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Relationships suffer a heavy blow as Facebook fails to notify birthdays

Pagal Patrakar — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 11:24:17 +0000

New Delhi. 25-year-old Praveen is on verge of losing his job as he couldn’t wish his manager on his birthday today. Praveen was the only one in the office who had no idea why a cake had been ordered in the office, and he happened to ask the question to Ankit, his boss and the birthday boy of the day. A curious Praveen was left crestfallen when he realized the faux pas he had committed.

“I checked my Facebook account and there were no birthday notifications! I remember being the first one to wish Ankit a happy birthday on his wall last year. Everyone thought that the 7.54% salary hike that I got was due to that quick performance,” Praveen, a regular Facebook user with 2443 friends said.

Most birthdays are being celebrated only on Facebook, research says.

Praveen then checked Ankit’s profile and he found his date of birth listed there, visible to public. Ankit hadn’t even unfriended him, but somehow Facebook failed to remind him about the occasion – a grave miss that can now cost his job.

“Boss was already unhappy with me for missing office on first Monday of 2012; that’s how I missed the HR mail reminding of the coming birthdays in the month,” Praveen told Faking News.

Millions of other Facebook users too complained of this technical glitch that stopped birthday notifications from appearing on their Facebook profiles. Experts have rated it as the most serious bug in Facebook till date, as it could potentially ruin millions of personal and professional relationships.

“Facebook was already being blamed for one-third of divorces, but now they have to take blame for lost jobs, broken hearts, and avoidable spending,” an internet security expert predicted.

“It could even drive away users to Google Plus!” the expert further warned of the unimaginable consequences.

The predictions by experts don’t appear way off the mark as Vikas had to buy a diamond ring for his girlfriend Poonam after he failed to wish her on her birthday last night. Vikas too blames Facebook for his impending credit card bill.

“They won’t stop reminding me to add some random guy as friend or to like some stupid page that some stupid friend of mine has liked, but they forgot to remind me of my girlfriend’s birthday! This is outrageous!” an angry Vikas said.

Apart from people like Vikas and Praveen, who are battling upheavals in their personal and professional lives due to the latest Facebook bug, there are people like Manish who have started doubting their own worth after nobody cared to wish them on their birthdays.

“Man, I don’t have a single real friend!” said a morose Manish, who finally updated his status as “Happy Birthday to me” to notify his friends. His status update attracted five ‘like’s.

“The fuckers just liked it, and didn’t bother to wish me even after that!” he rued.

White dove, the symbol of peace, introduced in Angry Birds

Pagal Patrakar — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 09:15:06 +0000

New Delhi. Millions of peace loving people around world were outraged when Rovio Mobile, the developers of the video game Angry Birds, announced the arrival of a new angry bird – the white dove. The white dove, with an olive branch in its beak, is the life time ambassador of peace, but the latest version of the game will see the docile bird fighting it out with greedy pigs.

The new game will be released next year and will see a white dove holding a bomb in its beak as opposed to the traditional olive branch. Players can launch the bird from the catapult and it will drop the bomb on the green pigs with a tap of the finger.

Outrageous depiction of a white dove

“This will screw up our future generations as they will left confused forever whenever they see the white dove drawn for peace messages,” Ravindra Singh, a frequent player of Angry Birds in his office expressed his concerns, “This also screws up the traditional metaphors in literature. It’s almost like calling a snake the man’s best friend.”

Apart from avid gamers, poets, writers, and animal rights activists have also condemned the move to depict the white dove as an angry bird.

“This defeats the whole purpose of the game, which is anger management. They are not doing good by making the symbol of peace indulge in widespread violence,” said Mukul (name changed to protect identity), a fan of Angry Birds, who claims that he associates the green pigs with his boss and the game always helps him relax after a stressful day in his office.

While the game is yet to be released in India, the government has decided to pre-screen it and ban it. Government has issued a notification asking all the Internet Service Providers to block all those websites that allow downloading of Angry Birds.

“This can’t be allowed,” Kapil Sibal, union telecom minister objected to the move, “This can hurt the sentiments of people and incite communal passions as white is associated with Christianity and Green is associated with Islam. We will not allow this game to be played in India.”

