With the spread of social networking came a whole lot of security concerns. Orkut, being an older social network, has been known to have quite a bit of notorious activity going on. If you wish to secure yourself and your online avatar on Orkut, here are a few tips from me to do so…
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Safegaurd your Password
The easiest way for someone to access all of your information is to gain your password. To ensure that this doesn’t happen, never use Orkut or any other social networking software at a cybercafe you’re not familiar with. It’s really easy to install malicious programs such as Key-Loggers that record your keystrokes and allow people to phish for your login details easily at such places. Needless to say, never enter your login details into a third party site and always look for the line https://www.google.com/accounts/ServiceLogin?… in your URL while logging in.
Set your Privacy Settings
In Orkut’s Privacy settings the last box allows you to set privileges or rights for what kind of content of yours is accessible to fellow social networkers. If you wish your scrap book, videos, testimonials or photos to be private, set them to allow “only friends”  or “only friends of friends” to view them. This ensures that not every troll out there has access to your profile. If you wish to take it a step further, you can set it up so that that only friends of friends, or only people who know your email address can send you friend requests.

Accept Friend Requests Cautiously
Orkut’s known for spam from autobots and random “fraandsheep” requests. Be vigilant and don’t accept friend requests from every Tom, Dickens and Harye that sends one your way. In fact, its a good idea to check someone’s profile before you accept their request, to ensure they’re not the social degenerate or sexually frustrated low-life that would creep you out.
Every now and then you’ll come across some fishy looking email in your inbox, telling you that you need to ‘reconfirm’ your details in order to continue using Orkut. Ignore any such mail and block those that send it. There are loads of people out there who come with with legit looking mailers and/or websites that ask you for your login details.

Downloading Files for Orkut = Not appreciated..

A lot of unofficial sites offer supposedly “powerful applications” that are nothing but stacks of Trojans and key-loggers. Don’t download anything but official Orkut applications to ensure that you don’t get screwed over.

Ensure your Password’s not easy
Lastly, please ensure that your password is everything but easy to crack. Keeping it a variation of your name and/or your last name is downright retarded. Using a mix of alphabetical and numeric characters is a great idea. Most of the time we get lazy and decide to keep it something that’s easy to remember, which, in most cases, is easy to crack too. Keep a difficult password and remember it! If you tend to forget things write down in a diary.

These all steps are for he betterment of social network. If in case we have missed out somthing do write to us via comment.

In this 21st century there comes a great need of socialising which is greatly fullfilled by all the social netwroking websites available (check out SpiceEdit its awesum!). So we need these applications handy, may be on our cell phones. Why not, they are here. In my opinion it’s becoming a rather impersonal way of communication and I’d rather go out and meet people instead of sending messages or notes, or ‘Posting’ on walls etc.

There is an easier way to reach out to a wider audience. To reach out to someone in as distant a place that we may never ever get to see in our life time is a brilliant thing, to share ideas, cultures and even take stands on important issues as well as the more mundane things as informing the whole world that you’re in the bathroom taking a pee at any given point of time.

The mobile handset is of course THE communication tool for this age and I don’t see that changing in any other future age either. Naturally we want to interact with the one device we would most likely have at all points in time as much as we would our PCs and with GPRS, WAP and the hopefully soon to be available 3G, the mobile Social Networker is now absolutely free to update and keep control of his or her cyber lifestyle and social life as they would in the real world.

To make things even more convenient, mobile manufactures are tying up with Social Networking sites and companies to better promote and market handsets as a new age Social Networking tool. “Access Facebook from your XXXX handset while on the go.” Or “Update your Twitter account with the new XXXX mobile phone.” These or something similar to these captions are the new marketing norm for mobile phones and they work. From Facebook and Twitter to Flickr, Orkut, MySpace or LinkedIn dedicated applications are available for download onto your handset so you don’t miss a beat while staying in touch with your online life anytime, anywhere.

But Social Networking isn’t just fun and games; it’s also a serious means of self promotion as well as promoting ones views and beliefs without prejudice. It’s a free and open forum. The mobile handset also allows you access to real-time contact with peers via chat applications like Fring and Nimbuzz. These app ties into multiple sites like Google for Gtalk, Skype for video chats, Yahoo! and MSN for their respective messengers as well. Introduction of these makes it so much easier to be in touch with friends, family, colleagues and even work through a very simple means of communication.

However, to preserve this exclusive things we must use them responsibly.

I’m not sure if Bill Gates actually has a Facebook page, but if he does, it probably looks similar to the one below.