Orkut Spam Scrap: AdSense is dead!

Just today when I logged into orkut to check if my ever devoted friends have scrapped me - I did find some unfamiliar person posting a scrap to me as follows:


First glance at this, I knew this was some hoax and I checked out the guy's profile (http://www.orkut.com/Profile.aspx?uid=1081345186944013950) - turns out this guy is a networking guy trying to get people linked together. No wonder he would send such spam scraps. His name is Michael Thomas and he says his location is India - a highly unlikely name for a person residing in India - but then again there could be people with that name too in India - who knows and who cares!

Next I simply checked out the link he had posted and here it is:


After seeing this I almost fell off my chair - not out of fright, but out of laughter. Google's main cash machine is AdSense and how can it be dead.

What really is AdSense?
AdSense is an intelligent piece of software code written by Google that can think artificially and know exactly what kinds of Ads to be displayed on what pages you browse on the Internet. Yahoo and Microsoft too display Ads on their search results but they are mostly irrelevant Ads - they could very well be displaying an Ad for a Kid's store on a Football sports page. But Google's AdSense does not do that - Ads are displayed according to relevance. AdSense has sought its place in several of Google's products:

Gmail: Ads are displayed on the right based on your mail's keywords. Not to worry - all this is machine operated and there is no human intervention, hence privacy is out of the question
Blogger: Blogger users can enable displaying Ads on their blogs and make money out of it
Orkut: Recently Google has started to put in AdSense capability to Orkut profiles based on communties and many more...

Take a look at the detailed tour on the Google's AdSense website and you can understand the stuff much better

http://www.google.com/services/adsense_tour/index.html

So, by no means is AdSense dead and don't believe this guy and the website looks like a hoax into coaxing people off their money.

Friends Map on Orkut

This has been a long awaited feature in Orkut - A map of your friends on Google Maps. This is a nice feature as it helps you in locating friends by browsing the map rather than clicking on each one of your friend's profile and finding out where they live. But what happens if someone has not entered their place or if someone has entered a place that Google Maps API does not understand? Hmm, as expected it screws things up as this feature still needs to be made completely fool-proof and proper exception handling needs to be in place. For example, when it cannot find the place based on what people have entered. One way Orkut could do is to map places to the closest proximity of last login - get the IP address and get the geographical location of the IP and display it on the map. That way it does not need to depend on people entering that information in the profile. But then again it comes with a price of privacy - the stupid privacy stuff that people jump around so much for! Also currently the feature is supported only for US and Europe locations. So your Indian friends are not going to be mapped on the Friends Map! Here is a snapshot of the Orkut Friends Map:

Emoticons in Orkut

Thought this might be handy for someone new to Orkut - putting smileys and other emoticons. Just make sure you put your regular chat emoticon within '[ ]'

[:)] [;)] [:D] [:(] [:O] [:p] [/)] [8)] [:(] [:x]

Orkut appreciates Brazil's Independence

Much to the huckus ruckus going on in Brazil, Orkut does a smart thing like super-imposing Orkut stencil over Brazil's map appreciating Brazil's independence and also sending a message across that Orkut respects its Brazil users. Here is the picture and btw, Brazil's (Brasil's) Independence is today - Sep 7th!

Katie's Google Gadget

This is something interesting and innovating - Katie Couric, who started out on CBS as the anchor for the Evening News yesterday has her own Google Gadget and Picasa Web album! If you have a customizable Google homepage, then you should be able to add her Google gadget that has videos, highlights and a little something about herself. Whatever - its good publicity for Google and Picasa!

Mutual Friends in Orkut

I just checked and Orkut now officially has the "Mutual Friends" showing up for your friends. That's a nice little handy thing as it saves you the trouble of knowing your friend's friend is also your friend! Nice going! But one thing that I don't like of this right pane in Orkut is - the damn thing is not customizable to list the number I want - for instance the mutual friends list is always set to 4 - people almost forget to read that there could be more than 4 and that they have click on 'View All' to actually view the 30 mutual friends. Google has so much going on around with AJAX - wonder why Orkut cannot have AJAX controls in them - something similar to Google Reader scroll pane for list of friends, mutual friends, communties, etc.,

Orkut's Brazil pain and Brazil's Orkut pain

Who is a pain for whom - I cannot seem to tell. Orkut seems to have gotten really popular in Brazil and people have gone bonkers over the social networking software tool from Google - Orkut! And why shouldn't they - Orkut is a great tool. It is also the name of a person!

Orkut was a 20% project written by a Software Engineer in Google - Orkut Buyukkokten and after realizing its potential to get long lost friends together, Google turned it into a full fledged supported software. I use Orkut and I like it, for it has helped me reconnect to many of friends from school and college.

