After a while i received a notification email from orkut, though thinking the orkut community is dead so the email did get my attention as it stated that a friend of mine poked me! For a moment i though “WHAT” this kind of emails are suppose to come from facebook but to my reconfirmation it was from orkut and it did say that a friend of mine poked me.

So i logged on to orkut to see what really happened and how could some one from orkut poke me! Once i entered the orkut word allot had changed and made me immediately comfortable as there was allot of similarity of what the new orkut had offered with an application that i had been using before. So i decided to write a review on how the orkut has improved and brought in BRAND new services to its social networking site.

1- Support for Applications >
Add applications and customize your profile with music, games, and more! a new feature by Orkut. Facebook allows its users to ad and customize applications along with privacy settings for the applications.

2- Notifications >
Facebook sends notifications when ever actions are taken …… Orkut sends you notifications via eMail, message ….

3- News Feed - Updates from Friends
Now orkut offers updates from friends see which of your friends added new applications, updated there image gallery and with facebook you get all the notices in the form of mini feeds on your landing page.

4- Privacy Features >
Orkut has now introduced privacy settings,that allows you to be as public or private with your information as you wish. With facebook’s privacy you Control who can see your profile and related information.

Apple Inc. Today announced the release of Aperture 2 an apple version of photo management / editing software. As innovative as Apple is Aperture claims to be next generation software specifically made for photo editing and management. Some of the key featuers of Aperture are :

• Auto Image Management Tool, just plug-in the memory card and let it manage the images for your by adding tags, meta tags, copyright & caption. You can even add rating to your images, store them at specific locations with the Auto Image Management tools in Aperture. Aperture keeps track of every photo. Organize photos logically in projects, folders, albums, and Smart Albums. If you are photographer who deals with 100’s and 1000’s of pictures every day this is the essential app to manage your photos. I know how imp is rating and tags it quite annoying to search for images when you don’t have them organized.
• After creating a library in Aperture you can review you images side by side, search by keywords, zoom and rest of the standard features
• Aperture has an image adjustment tool build into it just like the rest could not find something extraordinary into it.
• Exporting Images to flickr, publish to Mac Gallery, Create a book for print and order, or you can print with a 16bit printing.

So far apart from the Auto Image Management Tool rest seems quite same old, and cost to the product $199.00 for a new purchase or $99 for an update to the previous one. Keeping that in mind I think I will still stick with the Picasa which is free to use ….

Do you want your computer to be up to date , all the applications installed on your compute should be upto date with all the patches installed and ready to run. To do this manually and one by one it will take a bunch of your time to check for updates, then download them and then install it.

To keep all your application’s, OS, Firefox, Anti viruses, Firewalls up to date you can use SUMO (software update monitor). The SUMO application once installed runs and collects the information of all the applications installed in your computer weather its outlook, or Adobe or AOL. Once the list is generated you select when to update you application and it will automatically connect to the internet, download the patches and updates install them and wala all your apps are up to date.

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