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.

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.

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.

Google also have a beta version which is based on Adobe Flash and is having a sky of errors. Using the Google Talk Labs Edition gets impossible at times and most users un-install it. Google seems to be slow at desktop development of Gtalk. So we came up with the following solution for invisibility in Google Talk.

In order to use invisibility at desktop, here is a short tutorial which lets you run the online version of Gtalk on your desktop.

First step is to download Prism, a product in development by Mozilla Group which integrates web applications with the desktop, allowing web applications to be launched from the desktop and configured independently of the default web browser.

Note: This trick will only work on all Windows OS as currently Prism runs only on it.

Second step is to run the prism and configure and create a Prism app (basically a Prism shortcut) and specify the Google Talk Gadget URL in it.

The Step by Step Guide:

1. Download Mozilla Prism.
2. Install the Prism.
3. Run Prism, a window will open. Paste this link ( http://talkgadget.google.com/talkgadget/popout ) in the URL field.
4. Give it a name as “Google Talk Gadget”.
5. 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.
6. Run the shortcut you just created.
7. Re-size the window to look like a messenger by using Drag button in the bottom right of the window.

I found this as an effective way to remain offline while staying at your desktop and without launching your heavy browser. Though you get invisibility in Gtalk at your desktop but there is still a flaw in this trick. It doesn’t notify you when a contact comes online or goes offline. Also when someone sends a message, the window in Taskbar never blinks and so you have to keep a check at this window in order to know if you have got any message. So basically you get no notifications by this method. If you have any better way than this, do drop a comment below.

Many users have been asking Google to provide this feature as optional. Google surely needs to work on its iGoogle API and should provide individual refreshing settings for all the gadgets. This will help users as well as it will let developers customize their applications more deeply.

How to Disable iGoogle Auto Refreshing Functionality?

1. Using refresh=0

Adding ?refresh=0 to the iGoogle link will not stop iGoogle from refreshing automatically but practically it extends the time between two refresh. This is the most simplest and effective way I have discovered. Though this method will make iGoogle to refresh slowly but if the above method don’t work for you try the next one.

Link: http://www.google.com/ig?refresh=0

2. Changing Browser Settings

iGoogle uses meta tags to refresh it. We can change settings in browsers to not to allow refreshing of pages. This can be done as following:

In Internet Explorer, you can change the settings in browser on weather to allow pages to automatically refresh or not. This can be done by Tools -> Internet Options -> Security -> Custom Level -> Allow META REFRESH (Enable/Disable). Un-check the box in order to block pages from refreshing. Note: This will also stop other pages and websites from auto refreshing and thus some web apps might not work properly.

For Mozilla Firefox, you can download a plugin named RefreshBlocker and set up a blacklist. Add iGoogle to that blacklist. This will only ban certain pages from refreshing. Note: Please change the list type to blacklist else the all the other sites will be blocked other than in the list.

How to Enable iGoogle Auto Refreshing Functionality?

On the other hand some people face problem that iGoogle is not automatically refreshing.

If using Internet Explorer, make sure that Meta Refresh Checkbox is checked. This can be done at Tools -> Internet Options -> Security -> Custom Level -> Allow META REFRESH (Enable/Disable).

Firefox users should check if any addon life RefreshBlocker or so is not installed. Addons like ReloadEvery can reload iGoogle or any other website or page after a defined time.

For those who don’t know about favicon, its a small image appearing at the top with the title that show a small logo of the website you are currently on. Like if you are on Life Baker you will see a icon as “LB” near the title or you see a “M” shaped envelope icon while using Gmail. It is used to quickly recognize the tab without reading its title.

What this script exactly does is shows off the number of unread messages in the favicon itself. It shows blue “M” icon for Gmail accounts and for other hosted domains the “M” icon is turned blue. However the script has a limit of 10 mails. If your unread mails in GMail inbox exceeds 10 mails, it shows off 10+ icon rather than showing the count.

Gmail is smart enough and shows off the unread count in title but still this script get handy while you have opened many tabs and the width of the tabs have decreased. It also forms a great combination with Faviconize extension with which you can hide titles of Firefox tabs.

The script requires Greasemonkey extension and the Firefox itself. Download the script from Userscripts.org website.