the links and how often they’re retweeted, Topsy also grades users. Those who get retweeted often have more influence over the search results than those who retweet more often,Topsy can even break down what’s happening in the search result by the hour, day, week, month or all them.

Topsy listens to the conversations taking place all the time on the living, social web. In the world of Twitter, Blogs, Flickr, Digg and many such communities people use them to share reviews, opinions , messages and have discussions about many things. Topsy indexes those things . Topsy results are the things people link to, when they’re talking about your search terms.

Topsy is not a threat to Google, but it is definitely a very useful search engine for Twitter. The founders of Topsy are Vipul Ved Prakash, Rishab Aiyer Ghosh,Gary Iwatani and Justin Foutts.

Take a look at the demo Topsy

Finally some optimistic news, in the gloom that we are currently going through. At Microsoft’s 13th annual CEO summit,which was attended by more than 100 top business leaders.

Microsoft’s chairman Bill gates and its CEO Steve Ballmer said that tech sector will be able to recover from the current global recession and bringing new business and challenges which would be rewarding like never before.

Gates went one to say that “The drug companies will get back in high productivity mode” he also mentioned that the we are just at the start of the software, IT revolution.

Steve Ballmer also expressed faith in the Internet and its power to drive the business he said “”Some people probably think the Internet revolution is in the second half of the game. But I tell you, we are coming into halftime. The degree of change that will continue to come as essentially businesses and IT departments embrace the Internet, it’s unbelievable.”

Due to global recession Microsoft was also hit and last month it indicated a drop in sales figures. To cut its cost they laid off almost 5,000 employees worldwide.

Microsoft is optimistic and looking at a bright future since they have a lot of products lined up for release end of this year and next year, some of which are Windows 8, Office 2010, Windows Server 2008 R2, and Microsoft Exchange 2010..

Lets wish Microsoft all the best!!

Today, Social Networking and instant messaging, are becoming more and more popular. It has started replacing the standard business call and the client handshake.

While e-mail is still the leading technology tool . The usage of text messaging, instant messaging and social networking are becoming very popular with white collar workers under 35 years of age.

According to a recent survey by Directions Research Inc, in the United States,in the 21st century,because of the leap in new technology and with shifting demographics of workforce the traditional way of business would rapidly change and more business will be conducted using emerging communications technologies and social networking platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin.

The technologies that people preferred to use in their private lives will become the technologies people want to use at work. The survey found that nearly one in three such employees report that they use these technologies at work daily.

So what are u waiting for ?? get yourself onto one of the Social Networking sites and network away..:)