Rovio Mobile has completely rejected the criticisms and especially trashed Sibal’s argument that the game could incite communal violence.

“That’s idiotic, now we perfectly understand why he was trending on Twitter in India,” a representative of Rovio Mobile told Faking News.

The game developers claim that the depiction of a white dove as an angry bird was actually in keeping with changing times, and people, especially those from India, should actually welcome it.

“I hear phrases like ‘Gandhi with Guns’ from celebrated writers like Arundhati Roy, and Anna Hazare, a Gandhian, supporting slapping of a union minister,” a Rovio Mobile representative argued, “We have similarly attempted to show that a white dove can continue to be the symbol of peace even if it killed pigs.”

All Facebook posts to have “Kapil Sibal likes this” by default

Pagal Patrakar — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 04:40:23 +0000

New Delhi. Facebook has agreed to the demands of union minister Kapil Sibal to screen content before they go live on the website. The social networking website has announced that it will hire a team of young men and women to censor content being posted by millions of users from India. The team will only allow “acceptable” content to be published online, all of which will be identified by a “Kapil Sibal likes this” sign below it.

“If a status update doesn’t have a ‘Kapil Sibal likes this’ response by default, it means that our filters have somehow missed it,” a representative of Facebook told Faking News, “We appeal to our law abiding Indian users to immediately report such status updates for abuse. Our team will review it and give it a ‘Kapil Sibal likes this’ mark if they find it clean.”

If he doesn’t like it, you can’t say it

Sources suggest that government has expressed happiness over the decision by Facebook and has promised all support in implementing the grand censorship plan. Earlier, government had hired thousands of unemployed youth for Facebooking and Tweeting under NREGA, who could now become the talent pool for hiring by Facebook.

Explaining the whole mechanism, Facebook authorities informed that the company has asked for a list of “objectionable” terms from the government, which will be used by an automated bot to hold a status update if it contained any of those keywords. Such pending updates will later be manually checked by the team.

The bot, as well as the team, will get administrative rights through a profile named “Kapil Sibal”. Once the bot or a member of the team approves a post, the profile will automatically ‘like’ the post, which will cause the “Kapil Sibal likes this” sign to appear by default.

“99% of the Facebook updates will be cleaned by us, though 1% may go through,” Rahul Gandhi (not to be confused with Congress youth leader), a Facebook employee claimed, “But if people cooperate, we will purge even those remaining 1% of the updates.”

Facebook team agreed to give a demonstration to Faking News on how the censorship program will work. Our reporter logged in and wrote “Narendra Modi is a good leader” as status update, which never appeared on his profile, not even as a pending post.

“They have given us a list of blacklisted words too, which means such posts are straightway marked as spam and deleted,” Facebook authorities explained.

Our reporter then wrote “I was screwed in office today”, which appeared on his Facebook wall, but was put in moderation. “Sexually explicit terms” was the explanation. Even a status update with just the number “69” was put in moderation for the same reasons.

Finally, our reporter could get a “clean” post in his fourth attempt. He wrote “ZERO” and it said “Kapil Sibal likes this”.

New Facebook virus morphs user’s face on Vidya Balan in The Dirty Picture poster

Pagal Patrakar — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 07:06:41 +0000

Bangalore. Many Facebook users were shocked to see their faces morphed on to the poster of the upcoming movie The Dirty Picture as a result of a new virus that seems to attack Indian users of the social networking website. The victims, mostly males aged between 18 and 35 years, were embarrassed no end when they saw themselves being kissed by Tusshar Kapoor and Emraan Hashmi.

“Man, my life is ruined now,” Kamalesh (name changed) shared his harrowing experience with Faking News, “I saw a link that said – EXPOSED AND CENSORED! Vidya Balan naked on the sets of The Dirty Picture – and I clicked it out of excitement. And all I see next is a picture of mine being liked by all my friends. That ugly Emraan was kissing me! Yuck!”

A picture uploaded by virus on the Facebook wall of a user who had Digvijay Singh’s photo as his profile picture.

