It’s Diwali time. And so you might want to celebrate this festival of lights with your Orkut and Facebook friends. This is a list of the sites where you can get some of the best Diwali scraps and ecards that you can send to your friends on these social networking sites.

Cool Greeting Cards - This is a Facebook application with a good collection of greeting cards including Diwali ecards that you can send to your Facebook friends.

Diwali eCards for Orkut and Facebook - This is a collection of 11 nice Diwali eCards that you can paste on your friends’ scrapbooks on Orkut and Facebook.

Diwali Poojan eCard - A Diwali prayer ecard for sending to your Orkut and Facebook friends, complete with a long audio of the song ‘Om Jai Jagdish Hare, Swami Jai Jagdish Hare…’ Just copy paste the html and paste it on their scrap books. Now that’s one truly Indian style orkutting.

Happy Diwali Photo Zing - This one’s my favourite. You can upload your and your friend’s picture, decorate it with Diwali flashbulbs, resize the picture as you want, and paste it to your friend’s scrapbook. Check out the picture above as an example.

Diwali Glitter Graphics - Glittering Diwali graphics for your friends’ scrapbooks.

Prachina - More Diwali copy and paste images for Orkut scrapbooks. Lots of images of Gods and Goddesses.

Orkut Accessories - Three cool animated Diwali cards for Orkut scraps.

My Orkut World - Lots of animated Diwali cards for your friends’ scrapbooks.

Orkut-Scrapbook - Collection of 10 cool pictures of Ganesha, candles, lamps, swastika, decorations, etc.

Cool Orkut Graphics - Collection of animated lamps plus one Hum-Tum card to be copy pasted on your friends’ scrapbooks.

Xplore the World:Diwali Store - Five galleries of pictures of goddesses, lamps, and decorations for your Orkut friends.

Zabri Graphics - Big classy and animated Diwali cards for sending to your Orkut friends.

Orkut Glitters - One nice and warm Diwali card for your best Orkut friend.

Do you use Facebook status as your twitter and love updating your Facebook status regularly? Unlike Twitter that you can use from your IM or phone, you would have realised that you need to visit your Facebook profile page to update your status.

Not anymore. Now you can update your Facebook status from your Firefox browser with the Boost For Facebook addon. After installing the addon, it will reside on your browser as a toolbar showing a sidebar button, search Facebook box, Facebook shortcut links, and an ‘Update your Status’ box. You can type your new status in this box and hit enter on your system keyboard. That’s it. Your Facebook’s profile gets a new status update.

First time you installed the addon, you might not get the status update feature working on the toolbar. If so, visit the Boost for Facebook Help Page and see the instructions on the FAQ/ Feature Specific page.

To update your Facebook status from your mobile phone, add the Facebook Mobile application. This will allow you to text your status to Facebook. This application is currently available for users from the US, UK, and Canada.

If you are a new business development executive and are looking for new ways to leverage your online social networking in your work, here is one Facebook application that might help.

Post Your RFP is a Facebook application that you can use to browse a list of RFPs that other users have posted. There are more than 800 RFPs listed so far and you can see them listed in various industry categories.

If you are in an organisation, you can use this service to post RFPs and let your friends and contacts know about it. Post Your RFP can also draft and review proposals for you.

In India, Orkut rules. If you are young, say below 40, and you mention (even by mistake) that you do not have an Orkut account, you are sure to receive shock expressions.  There seems to be no other social networking site in sight that can overthrow Orkut, at least a for a long time to come. I’m sorry but can’t see even the desi ones standing a chance. However, there is one I think that can pose a threat to Orkut’s dominance. Who are we talking about? None other but Facebook.  

Rajesh has talked about this and I second it. To take the discussion forward, let me say considering the number of Facebook invites exchanging in the emails nowadays, it is reminiscent of how Orkut invites were getting shared and exchanged some years back.

Let me try an analogy. Years back, we all used to have Yahoomails, Hotmails, and various other email services - content with with the 25 or so MBs we used to get with each account. Then suddenly Gmail came along. Suddenly all the previous email services became pale in front of it. It’s true even today everybody has a Yahoo or Hotmail account and comparatively these services might be having larger user bases but Gmail seems to be the preferred second email service one uses after the office email account (at least all my friends, media contacts and clients use Gmail). Today in India, I see Facebook as a Gmail and Orkut as a Yahoo or a Hotmail.

Why is that?

