Whenever you click on “Get verified” button, PayPal asks you to enter you credit card information. It is likely that not all everyone has credit cards as they are not so easy to obtain in India at this particular time. Or some users will not feel comfortable entering raw credit card numbers over the internet.

• To confirm a PayPal account an alternative way which usually go un-noticed is linking any Indian bank account.
• Simply login to your PayPal account click on “Add/Edit Bank Account” and fill in the bank details it requires. If you are unsure about any of the fields specified there, give a call to your Bank Branch and get it from them.
• When you are done with it, PayPal will soon transfer two very small amounts via NEFT to your account in next 2 working days.
• Next step is to enter the exact amount PayPal transferred to your Bank Account. Make sure you enter them exactly as they appear in your Bank Statement.
• And you’re done.

This not only verifies your Bank Account with PayPal but even your accounts limits get lifted as your PayPal account also gets verified without entering your credit card information. The good thing is if you have enabled for Internet Banking facility for your Bank Account. You can check the statements and verify instantly as the transfer is made.

A day comes when your Facebook friends count reaches in hundreds and you scrub your head watching the ever growing chat list and friends activity stream with useless updates. We don’t have to chat with those hundred friends but we have to add them just to keep in touch with them sometime in future. While adding Facebook contacts if you have been organizing your friends, its great but if not start doing it right now.

I have nearly ~200 friends in my Facebook account and sometimes chat list show up to 50 persons online at the same time. This creates a big trouble to search for the person you really want to chat with. Now all you have to do organize this clutter is to categorize you friends in lists. I prefer organizing it separately for Photo Sharing, Chat and Updates Stream so I have created three lists in Facebook for each. As there might be cases where you have to share photos with someone while chat with the other.

Chat with Selective Friends, Appear Offline to the Rest

Now when you are done with the lists just add your friends to the lists as per your need. After the friends have been added all you have to is click on “Friends List” in chat window, it will show you all the lists over there. Untick all of the other lists except the “Chat” one. And you’re done. You will only be able to chat with the people you want and for rest of the Facebook friends you will appear offline always. You can anytime make changes to the list to add or remove friends. This gets the power in your hand to chose which friends should appear where on Facebook.

Share Photos only with your close Friend

Same is the case with Photo Sharing. Creating a separate list and putting in your those buddies in it with whom you want to share your personal pictures. This again helps you a lot in maintaining your privacy over the social network.

Hide Useless Applications, Clear the clutter from your Stream

Most of our buddies enjoy farming, planting and so many useless apps like FarmVille, MafiaWars, etc. These applications pushes lots of updates in the user’s stream which is basically useless to others. You can hide updates from a particular application or a particular friend. All you have to do whenever you see a useless update from an application hit the “HIDE” button. Facebook then asks you to either hide all updates from your friend or hide all the updates from particular option.

Cool! We knew all this, tell something better…

You may say these are some basic things which everyone knows. Let me remind you once every one is a beginner to everything and this post is completely meant for Facebook first-timers. And most of the people are unaware of these simple ways on how you can organise your social life on Facebook. So basically if you have been facing lots of clutter at Facebook get organized or if you are new to it, its better to start organizing from day one.

According to Mr. K. Srinivas, Joint President-Telemedia Services, Bharti Airtel:

We are massifying the broadband experience by enabling users to access higher speeds at affordable rates. Our data shows that more and more customers want higher speeds. Average usage per customer has also increased by 40 per cent.

Therefore, we are redefining broadband speeds in India by upgrading all our subscribers to 512 Kbps even as the telecom regulator defines broadband as 256 Kbps.

Airtel has also launched new 4Mbps unlimited plans ranging from 899 to 1799. The complete details of the new plans are given  in the table below:

Over the past six months, telecom players have got engaged in a battle for speed. Recently a Mumbai-based Internet Service Provider –Tikona launched a 2Mbps speed connection priced between Rs 299 and Rs 1,249 depending on the download usage. Tata Teleservices Maharashtra had introduced a 100 Mbps line in Mumbai, while State-owned BSNL is offering 24Mbps connection for Rs 9,999.