Many young men desirous of seeing Vidya in nude fell for this trap as the virus spread like Emraan Hashmi’s kiss. Facebook walls of users were flooded with pictures of their friends being kissed or caressed by Tusshar Kapoor, Emraan Hashmi, and Naseeruddin Shah.

“Being kissed by Naseer is ugly too but one can bear the shock,” Ravish (name changed again on request) told Faking News, “I can claim that it was a grandfatherly peck. But man, this is so traumatizing to see your stomach being touched by Tusshar or Emraan looking at you with lust.”

“Sick people!” Ravish said, referring either to the people who coded the virus or the actor duo.

It’s not yet clear if the virus was specifically designed to target the male users only as no confirmed report of a girl being affected by the virus was received. Internet security experts were divided on the issue.

“It’s easy to make such a virus that targets only the male users because profile data of Facebook makes the gender of the user public,” Krishnan, working with Symantec said. However, Krishnan agreed that perhaps the virus designers didn’t need to incorporate such a feature as the chances of a girl clicking on a link, which promises to show Vidya Balan nude, was very low.

After the massive attack, which is second of its kind in as many days, Facebook has issued a statement asking people to get the hell out of the website if they can’t differentiate between a spam and a genuine link.

“Morons! Just f@#K off!” an official statement by the leading social networking site said.

Facebooking and Tweeting added to the list of jobs under NREGA

Pagal Patrakar — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 11:03:57 +0000

New Delhi. Government has decided to add activities such as writing status updates on Facebook and Twitter to the list of jobs allowed under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), originally NREGA.

Though this has been ostensibly done to empower the rural youth and bridge the “digital divide” between the urban and rural India, experts believe that the central government is trying to counter anti-government activists on social networking websites through this initiative.

Sources tell Faking News that the government had been mulling for long over ways to control criticism in the online world. Taking a leaf out of the US government’s book, Government of India even tried to create fake profiles on Facebook and Twitter to propagate its views, but anti-government activists could spot the fake ones.

NREGA candidates apparently being trained to tweet like hell

“This is when they decided to employ real people, and not bots, to fight the anti-government trolls,” Prasanna, a cyber-trolling expert alleged, “And they have done it cleverly by disguising it as employment for the rural youth.”

Although government officials declined to comment, Congress leader Digvijay Singh justified the decision of “paid tweeting”.

“I have documents to prove that those tweeting against Congress and the UPA government are being paid by the RSS and the BJP,” Digvijay Singh said, “We are paying them back in their own coin.”

When asked how the government could use taxpayers’ money to fund state propaganda, Digvijay Singh smiled and walked away.

While government is all set to launch the latest NREGA policy, many critics have raised questions over this being an “employment scheme”.

“It is true that Facebooking and Tweeting is for jobless people, but not for the unemployed,” Omkara Shukla, a rural opinion maker opined, “There is a thin line between being jobless and being unemployed – just like there is a thread like thin line between being bewaqoof and being chutiya.”

Omkara Shukla claims that the step announced by the government can’t be called an employment scheme as it would just transform the unemployed people into jobless ones.

“There appears a larger conspiracy,” Omi, as Omkara Shukla is fondly called, alleged, “It seems the government is trying to counter the bitter criticism it faces in the virtual world. Very soon we could see pro-government trolls fighting it out with anti-government ones.”

“The battle between bewaqoofs and chutiyas,” he explained.

Meanwhile the first batch of Facebookers and Twitterers are already being trained by the government, sources say. They are being taught key English phrases that win online debates, such as – “that doesn’t make any sense”, “lame argument by a lameass”, and “shut the fuck up”.

People with less than 32 friends on Facebook or Twitter identified as “socially poor”

Pagal Patrakar — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 10:36:07 +0000

New Delhi. After Planning Commission’s benchmarks for identifying poor people based on economic criteria drew flak, the government has come up with new set up benchmarks that will identify poor people based on “social” criteria. The government has claimed that critics should hold their horses for now, as the definition of “socially poor” would include those who were left out by Planning Commission as being “economically poor” and help those in need.

“It’s same as ‘economic backwardness’ versus ‘social backwardness’; a mixture of both goes a long way in making policies that are hallmark of a welfare state,” Mukul Wasnik, Minister for Social Justice & Empowerment told Faking News.