So what is the big problem now in Brazil?
Last few months must have been really painful for Google as Google has been slapped with law suits from the Brazil government alleging that the social networking site - Orkut, is the cause for all misery so far in Brazil! By misery, I mean, child pornography, adult pornography, crimes, racism, sexuality, yada, yada, yada, .... Prosecutors requested judges to issue civil action law suits against Google Inc., for $61 million and also shut down the Google Brazil office if certain requests for information was not complied with. Sometime last week, I was reading online that the Brazil government said that Google Brazil is the information storehouse for certain kinds of Brazil's Orkut data and Brazil's search related data and that Google needs to release this data for certain criminal investigation purposes. Google, in turn reciprocated that the Google Brazil office is only a sales office and that the sales office has no means of information storage whatsoever. Google tried really hard in defending its stand that the information is not sitting on any servers in Google Brazil office but finally agreed to release the requested information to the Brazil government. Well, in fact there was a threat from the Brazil government that if Google did not comply with the request then the search giant would be fined $23,000 per day of non-compliance. So that's where it stands today - Google has agreed to comply with the requests from the Brazil government and avoid any more further harassment from the Brazilian civil courts!

My take on this
Yeah, right! As far as I'm concerned, blaming Google or Orkut is utter stupidity. The Internet is an open community and the tools out there have given the freedom for people to express their choices and opinions. Doing it the right way is up to the people as there are laws that can prosecute the violated. The Internet is like a Society - you can't blame the society if the people who make up the society are dirty. The society is what the people make of it - so blame the people who make the society dirty. If people on Orkut use the networking site to exchange dirty information and promote certain illegal activities, then the concerned authorities should go after the people who are making the tool look bad and not blame the company that brought the tool out.

I read elsewhere in the news online that Brazil government has requested Orkut to help stop organizing organized crime - its a shame that the prosecutors and the civil courts don't understand how the Internet and Orkut in particular work - what can Orkut do to stop people from doing bad things? All it can do is place a filter that can filter all the bad things and show only the good things (btw, if the bad things were filtered, how could the Brazil police have made arrests related to drugs a few months back? - pun intended!). People are still out there seeking different mediums to spread their activities - is the government going to shut them all down? Or is it going to blame that Orkut is the sole cause of a brainwave among people to start anti-social activities in Brazil? Sometime back I had heard that Al-Queda, after the 9/11 attacks, was using the American media like Internet, TV, Wireless etc., for communicating their plans across continents - so, did the US government blame the guys who invented all these tools? Its stupid how these governments behave sometimes - their language is always - Civil Action Lawsuits!

Orkut was never launched with an ulterior motive to attack the Brazilians with the anti-social activities and Orkut never did anything to promote such activities in Brazil. It is the people in Brazil who misused the tool for their stupid purposes. So why sue Google for $61 million? Whay blame Orkut for spreading the anti-social elements in Brazil? What has Google done to foot the dirty bill of the effects caused by the anti-social elements in the society? As far as requesting data for investigation purposes is concerned, all that Google was trying to do was protect the privacy of its users. The courts did not know any better than to sue the company to get the data it wanted on the pretext that the data would be helpful in catching the anti-social elements in Brazil. Well, cleaning up the society at the cost of lawsuits against Software firms is the latest motto, my friends! Some may say, "Oh, Google made money on ads shown related to pornographic material on Orkut, isn't that bad?" I would ask "Why is it bad?" - Google's AdSense is an independent engine that just spits out Ads related to the material it finds on the query/mail/whatever... Google doesn't employ a specific person to push Ads related to pornography/sexuality/... onto the user's screen. Google has no idea who is looking for what! So before suing Google for making money on Ads related to pornography, try and get hold of the people who are trying to search for pedophilia, crimes, racism et al. Take some time and read the policies relating to AdSense - https://www.google.com/adsense/policies Google is strictly against any anti-social elements. So my request to all you folks out there - "Please keep your online society clean, especially Orkut, we all like to get back in touch with our friends, don't make the networking site your one-stop shop for your anti-social activities." and last but not the least - "Don't blame Google and Orkut for it" - if not Orkut, it would have been something else, it is after all who we are that matters and not where we are.

Orkut might have implicity helped the Brazil government in realizing that there was so much dirt in the society and that the officials better get busy cleaning up the mess rather than throw chits of blames across tables with Google and Orkut written on them! The goverment should peacefully seek the help of software firms in locating criminals who make the society a bad place to dwell in.

You can't blame the Internet for someone searching for pronography, you can't blame the computer for virus attacks, you can't blame your nose if you get a cold and you simply cannot cut off your head to fit the cap! It like telling "I have no problem with humanity, its just that, I cannot stand people." So it is up to us to keep it clean - Shall we make an attempt to keep it clean?

Some reading materials:

http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/005945.html
http://news.com.com/2061-10796_3-6112176.html

Disclaimer: These are solely my views and has nothing to do with the Brazil government/civil courts/Google/Orkut. So if you don't agree with my views, comment on the article and we can discuss, otherwise, there are other sites on the Internet you could read that are less boring!

Embedding Google Maps onto your website

I was wondering how I can embed Google Maps From-to directions on my website. Googled for it and I got an amazing link that showed me how i can do it:


http://www.malevolent.com/weblog/archive/2005/05/01/add-google-maps/

The piece of code that does the job is pasted below. Try it out, its cool!

Search for directions to a pre-defined place, given a zip code:


Search for directions to a pre-defined place, given a FROM address: