Monday, December 07, 2009

Famous Personalities / Celebraties on Twitter

Twitter has become very famous among the personalities, especially among the film celebraties. You find Sachin Tendulkar, Rahul Gandhi and not to forget Priyanka Chopra, Mallika Sherawat, Rakhi Sawant et al... Here are few Twitter accounts which I was able to find out. Not sure how many are verified. You can directly follow my list on Twitter - Films and Sports.

Abhishek Bachchan
Aishwarya Rai Bachchan
Ajay Devgan
Akshay Kumar (verified)
Amrita Arora
Amrita Rao
Amitabh Bachchan
Anand Mahindra
Anupam Kher
Anushka Sharma
Arbaaz Khan
Arjun Rampal
A R Rehman
Arshad Warsi
Asin Thottumukal
Ayesha Takia
Barack Obama (verified)
Barkha Dutt (news channel, verified)
Bill Gates (verified)
Boman Irani
Celina Jaitly
Chetan Bhagat (author)
Chris Gayle (cricket)
Dalai Lama (verified)
Deepika Padukone
Dino Morea
Farhan Akhtar
Geoffrey Boycott (cricket)
Genelia D’souza
Gul Panag (verified)
Hritik Roshan
Imran Khan
Jiah Khan
Jugal Hansraj
Karan Johar (verified)
Konkona Sensharma
Kris Gopalakrishnan
Lara Dutta
Lalit Modi (cricket, verified)
Madhavan
Madhur Bhandarkar
Mahesh Bhatt
Mahesh Bhupathi (Tennis)
Mahendra Singh Dhoni (cricket)
Mallika Sherawat (verified)
Mandira Bedi
Meera Sanyal (politics)
Meghna Gulzar
Mohammed Kaif (cricket)
Narendra Modi (politics - protected account)
Neha Dhupia
Neil Nitin Mukesh
Oprah Winfrey (verified)
Pragyan Ojha (cricket)
Prannoy Roy (NDTV)
Priety Zinta
Pritish Nandy
Priyanka Chopra (verified)
Radhika Roy (news channel)
Rajat Kapoor
Rahul Gandhi (politics - protected account)
Rahul Khanna
Rajnikanth
Rajdeep Sardesai (news channel)
Rakhi Sawant
Ram Gopal Verma
Ranbir Kapoor
R P Singh (cricket)
Riteish Deshmukh
Sachin Tendulkar (cricket - verified)
Sajid Khan
Salman Khan
Sameera Reddy
Sania Mirza (tennis)
Shahrukh Khan
Shammi Kapoor
Shane Warne (cricket)
Shashi Tharoor (politics)
Shatrughan Sinha
Shekar Kapoor
Shilpa Shetty
Shreya Ghoshal
Shruti Hassan
Siddharth
Sona Sinha
Sonam Kapoor
Sonu Nigam
Sussanne Roshan Khan
Sushmita Sen
Trisha
Uday Chopra
Vijay Mallya
Vivek Oberoi (verified)
Yuvraj Singh (cricket)
Zaheer Khan (cricket)

Let me know if you have more. You can add them as comments here.

For Twitter ids of Telugu film stars click here.


