The Format for using the FREE (standard sms rates apply) service is:
GYAN<space>SearchTerm/Keyword to +91 989 597 4926

Within 10 seconds, you’ll receive an sms with the information you requested. Sounds awesome, huh ? It indeed is. They provides the information from Wikipedia, which is transformed into mobile friendly formatting by removing the text inside brackets and such.

The system also features a Dictionary. The Format for using the dictionary is:
GYAN<space>D<space>TheWord

• Watch the animation on how to use SMSGyan

Pretty useful and nifty service that proves to be a time-saver and at times, a life-saver ! The founders of this startup, Innoz, are in their very-early-twenties which promises us that we’ll see more from them down the road. Wishing all the success to the guys over at Innoz. They’re planning to have the official launch of the stable version soon.

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It essentially, displays the tweets in speech bubbles near the Twitter users who are tagged in a particular image. It’s dynamic, i.e. the image gets updated with the your (and your friends’) latest tweets. It’s to be experienced rather than explained. You’ll get a better picture with the pics below.

daaku, sathyabhat, cruisemaniac, suksy, scorpion032

SayTweet is intended to be driven by Imagination. There’s no limits to what you can do with it. Among some simple ideas,

• Uploading a family photo and tagging each member serves to be a great way of keeping up with everyone.
• Upload that group photo of your school/college which you lovingly cherish and tag your friends. Now, you’ll never ever miss them.
• Remember, you can UPLOAD JUST ANY PICTURE. Be creative, start a twitter profile for your blog (powered by TwitterFeed), upload a pic of you hugging your computer and tag the computer with that username.

These are just some random thoughts about the cool ways in which SayTweet could be used in conjunction with Twitter. Possibilities are endless.  It seems that you’re struck with an idea. Say it loud in the comments.
(Thanks @SathyaBhat for introducing SayTweet.)

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• Vote for the entries you like/feel value.
• Higher the votes, it gets featured on the front page; the migg frontpage !I

If you are a Malayalam blogger/blog reader, wait no more, and register at migg and start participating.

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The bluish-spacious design reminds me of FaceBook (old).Once you’re registered you can add fellow bloggers as your contacts, write shouts to them (as the Wall in FB ), add and view events, create/join groups based on the your interests.

Building a community around your blog is recommended for the growth, by almost all blogging gurus and enewss can help you a lot in this direction. If you’re an Indian Blogger, you should’nt miss this one, really.

Another important feature is the Regional Language categorization. There are categories for Marathi, Hindi, Telugu, Tamil, Gujarathi, Malayalam, Kannada. Many more languages are to be supported soon.

Join enewss NOW ?Join me at enewss

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PopTok (pop-talk) essentially is an Instant Messenger where hottest Clips from Hollywood, TV and

PopTok Video Messenger - Review at AravindJose.com

Music Videos do your talking. i.e. instead of verbal (written) converstations, you drag & drop (it’s that simple) clips from movies and shows that does the talking for you. For example, if you want to say NO to your friend, you could select KingKong screaming NO (does King Kong talk ?!!) from the movie “King Kong” and so on.

It’s (PopTok) an application that is to be downloaded and which could be integrated with AIM, MSN Messenger, and Yahoo! Messenger. (Compatibility with others will be rolled out soon!). They’ve created a vibrant and to-the-point visual tutorial/guide, which is embedded below:

12seconds.tv - The Video MicroBlogging Tool

The Next One, possibly a potential winner, 12seconds.tv. It’s a video-microblogging tool and could be rightly called Video-Twitter, since  It’s a super easy way to share what you’re doing with your friends and family using short video status updates of maximum 12 seconds. (Similar to text status updates in Twitter with a limit of max 140 characters).
You can either use your WebCam or you can record and share 12second updates with just about any mobile phone. Just record your video and email or MMS it to the unique email address you get and you’re good to go.

This one is of immense potential and the creators could be confident about it’s sure success. !!
For the possible question: “Why only 12 seconds ?” , They says:

Because anything longer is boring. The scientists here at the 12seconds dodecaplex have conducted countless hours of research to determine the precise amount of time it takes for boredom or apathy to set in during typical Internet video viewing. Our patent pending Electro-Tear-Duct Prongers have determined that exactly 12 seconds of video is the ideal amount of time to keep anything interesting.