However, for the first time in the history of independent India, government has used “social” in a context that doesn’t include considerations exclusively based on one’s caste, religion, tribe, or other ethnic identities. Instead, it’s actually “social” i.e. the way a person’s relationships are made with the rest of the society.

While Munaf Patel comes from a modest family background, he could be declared poor due to his social relationships.

“We are willing to consider even online relationships, as that’s where the word ‘social’ is mostly used these days,” Mr. Wasnik said.

The union minister revealed that under the new set of benchmarks, a person with less than 32 friends on Facebook will be considered for being classified as “socially poor” if each one of his or her friends is having more than 32 friends.

Similarly, someone who is following more than 1000 accounts on Twitter but having less than 32 followers even after publishing at least 5000 public tweets will be considered socially poor.

“Poor status on social networking sites will increase the chances of a person to get the BPL (Below Poverty Line) card, but the final decision will be taken based on his or her status in the real world,” Mr. Wasnik clarified.

The criteria for being socially poor in the real world are quite complex but mostly revolves around quantity and quality of one’s relationships and “contacts”.

For example, a person, who fails to get even a single person to become his or her guarantor for opening a bank account, will be classified as “socially poor”, as it proves utter lack of “quantity” in relationships and contacts in urban India.

“This should cover all those people who are spending more than 32 rupees a day but are still poor for all practical purposes,” the union minister claimed.

When pointed out by Faking News that even Suresh Kalmadi could meet the same fate if he tried to open a new bank account today, the minister refused to comment if Kalmadi could be classified as “poor”. Interestingly, Kalmadi is spending less than 32 rupees right now as he is in Tihar Jail.

Not only Kalmadi, Faking News found out that some of the criteria for identifying “socially poor” were throwing up other errors especially in cases where “quality” of relationships were being considered.

For instance, Indian cricketer Munaf Patel could be declared socially poor as the only relationship he had was with Bobby Darling, while other cricketers in his social circle were having affairs with well-to-do models and Bollywood actresses.

“Even Manmohan Singh and L K Advani are turning out to be poor based on the ‘quality’ of their political relationships,” an expert pointed out the drawbacks in the criteria to identify socially poor people.

“However, Sharad Pawar is rich even here!” the expert added.

Panic strikes as Facebook allows girls to list anyone as brother on Rakshabandhan

Pagal Patrakar — Sat, 13 Aug 2011 04:57:25 +0000

New Delhi. Suraj, who had successfully added a good looking Karishma to his Facebook friend list last month, was shocked to see a “Karishma is now sister of Suraj” update on his news feed this morning. Suraj had not confirmed this relationship status change, probably initiated by Karishma, but a new feature on Facebook bypassed this requirement to celebrate Rakshabandhan – the festival celebrating relationship between brothers and sisters.

“I was shocked,” 17-year-old Suraj confirmed as he desperately tried to edit his profile to remove Karishma as a family member, “I can’t even change this shit now! What the hell is this?”

At one point of time Suraj even thought of removing Karishma as friend, but dropped the idea as that would have stripped him of the rights to see her photos albums, which contained photos of many other good looking girls.

“Her privacy options don’t allow a normal visitor to see her photos,” Suraj expressed his frustration even as hordes of his male friends ‘liked’ the ‘activity’ of him becoming the Facebook brother of Karishma.

Facebook says that implementing the new feature is as easy as tying a Rakhi on someone’s wrist

Karishma, who has over 900 friends and 1200 pending friendship requests on Facebook, confirmed that it was her who made Suraj a brother.

“His first message to me on Facebook was – plz add me and replay me – I ignored. He kept on sending me messages and I don’t know when and why I added him. And it was worse after that. He liked all my photos and commented on everything I posted!” Karishma explained her relationship with Suraj.

This morning Karishma got a personalized mail from the Facebook team that made her aware of the Rakshabandhan special feature, which allowed a woman from India to list any man from her contact list as a brother without having to wait for approval from the man concerned.

“The mail said it was in the spirit of the Rakshabandhan,” Karishma showed the official e-mailer that also said – they can run, they can hide, but they can’t escape your love.