Links:

The Hindu Business Line, Theitechblog.

Google Buzz packs in features like sharing of Video’s, Pictures, etc. It can also be integrated with your current Twitter, Flickr, Picasa, Youtube and more Streams. It gives you control to share with your content with whole world or just selected friends. Your current Gmail buddies or frequently contacted Gmail Clients are automatically added to the Buzz stream.

Google Buzz is also available for Mobile Phone’s. Another great feature of Google Buzz is geo-tagging capability. You can tag your location using the maps and even see the location of your friends in their buzzes.

Isn’t It Another Facebook / Google Wave?

Yes a lot of features matches the one already we see in Facebook. Though this is a more streamlined service by Google and some features are unique, such as integration with Maps for geo-tagging, etc. On the other hand Google Wave can be call as a future of the “Social Working”. By Social Working, I mean it is more directed towards collaborative working, rather than the usual Social networking which includes sharing updates from different services. Google Wave could be integrated as a sharing service in Google Buzz on a later stage but as of now these service are totally different from each other.

Introductory Video (by Google):

Here is a quick introduction video, which explains about the available feature’s in Google Buzz:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=yi50KlsCBio

Reaction from Yahoo:

Here is a tweet from Yahoo within an hour of launch of Google Buzz:

Two years after #Yahoo! launched #Buzz, Google follows suit. Check out the original: http://buzz.yahoo.com/

P.S. Google is in a process of rolling our Buzz to all users. You will soon find the "Buzz" tab in Gmail.

Using Google Web Search:

Google provides a search filter known as “link”. It is basically designed to show the sites in google index that link to your site. A example link query is shown below:

Query: link:www.lifebaker.com

Sample Link: http://www.google.com/search?q=link:www.lifebaker.com

You can even create a Google Alert so that you get informed every time a new update is added to Google’s index.

But this method yields very few results, so I gave other queries a try and found the following one to work quite good for detecting latest in-links to your blog. It shows the latest links being indexed by Google which have back-links to your site.

Query: http://lifebaker.com/* -site:lifebaker.com

Sample Link: http://www.google.co.in/search?q=http://www.lifebaker.com/*%20-site:lifebaker.com&tbs=rltm:1

Using Google Blog Search:

This is a very common method in use by many blogger but its accuracy has reduced over time. The in-links you find in WordPress panel are also found using Blog Search RSS feed.

Query: link:http://lifebaker.com

Sample Link: http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?q=link:http://lifebaker.com

Feed Link: http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch_feeds?q=link:http://lifebaker.com&ie=utf-8&num=10&output=rss

Using Yahoo:

Yahoo’s Site Explorer is another goog method for tracking in-links to your blog.

Query: link:http://lifebaker.com

Sample Link: http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/search?p=http://www.lifebaker.com&bwm=i

Using Bing:

We can use the same query as we used above for Google to search inlinks using Bing. Bing even provides a rss feed for your queries if you add &format=rss at the end of the query.

Query: http://lifebaker.com/* -site:lifebaker.com

Sample Link: http://www.bing.com/search?q=http://www.lifebaker.com/*+-site:lifebaker.com

Feed Link – http://www.bing.com/search?q=http://www.lifebaker.com/*+-site:lifebaker.com&format=rss

Using Technorati:

Technorati is one of the oldest service to provide in-links but its accuracy has decreased over time. You can find in-links to your blog from other blogs indexed by Technorati.

Conclusion:

There are a bunch of more services which offer the same. But mainly I prefer using Google Blog Search, Google Latest Web Search and Bing to track the links. Note: LifeBaker is a new blog. We have limited posts as of now, thus above link might not yield much results. Try it on some popular blogs and you will be able to note the difference. Image via Flickr.

A service known as Chi.mp, allows you to create you personal profile or online identity at your own top level .mp domain. I will not be going into details of the whole chimp service as you can read their FAQ here. The interesting point is that they set-up a top level .mp domain for every user that registers at chimp. Chimp also offers one free email address at the domain you choose while registering and puts up as e-mail forwarder to your existing e-mail address.