1. Features laden - Facebook is feature packed - much more than Orkut. Once the users get a hand of the social networking thingy in Orkut and they are ready to explore more, they would definitely like to gear up to Facebook. Orkut today offers just what Internet Explorer used to offer before Firefox came along. We used to work on Internet Explorer to just ’surf’ the web. Then came Firefox announcing that we could surf with tabs, develop and put addons, manipulate webpages, and customise how the browsers look.  Similarly, right now we are just plain ‘networking’ on Orkut - sending each other scraps and exchanging messages in communities. Facebook, on the other hand, can become your start-up page (just like Netvibes or iGoogle) combined with social networking elements, given its expanding sets of third-party applications. For instance, put in a to-do list and an email module on your profile page and make them invisible to your friends. Throw in feed readers. It can also be your twitter.

2. Something different - Every tom, dick and harry today has an Orkut account. Some people are going to feel ‘we want a more niche social network’ - some place special than this general hangout place.  You get scraped by everybody and get spam friends requests by the day if you are a girl.

3. More privacy - No more of those Orkut woes where somebody downloaded your pictures and morphed them into something silly. You cannot see a person’s profile page in Facebook unless you are his/her friend. If you want to be friends, all you can do is send a message or poke him/her first.

4. A customisable and classier interface - Ever wondered why your boss is not on Orkut? Maybe it is because it is full of kids and everything there look so ‘teen’. Facebook has a more mature, cleaner, and classier interface. I love the white and blue combination. You can also customise your profile page as you want. Throw in funkier applications or plain business modules, it is your choice.

Given a choice, on a maturity/seriousness scale of 10 - I would put Linkedin at 10, Orkut at 1, and Facebook at 5. So it fits between the extremes.

5. It’s more aspirational, like Rajesh said - the lure of a more global member-base, coupled with familiar Indian faces (many who have studied or are studying overseas) already friends with global buddies… making them more accessible to new joins.

If you like this article, vote for it on Grupl (Facebook’s Digg-like application)

There are hundreds of social networking sites today and hundreds more are coming up. Often we find ourselves registering for a couple of these. Some of our friends are in places like Orkut, while some are in other places like Linkedin or Facebook. Over time, we keep on getting invites from friends at new social networking sites and finally we find that we are everywhere. Often in such situations, we lose track of which login ID we have created for a specific site or which friends are where.  

There are more to handle. I am talking about the social bookmarking sites like Del.icio.us, Digg, StumbleUpon, etc. Add to this the picture and video sharing sites like Flickr and Youtube.

Almost every web 2.0 sites today requires you to create a login ID to use its services. How do you manage your identities in the midst of all these? We can simply jot down our login IDs on a MS word file or use a service like Roboform. But what if we want our friends to know where all places are we? What if we want to access and manage all these identities and sites from a central place?  

In come the social networking aggregators. These sites basically lists all your social networks in one page. Some of them offer advance services such as getting content from all these sites like your list of friends or all your friends’ scraps in that page, so that you don’t have to visit each site individually.

Below is a list of such social network aggregators. Check them out: 

8Hands - This is a desktop application that allows you to offer you to send IM your social network friends, share your online content like YouTube videos, Flickr Pictures, etc. with them by a drag & drop feature. It can also show a summary of all your online social networking activities with statistics like the number of friends in each network, activity meter, etc. 8hands will notify you upon receiving any comment, message, friend request, new video or any other event on your and your friends profiles.

Ex.plode.us - Explode is a social search tool that lets you find others online irrespective of which network they are on, as well as those running their own sites and blogs. You can also create your profile on Explode where other users can leave comments.

HypeIt - You can create a HypeIt profile page where you can display a mash up of all your sites and share it among your HypeIt friends. You can vote on their stories on their profile pages, just like in Digg. The most hyped stories get on to the HypeIt homepage. 

Minggl - Minggl is a browser toolbar that lets you organise your social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook allowing you to decide what to show in these sites by password-protecting sections of your profile. You can maintain a single friends list from various sites and email them directly, without the need to navigate to their profile pages.

With Minggl, you can put your profile information in little portable suitcases called Minggl Notes. When you edit these notes, Minggl can push all those changes to other sites/profiles automatically. It is currently available by invitation only.You can request for an invitation.

Naymz - Naymz allow you to create a personal profile page where you can include a brief about yourself like profession and location, and have the links to all your profiles at various social networking sites, blogs, and other sites. Naymz will promote your profile page at the top of Google and monitor it through its ‘Reputation Monitor’ that will let you know everytime your name appears in a new blog, online news article, or Web page.

