In the backdrop of fake accounts of ministers being created, Goa Chief Minister Digamber Kamat has demanded a ban on social networking sites (SNSes) including Facebook. The Chief Minister has recently written a letter to the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team, which functions under I&B Ministry, demanding a ban on the SNSes. "Social networking sites like Orkut, Facebook, Hi5 etc, are adversely affecting the lives of people with unscrupulous elements using them to post defamatory, vulgar and obscene material to blackmail, defame, cause mayhem among the people and destroy the social fabric of a peaceful society like Goa," he said in the letter. Innocent people fall victim to emails or "add friend" requests when they see email IDs belong to their friends or their acquaintances, he said adding therefore these sites should be banned. Two of Goa's ministers Churchill Alemao and Atanasio Monserratte had filed a police complaint last week after their fake IDs were created on social networking websites.

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A new function called keyboard navigation has been introduced by Google in its Instant search. Users will now be able to quickly navigate by using the up/down/left/right arrow and the Enter key. By scrolling through these keys on their keyboard, users will get to see ever-changing list of search term options.

This special feature is created for speed freaks because fewer mouse-clicks will give faster results and users are definitely going to appreciate it. There is another interesting feature, which Goggle has come up with, and that is Instant's expansion into Google'sGoogleGoogle. It means that if users search for Videovideovideo and Newsnewsnews, they will happen to see Google Instant results.

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Today at our TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco, Google’s Marissa Mayer took the stage to talk a bit with our own Michael Arrington. After she revealed a couple new Google Instant features, she went right into another topic: social.

Michael (of course) asked Mayer to disclose Google’s plans for their upcoming social strategy. Mayer (of course) would not do that. But then Michael turned the discussion to a social product Google does currently offer: Orkut. To hear Mayer tell it, the service never caught on in the U.S. simply because it was far too slow after its initial launch.

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Looks like it's a bad time for all major social networks out there. Recently, Twitter faced an attack by hackers after a security flaw was unearthed by a user. Soon after, Facebook saw its worst downtime in four years and now its Orkut's turn to be under attack by a worm known as Bom Sabado.

If you are in a country which hasn't heard of Orkut, let us inform you that this Google-owned website is the most used social network in Brazil - with a significant number of users in India too. While it may be small compared to Facebook (which boasts of half a billion users), 52 million active Orkut users is, by no means, a small number.

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California, Sep 26: The search engine giant Google Inc has announced that the virus attack on their social networking website Orkut was removed.Orkut was hit by Bom Sabado virus, which means 'Good Saturday' in Portuguese, on Saturday, Sep 25. This virus posted scraps to the Orkut users with the text Bom Sabado and is sent to the users account by the name of the other friends account. It also added affected users to new Orkut groups.

Google released a statement in their blog which notified all users that the worm was cleared and Orkut is safe. This is the second virus attack on Orkut. The attack came just after a month Orkut unveiled the new exciting home page and features.

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Twitter recently had a JavaScript related problem and we now have a similar mess on Orkut. The service seems to have been hit by a worm named Bom Sabado. It creates a major mess on user profiles as it scraps the text ‘Bom Sabado’ on profile pages. You visit an infected profile page, you are likely to get affected as well. Google has not yet made any official statement on this issue but we expect them to be working very hard on it. Avoid using Orkut for now. And if you have been hit, change your Google Account password asap!

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From a marketing standpoint, what would be the ideal environment, the perfect web presence to work within to get the most from your valuable time? The marketers garden of Eden would likely have a traffic rate comparable to MySpace, be extremely search engine friendly, be subdivided into interest groups, reach an audience of global proportions, easily accessible and user friendly, and cater to an audience that makes it evident what there interests are. This would virtually take at least half the work out of the marketing and networking process. Isn’t it a complete shame that such a wonderful place does not exist?

Actually, it does exist, and it goes by the name of Orkut. Orkut is a diverse community of individuals from all over the planet, from every walk of life, all virtually begging for something, be it a product or a service. Let us take a look at some of Orkut’s premier aspects.

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The upcoming Malayalam movie Orkut, Ouru Ormakoot, which has performed “pooja’ in last week at Avenue centre Kochi, is casting the kids of many veteran stars.

The cast of the movie includes newcomers like Jo Malayil, son of veteran director Sibi Malayil, Vishnu Raghav, son of senior film still maker R Gopalakrishnan, Anu Mohan, brother of actor Vinoo Mohan and Ben Alex, son of senior actor Lalu Alex. All these actors were present at the “pooja’ of the movie.

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Police say a Brazilian woman used a social-networking site to track down the man who kidnapped and kept her captive for two weeks. Police investigator Glauco Myga says police asked the woman to search through Web profiles of people living in the region where she was kidnapped last March. Myga says the woman spotted a photo of her alleged abductor on Google's Orkut site, then contacted him using a fake profile. Police detained the 34-year-old suspect thanks to information she obtained. The woman was kidnapped in March and held for 15 days in a city just outside Sao Paulo. Police got a tip on the case and freed her, but her abuctor wasn't there when officers raided the site. Police withheld the victim's name.

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Want to know how reliable your favourite social media site is? A newly-launched service will tell you just that. Social.Downornot.com from Watchmouse measures the uptime of a range of social sites and offers their current status along with an overview of their performance over the past week. Each of the 20 sites covered by the service is regularly checked, and if the result is wrong or is received after eight seconds, it is noted as an error and unavailable.

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