Getting Ready

If you are new to email firstly please setup an account at Gmail and then follow the step further. In order to setup, first register at Chi.mp and setup your account be careful while choosing the domain as once created it cannot be changed. I used duseja.mp domain so that I was able to have the mail address as ankit [at] duseja.mp

Directing Mails from new address to your existing one

After your account is ready, login at your domain you just created using chi.mp credentials and then go to Settings –> Email Forwarding. Enter any desired mail address and your current mail address. Finally click on Save Changes button. Good you have completed the first part of the process. now you can give out that address to your friends, family or anyone.

Sending Mails with your brand new address

It depends on your mail provider whether it allows sending mail from another address or not. Gmail users are lucky enough so that they can tightly integrate the new address in there current account and send mail from the newly created one using you old Gmail panel. Here’s how to do it in Gmail:

• Login to your Gmail account or Google Apps for domain account.
• Go to Settings –> Accounts & Imports.
• Click on Send Mail from another address.
• Enter you new email address here and verify (the verification will directly reach you current inbox as you have already forwarded all mails from your new address to gmail one).

You are done. To send an email from your new top level domain address just click on compose in Gmail and select your new address in from field. Both your new chimp address and old gmail one can be accessed under one place. Life’s good! ;)

Download Links

• Windows: http://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-3.5&os=win&lang=en-US
• Linux: http://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-3.5&os=linux&lang=en-US
• Mac OS: http://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-3.5&os=osx&lang=en-US

Firefox 3.5 Features:

Enjoy!

Blog is a beast which continuously demands more & more food for its growth. It is a common problem with all the authors, no matter big or small to get out of topics for writing. Its basically a human nature to get tired of doing same thing every day. So with my experience and after meeting some of the popular A-grade bloggers, I have concluded this post to help the blogging community. Check out some of the popular techniques of getting out of this un-creative trauma.

Hang Out!

Bloggers work non-stop at their PC’s. Having a habit of continuously staring at their monitors, it is normal with a human being to get bored or feel stressful. At this point of time brain is not in a condition of manipulating new ideas for blogging. The intial step to get rid of such situation is to take some rest or hangout with your friends.

While hanging out with family members or your friends would actually generate new ideas like while sitting with your friends you notice one of your friend is facing problems in performing a function on a PC or Mobile. Consider your friend’s problem and ask him why is he facing such problem. When you get back to your desk think about the probable solutions to it and do some research on it. This usually helps in gathering a lot of topics for blogging from people around you, which finally serve up as fodder for your blog.

Did you know, your blog has fodder for itself?

After hanging out a for a day, if you still don’t got any snack for your blog, don’t get depressed. Also I know the RSS feeds sometimes just annoys as we see the same story is being published on multiple sites. You might be thinking I’m joking that you blog can feed itself but seriously it can do and the fodder is in your blog’s comment section. Sometimes comments from your readers gets you back in business with a new idea. There are many “How do I ……”, “What is ……”, “Please help me with ……”, etc. such type of comments. Do some homework on their queries and you will get a lot of new idea’s from them.

Google Alerts can save your day!

If you still don’t know about Google Alerts, let me tell you my friend you are missing a great part of the Blogging Tools. Google Alerts is basically a service from Google which creates a feed of new link being added to its index on a particular topic. All you have to do is just visit Google Alerts type in a Keyword, and subscribe to the feed.

You have to be little careful while entering the keywords like if you have a blog related to food, creating an alert with “food” will mess you up, Instead you can type “recipe” or particular keywords so that the unwanted stuff would not get in your feed. For example if Google captured a blog post of a person who wrote “I like so and so food” might get included in you Alert feed if you must have subscribed to keyword food but as you chose recipe if a person updates “I need the recipe and procedure of so and so” By this you will come to know that what is missing on Internet as well as If some one posts a new recipe it would inform you about it.