There is a Naymz Premuim Service that will provide detailed reports of visitors to your profile, top search engine placement in Yahoo and MSN search, and customization of your search engine listing description. There is also a Premium Plus service that will provide SEO service to your profile page.

OtherEgo - This lets you create a Otherego profile page on which you can import all your social network pages, blogs, and sites that you like. You can browse your sites through tabs just like in iGoogle or Netvibes. You can choose which parts of your profile is shown to the public.

Profilactic - Allows you to create a profile page and a mashup of your sites and share it among your friends at Profilactic.

Profileomat - Formerly known as LinkMyBox, Profileomat allows you to list all your personal websites, social networks, blogs, contact info, photo albums and other profiles in one profile page.

Profilefly - Allows you to create a profile page where you can stream all your links and contents from your social networks, blogs, photo sites, emails and IMs, social bookmark sites, personal websites, etc. and share it among your friends at Profilefly.

Profilelinker - This allows you to link your social network profiles in one central location. You can also get message alerts from your favorite social networks, get updates on your friends, search for users across several networks, get your horoscope, weather, sports news and more.

Snag - Snag aggregates information from your accounts at various social networks. Instead of having to visit each of your networks separately, you can find friends, read messages, and get updates from all of your networks in one place by using Snag.

Socialnetwork.in - With this, you can aggregate links to all of your profiles into one page and widget (coming soon), including social networks, chat, VOIP, and other communities. You can aggregate links to social sites you wish to monitor or your friends on various social and chat networks. You can also rate social and chat networks using a 1-10 scales and comments.

Socialurl - This allows you to create an online profile through which you can search for old classmates and love matches, share photo albums online, and control who sees them, or keep them private. You can also organise to-do lists and bookmark favorite sites, and add additional profiles including EBay, Facebook, Myspace, LiveJournal, Yahoo360, YouTube and more. You can also upload your YouTube videos to one profile.

Tabber - This is an online address book on which you can import your contacts from your web email accounts, IM, Outlook, MySpace, Digg, etc. If you ever need a friend’s address, phone number, need to remember their birthday, etc, you can go on Tabber and look it up. It also allows you to get Google map directions to your friends’ houses, organize them through the use of tags, keep up to date on what your friends are doing online, and be alerted of any changes your friends make to their personal data provided they are members of Tabber.

Upscoop - With Upscoop, you can find out which of your contacts from your Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, and AOL contacts are on which social networks. You can also add the Upscoop Social Networks application to your Facebook profile to show off what social networking sites you use.

We have done all the social networking on the Net. Now we can do it on the mobile phone. The people at Webaroo has started a new service called SMS Gupshup through which we can forward SMS messages to a group of friends.   

This is how it works. You send a SMS to GupShup, it gets forwarded to everyone who is subscribed to your group. The messages are also saved on the website and can be viewed on your group’s page. You can join and subscribe to other groups and get SMS alerts whenever messages are posted by the author. There are already many groups on SMS Gupshup.

The service is free and users have to only pay the cost of SMS to their mobile service providers.

Cool service. Just that I had one concern - and that was the expenditure involved. Online social networking works well because, among other reasons, people do it on their PCs at their offices. If people use cyber cafes, the Rs. 20 per hour rate is still okay. For home users, the Internet charges starts at a mere Rs. 400 per month. No matter how many messages you exchanges with your friends, you wouldn’t normally say you have burn a hole in your pocket because of your online social networking.   

Now here, a SMS costs around 50 paise to Rs. 2 per message. For youngsters and even for many of those who are on prepaid, this amount can a big deal.

I shared this concern with SMS Gupshup. They responded:

• Our take is that for 50 paise - Rs. 3, a person reaches out to 10-20 people depending on the amount of people they want to keep in touch with.

• Another way you can look at it is that people can subscribe to certain groups and that tends to be a one time cost for that person.

Valid points.

Now I am wondering if we can leverage this service in our work/professional life? Suppose we are working in a team on a particular project and need to update all the team members on the field about the status of the project frequently, maybe we can use this service to SMS developments to the team. A cheaper alternative and a time-saver to SMSing everyone individually.

This reminds me of Twitter. We can do the same with it. However, the benefit here is that you will save on the cost of sending a SMS message through an Indian mobile service provider instead of sending your updates to Twitter’s UK number.

Two weird ideas:

1. A blogger, or an online group moderator,  can send updates to his/her readers/members through SMS. 

2. A PR professional send updates on developments to his/her set of journalists.

Can we think of some more?