Apart from Suraj, Karishma confirmed that she made at least seventeen more “rakhi brothers” through this new feature.

And Faking News can confirm that this phenomenon was not limited to just Karishma and Suraj, thousands of other Indian men were filled with panic as they saw themselves being listed as brothers by women they had been trying to flirt with.

“I am moving to Google Plus,” said visibly upset Mahesh, who was made brother by seven different girls, all with Priyanka Chopra profile pictures.

When contacted by Faking News, Facebook administrators confirmed that the new feature was enabled by them and that it would remain active for a day. They refused to comment what happens to the changed relationship statuses afterwards.

“We have no idea, you should know as you are from India. We just implemented something that we thought was not very different from what happens in the real world,” a Facebook official explained.

“Yes, people can edit their profile after Rakshabandhan ends,” the official clarified, which gave some of the panic stricken men a glimmer of hope.

However, sources inform that many users have already taken screenshots of the news feeds and have uploaded it on their Facebook photo albums, which might make erasing the footprints of the new relationships difficult for now-brother men.

“Hahaha, I’ve tagged both Suraj and Karishma in the photo,” Rohan, a mutual friend of the newly made brother-sister told Faking News.

Honeymoon picture on Facebook receives “Hang Kasab” comment

Pagal Patrakar — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 10:12:28 +0000

Mumbai. Supriya, who uploaded her recent Honeymoon pictures on Facebook for her friends to ‘like’ and comment upon, was left a bit confused as one of her Facebook friends commented on a picture with a message calling for immediate execution of Ajmal Kasab and Afzal Guru.

“It was a picture of Siddharth holding me by the Sicily beach,” the 26-year-old who married her longtime boyfriend earlier this June, informed about the picture on which the comment was posted, “The comment said – How long will Indians die while terrorists enjoy biryani? Hang Kasab and Afzal. Post it all over Facebook. Jai Hind!”

Supriya had kept looking at her laptop screen awaiting cool comments after uploading her honeymoon pictures

The comment was posted by a certain Vivek Veer Singhal, who somehow has been on Supriya’s list of friends on Facebook for over two years now.

“I’ve absolutely no frigging idea who is he,” said Supriya, “I don’t even know why I added him. But what worries me more is why did he post that comment on my honeymoon pic? Worse, that comment received 37 likes as against 35 likes on the original pic.”

Supriya, whose every status update and picture used to receive dozens of likes and comments before she updated her relationship status on Facebook, admitted that she was very depressed with the numbers, and wondered if her honeymoon was not as exciting as she originally thought.

“Every time we got a picture clicked during our Euro trip, I could imagine a string of likes and comments like – ‘supercool’, ‘wow’, ‘so romantic’, ‘you guys look awesome’, ‘where is this place?’ – getting posted on the pic in quick succession,” Supriya recalled her honeymoon experience, “But I had never imagined this happening.”

“He even tagged a Facebook page called ‘Hang Kasab’ on the face of Siddharth in the picture!” a visibly upset Supriya said.

When asked why she doesn’t remove Vivek from her friends-list, Supriya said that she feared losing important data as Vivek had earlier ‘liked’ all her status updates and pictures, including the honeymoon picture in question.

While experts suspect Supriya of nursing an “identity crisis” that has pushed her to worry too much about her virtual life, leading television journalist Sagarika Ghose has blamed Internet Hindus like Vivek for the phenomenon.

Google Plus blocking entry to users who were hyperactive on Orkut

Pagal Patrakar — Sun, 17 Jul 2011 09:12:44 +0000

California, USA. In what appears to be a serious violation of the Equal Opportunities Act, Google Inc. has been found meting out unfair treatment to those internet users who were hyperactive on Orkut, Google’s original social networking website that got trumped by Facebook. The users, usually referred as Orkutiyas in India, are finding it hugely challenging to join Google Plus, the latest social networking initiative from Google aimed at trumping Facebook.

“I have a functioning Google account and I was invited by a friend to join Google Plus, but my G+ profile is still not active,” complained A@sHis \m/ehTa, an avid social networker and an active Orkut user. Aashish (his printable name) claims that he entered his credentials correctly on at least five occasions, but was spurned by the website each time.