I’ve requested for an invite at both these places and will update once I get the chance (and publish my 12seconds profile too) to take ‘em for a spin. now I got it. While PopTok seem to be a seriously-funny-useful-app, 12seconds could well, really be a revolution, by introducing Video-MicroBlogging

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Know Identi.ca ? It could be called as a Twitter-clone with a stated difference - “Unless otherwise specified, contents are copyright by the contributors and available under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 . ” That’s it. You now holds a CreativeCommons license for every update you post there.  It’s powered by laconi.ca - an Open Source Microblogging Platform. The whole thing is just 18 days old (as of the time of writing this post) and have already implemented a Twitter compatible API, and now it gets supported by a major desktop client - twhirl, which led people say; “Identi.ca/ Laconi.ca moving at the speed of light”. Impressive, isn’t it?

The latest stable version of Twhirl (0.8.4) supports identi.ca.  Get It Here

• How It Works?
  It work on the basis of “push-updates”. i.e. “Twhirl doesn’t have to constantly connect and disconnect with the identi.ca servers. Rather, the client (Twhirl user) gets the updates from his Google Talk ID, which is set up for notifications, on your identi.ca profile settings.”
  
  You’ll have to enter the account details of both your Identi.ca account and Google Talk account.

  Simply Put, Identi.ca pushes to GTalk (a Jabber client based on XMPP) which pushes it to Twhirl

More details about this could be found here & here. Other sources which are not mentioned elsewhere: Duncan Riley’s Notice at Identi.ca.
**JOIN ME ON IDENTI.CA

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Though, the title says about ‘creating a magazine style theme for wordpress’, it’s much more than that. It could be well said as the “best, free, ultimate Wordpress Guide“. It’s basically a compilation of his informative and tutorialistic posts. But, when transformed into an eBook, it’s much more.

What made me blog it:

• Hands-on experience on coding a wordpress theme (in PHP)
• Emphasis on standards-compliant theme designing (CSS, XHTML etc.)
• Extensive collection of code snippets/fragments (that you can use while building the theme from scratch)
• A complete section on SearchEngineOptimization (The Life of blogs!!!)
• List & Reviews of the most useful and essential plugins for wordpress

It’s obvious that there’s been a lot of work behind this perfect release. If you are related to anything wordpress, go, take it down, straightaway. And, don’t forget to express your thanks/opinion to Syed (author). You may consider subcribing to his blog (& mine too !!) and/or posting it to social media sites !!

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If you are an active tweeter, you can’t miss Summize, which provides real-time search of tweets; i.e. you can use it to track a keyword and see what/how much people are talking about it. There was a need for a tool like summize which provides a way  to search Plurks made by Plurkers. And, now we’ve got it: Plurkerati.

Plurkerati makes it possible to search through the public plurks by all users. A seriously useful tool if you really plurk. You can search plurks based on keywords or you can track a particular user.

Yes. We’ve got another great tool to filter the huge amount of User-Generated-Content.

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UPDATE: FireFox now hold a Guinness World Record for the most software downloaded in 24 hours. From 18:16 UTC on June 17, 2008 to 18:16 UTC on June 18, 2008, 8,002,530 people downloaded Firefox 3.

I’ve always tried not to write posts that will make me a part of blog-echo-chamber. Now that Firefox 3 is ready for launch today, i.e. June 17th 2008, I couldn’t stop me from writing a post on it. It’s because I’m so passionate over Firefox. This is not a post that enlists all the new features of the great Firefox 3.

After 34 months of constant development, it’s now ready. And, the Mozilla Community is on their way to set a new Guiness World Record for the Most Downloaded Software in 24 Hours. Help the community in setting this record by downloading a copy of Firefox 3.

Eventhough, you might face some compatibility problems with your add-ons in the beginning, I’m sure all those will be fixed to work seamlessly with Firefox 3.

If you want to be a part of this cool Guiness World Record,

• Download a copy of Firefox 3 from the official website on June 17th, Tuesday, 2008.
• Upgrading any other FF version to FF3 won’t be considered for the record. So, download a fresh copy.
• Don’t download it from any other download locations as they won’t be counted in the record.

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• Here is a list of Plurk services blogged at RevenueRobot.
• Find the Top Plurk Users (based on Karma). You can have location-specific results too.
• Adheeth has got some UserScripts (JavaScript) which could be used in Plurk.

I was among the Top 5 Plurkers from India, and now I’m at 10th place (as a result of 4 days of inactivity).
You may meet me at Plurk. If you still haven’t joined Plurk, Join Now !!.

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