The A to Z of Sachin Tendulkar

Friday, December 04, 2009

Seven Social Media Trends for 2010

We have seen what difference Social Media has done to the online world in 2009. The users have increased enormously on Facebook, Twitter… More and more people are using it. Organizations have also moved over to this channel to provide customer service or just to create brand awareness here as well. So, what 2010 has for us in Social Media –
  1. Social Media will be more filtered: People do not like unnecessary updates to be seen in Facebook or Twitter. They want to read updates which they are interested in. People would now like to connect with only like-minded people. They just do want to increase their social network – they will now choose in which niche network they want to be a part of. This will give rise to increase in “exclusive” social networks concentrating on niche areas where like-minded people can ignite more in discussions.
  2. More Organizations will join this wagon: More corporate and organizations will try to use this medium to provide customer service. This is the most economical way to solve the customers’ issues and it is also quick. Even the customers will feel it is comfortable to reach through this channel. Wells Fargo, Best Buy’s are already using Twitter help out their customers to answer their queries.
  3. Organizations will look out for numbers: Organizations will try to leverage this medium and at the same time they would like to know as to whom all are talking about their brand and products on other social channels. They would be keen to analyze the plus and minus feedbacks. They may also want to know about the presence of their competitors here and how they are leveraging this platform. More tools and filters will come into play to help the organizations in getting these stats and analysis.
  4. Social Media on Mobile: Organizations will have polices on using networking sites by employees and may even block most of the sites within the office network. Employees will be forced to use mobile phones to help them with the social media. This will increase the usage of mobiles with good apps to help them in satisfying them with the social media addiction.
  5. Social Business: More games and apps will be focused on generating revenues. The apps will try to create competition with friends. FourSquare, Rummble will try to concentrate more into this business.
  6. Usage of Emails will come down: Social media helps in distributing and sharing of content with large audience much easily than emails. People will try to use less and less of emails and more of social sites. Read more about this - Email Vs Social Networking Sites
  7. Leveraging Offline meets with Online Connections: People will tend to meet offline with the like-minded people whom they met online. Networking groups will lead to such meet-ups. More and more websites and people will come-up to have such meet-ups.

Let me know if you anticipate more or do you defer with my thoughts. I would like to hear from you.

Related read: Top 10 Probable Trends in 2010 for Online World

Wednesday, December 02, 2009

10 Tools for Website & Page Load Speed Tests

Google is trying to help webmasters to build efficient websites which can load faster. Also, Google's new algorithm addition can also check at the time taken by the web page to load. So, it is always a best practice to test the loding of the website. There are lot many tools available and here are the best ones which I like -
  1. Google's extension for Firefox - Page Speed
  2. Google Webmaster Tools
  3. Pingdom Tools
  4. WebpageTest.org
  5. Website Optimization Speed Test Tool
  6. WGET
  7. Uptrends Page Load Test Tool
  8. Submit Plus
  9. Link Vendor Speed Tester
  10. Self SEO website speed checker - check and compare speed for different domains at a time
More details are available here.

Facebook crosses 350 Million Users, Eliminates Regional Networks

Facebook is rolling out changes that it proposed in July 2009. As per the communication sent by the founder Mark Zuckerberg to Facebook users, some of the regional networks have become so big as they have millions of members. And member’s privacy makes no sense here. So, Facebook is planning to update the current privacy model by eliminating the regional networks. The members will be prompted again to update the settings.

Facebook is also including more granular control for the privacy settings. Now, your information, contact details, photos… can be shared with your friends, friends of your friends, or everyone.

Mark says, “The plan we've come up with is to remove regional networks completely and create a simpler model for privacy control where you can set content to be available to only your friends, friends of your friends, or everyone. We're adding something that many of you have asked for — the ability to control who sees each individual piece of content you create or upload”.

I also want to add that Facebook has added 50 million users in 2 1/2 months. That’s actually a bit slower than the amount of time it took for them to get from 250 to 300 million users, though still a fast pace.

Tuesday, December 01, 2009

Google Caffeine Now Live On One Google Data Center

Search Engine Roundtable in the blog post has mentioned that Matt Cutts confirmed that Caffeine is live 50% of the time on 209.85.225.103.

There were many threads across many blogs and forums about the major changes happening yesterday to Google search results. DigitalPoint Forums, Google Webmaster Help and WebmasterWorld discussed about this changes in the search results.

Matt Cutts was kind enough to update all stating that the change or update the webmasters are looking is only from one data center 209.85.225.103 which is hitting Caffeine update 50% of the time. So, Caffeine is live only at one data center and not all and that too you will get the results with Caffeine results only for half of the time. But, Matt did not disclose if we can get the results with the new update 100% of the time from a single IP.

Update from Matt Cutts: “So 209.85.225.103 does hit the Caffeine data center more often than other IP addresses, but it's always been the plan that Caffeine would roll out at one data center (no more data centers will get Caffeine until at least January”.

So, folks to see the search results with Caffeine update, I guess we need to wait till the vacations are over.

Happy Vacation!!