A Google+ user, who imported his contact from his old Orkut account, saw this Circle automatically getting created by the system.

Many others like Aashish complain of numerous such ‘glitches’ that have stopped them from either joining or being active on Google Plus. Now they suspect some ‘organized attempt’ by Google to keep them at bay.

“How come Pratik, that guy who never used Orkut and had always used Facebook to wish me birthday, got his Google+ account created within minutes?” Aashish, who is 90% cool, 80% trusty, and 70% sexy on Orkut for the last five years, wondered.

“How can Google do this to their original patrons? Domestic chicken is equal to pulse for Plus?” he complained, referring to the Hindi proverb of “ghar ki murgi daal baraabar”.

Some original Orkut users even accuse Google of being ‘condescending’ and ‘insulting’ to them.

“When I clicked ‘Circles’ tab in my Google+ page, it took me to a page which had a quick tutorial explaining what a circle was. It showed triangles and hexagons as being different from a circle! Do they think people at Orkut don’t know that!?” Irfan, a former Orkut user who could set up his G+ profile with help of a friend, accused Google of following discriminatory policies.

Google has refused to comment over these allegations but social media experts believe that the internet giant might be taking some ‘preemptive’ and ‘precautionary’ measures to make sure that Google+ doesn’t go the Orkut, Buzz, or Wave way.

“It’s like not inviting your ex to your marriage ceremony,” a social media expert with 32 followers on Twitter claimed.

Facebook to launch its own country to take on Google Plus

Pagal Patrakar — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 05:41:37 +0000

California, USA. While everyone is talking whether Facebook will be finally tamed and “killed” by Google+, trusted sources inform us that Facebook is planning a much bigger coup. The social networking website, which has over 600 million active users, is all set to launch its own modern republic next week. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg would head an interim government in the new republic till inaugural elections are held.

“While mentioning Facebook, various experts have been pointing out that if it were a country, it’d have been only behind China and India in terms of population size,” said a Facebook source, “Our team spotted this opportunity and decided to give it a go.”

Coming Monday, every registered user of Facebook would receive a mail asking to confirm if they’d like to become the citizen of the new country. If a user confirms, he or she would receive his or her passport of the new country, whereas those rejecting the offer would have to apply for “visa” to continue being a user of the website.

“Yes, those not willing to join the Facebook Nation will have to pay visa fees. We’d have different types of visas for different types of users. The social media consultants will have to apply for business visa, Twitter addicts would have to apply for tourist visa, while those who still prefer Orkut will be issued student visa,” informed our source.

Interestingly, since Facebook doesn’t yet own an independent piece of land in this world, all those who’d become the citizens of the Facebook Nation (FN) would automatically become Non Resident Facebookers (NRFs), and thus may need to apply for visa in their existing countries of residence.

“We are in talks with all the nations of the world to allow NRFs to continue living in their respective countries on immigrant visa or transit visa till we buy land and relocate all our citizens,” the Facebook source said, who further informed, “In fact, we may not need to buy land at all because countries like India are willing to offer dual citizenships for the NRFs at no extra cost.”

The new nation would uphold the freedom of its citizens, but is not so sure about privacy

“We are the fastest growing economy, so we believe we’d strike out a favorable deal with other countries, so the users willing to become citizens of the Facebook Nation should not worry,” the source added.

The new country FN will follow democracy and electoral politics with multi-party system. Any user, rather citizen, would be able to create his own party and ask fellow citizens to ‘like’ it. The parties with maximum likes (at least 10% of total population of FN) would be allowed to contest elections and form government. The first elections would be held in December 2012.

“It makes sense,” says sociologist Ashish Nandy, “people today spend more time online and socialize with virtual friends more than their real ones. Online business is growing exponentially and ‘e’ version of everything real is coming up. Soon, every action of a human being would be executed only in the online domain, so it’s better if there is an authority to regulate and govern all those actions.”

The minute details about how the new county would function are still awaited and could be announced next Monday, but experts believe that going won’t be easy for the new nation, especially if they don’t have a “physical presence” in the real world.