Entrance and Exit Keywords

The trick I am going to tell you now is used by many of the A-Grade Bloggers. If you use any tracking service for your blog like Google Analytics, StatCounter or any other, you might be knowing that these sites provide entrance keyword which tells that what users were searching for when they entered your site via search engine. If you run custom search at your blog, filtering out the exit queries can also let you check which queries made the user exit from your blog.  This is a great tool know about what’s missing over your site and if you do a bit research on these queries, It could serve as new drinks for your blog.

Don’t forget the Forums

For bloggers forums could act as a great source of food for your blogs. Many people post their different sort of problems in forums which are also categorized by the forum moderators. Thus you can easily for queries which are related to topics of your blog. All you have to do is search for a forum of your niche of blogging and subscribe to the particular categories feed. Any new post in forum will hit up your RSS reader right away.

Social Networks!

Well I agree to the fact that Social Networks many a times distract bloggers from their work, but if you look at the Social Networks in a different way it could serve you in feeding you blog heavily. Like when you are on Facebook, try to discover official pages that are related to your niche of blogging. By participating in the discussion there, it will let you think of new ideas.

Twitter is another great place to generate new ideas. If you are following a good community there, it could get trucks of topics for you. The other networks and communities include Digg, Xmarks, Technorati, StubmbleUpon, and many more.

Google Trends

Most of us know about the Google Trends, a service by Google that lets you view the most popular queries made for the day on its very popular Google Search. Google Trends also let you see the most popular queries, country-wise. Google Trends gives you the idea about what’s hot over the world or in your country.

Mom is the last rescue!

If nothing works among all of the above solutions, get someone from your family who does not have any or low knowledge about computers to sit around you while you do your work. This might be sounding funny to you but it actually works. Tell him to ask questions about things while you work or simply let him work on your system and monitor his/her activities. Try to observe what all problem he faces while surfing, show him a cool new service related to your niche of blogging, tell about its functionality and ask his/her thoughts on it.

If you have got some more ideas, we all would love to hear them. Drop in your comments below. Image Source: Life As Art, Cinderellasg.

The data from Google Trends says Facebook is leading a way longer than other. Google Trends is unable to plot Orkut traffic data as Google have disabled dara from their sites in Google Trends. Hi5 as well as MySpace is suffering as the Facebook upraises and Twitter unlike others is accompanying Facebook.

Hopefully Alexa is able to plot Orkut while comparing it to others but while comparing orkut.com, alexa is not showing the full traffic data because orkut has splitted its traffic under separate domains like Orkut.com, Orkut.co.in, Orkut.com.br etc for separate countries and partly as Facebook has pulled its traffic heavily. Facebook is still the leader here, and the rest trends are also same as the Google Trends revealed.

Even if we sum the data of Orkut from multiple orkut domains it still doesn’t crosses Facebook anywhere. So clearly, Facebook is having a lot of potential because of its powerful features while also maintaining simplicity within them. Hi5 which can be called as the old leader now is also getting heavily affected by Facebook while Orkut trends are not being determined by these sites due to multiple domains and other pagination factors.

Another news is Orkut has started offering commenting capability within status updates. This has been existed in Facebook and other networks from long time back. Snapshot after a break.

Prism treats every window as a separate browser. This can be used for running many Google Talk messengers with different accounts at once. If you have multiple Google Accounts and want to run all of them in messenger, all you have to do is create multiple shortcut in Mozilla Prism.

To run multiple Gtalk Messengers at once, follow and repeat the below steps:

1. Download & Install Mozilla Prism if you haven’t already done so.
2. Run Prism, a window will open. Paste this link ( http://talkgadget.google.com/talkgadget/popout ) in the URL field.
3. Give it a name as “Google Talk – Account 1”.
4. Configure other options as per your need as where do you want to place its shortcuts. Prism creates a shortcut for every app you create. Make sure you place atleast create one shortcut.
5. Run the shortcut you just created.
6. Re-size the window to look like a messenger by using Drag button in the bottom right of the window.
7. Repeat steps again if necessary from Step 2.

This works with Google Accounts as well as with Google Apps accounts. This method will help people run multiple copies of Gtalk Messenger at once and simultaneously also supporting invisibility.