“Politics and business is fine, the e-country would be able to manage them,” says e-sociologist Pritish Nandy, “But what about the social aspects? Most internet users consider Google as God; they turn to Google for all their solutions. Will Facebook allow this practice or consider this as some heretic or traitorous action?”

“What would be the identity of this nation? The ethos? The symbols? Have they thought about these things?” Pritish Nandy sounded very cynical.

But our Facebook source claimed that all such issues had been discussed intensely within the team before they decided to launch a new country. The thumbs-up picture of the “like button” would be the national icon of the new country, FarmVille Cow would be the national animal, while poking would be the native way of greeting each other.

“There is a proposal to make one of the soundtracks of the movie The Social Network as the national anthem,” informed our source, who hinted that Beatles’ song “Baby, You’re a Rich Man” which appears at the end of the movie might win the race.

The not-so-cynical experts believe that the Facebook Nation would be a runaway success and would lead to creation of new e-countries, with Google most likely to follow suit and pave way for a bipolar but vibrant e-world.

“The real problem would be when companies like ibibo follow suit; it will create failed e-countries that might give rise to e-recession and e-terrorism,” warned an expert.

(Updated on July 1, 2011 to modify the script to incorporate the launch of Google+; the original script referred to the launch of email service by Facebook in November 2010. “Facebook Nation” picture source)

When celebrities clicked Facebook spam links on their walls

Pagal Patrakar — Mon, 16 May 2011 15:05:32 +0000

The latest Facebook spam that appears to have started today tells you about a video in which you are looking stupid or funny or simply horrible. The spam link asks you to untag yourself from the video that is cleverly disguised as a YouTube link. Ram Gopal Varma also got such a link and he clicked it. This is what followed:

Ram Gopal Varma finds Abhishek Bachchan's funny video

A couple of weeks back, when everyone was talking about Osama Bin Laden’s death, a spam link went viral that claimed to be a WikiLeaks video of Osama being killed by the US forces. Even Pakistani President wanted to see what was happening inside his country, so he clicked the link:

Zardari tried to find out what US was doing inside his country

Another “popular” Facebook spam that appeared everywhere was a link that claimed to be based on a “technology” capable of predicting how would one’s face look like in 20 years. Only that this cutting edge technology ended up showing the same picture to everyone. This is what Rahul Gandhi found:

Rahul Gandhi tries to find out how he'd look in future

Father names son “Facebook” after he fails in annual exam

Pagal Patrakar — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 16:28:22 +0000

Noida. Just days after an Egyptian father named his daughter “Facebook” to acknowledge the social networking website’s vital role in overthrowing the dictatorial regime of Hosni Mubarak, a man in India has done the same to his teenaged son to acknowledge the website’s crucial contribution in spoiling the academic performance of his son.

Rachit, 13, now renamed “Facebook”, scored below 40% marks in each subject in his 9^th grade final exams, after which his father decided to change his name to pay a tribute to the website that he considered responsible for his son’s scholastic downfall.

“He had been sitting glued and logged into his Facebook account all these months,” Pramod Uppal, father of “Facebook” said, “Even though he had ‘liked’ the Mathematics page on Facebook, he had no idea what was Pythagoras’ Theorem!”

Report card of “Facebook”

Mr. Uppal, who is also on Facebook and friends with his son, claims that his son used to spend at least eight hours daily on the social networking site and had a network of 1427 friends, mostly girls, whose every status update he used to like and comment upon.

“Duffer didn’t use to study at all!” the angry father complained. Mr. Uppal decided to change the name of his son once he saw his son ‘liking’ a page titled “I wrote all correct answers in exam but the teacher was IDIOT. Lulz!!” the evening results were announced.

Pramod Uppal took Rachit to the nearest notary public office the next morning and undertook an affidavit to change his son’s name. Within hours, Rachit was “Facebook”.

“I want all his friends and every other student in this country to learn a lesson from his deeds,” Mr. Uppal explained and defended his actions, “I have not done anything illegal as my son was still a minor when I got his name changed, and parents have all the rights to name their wards as they wish.”

“Facebook”, formerly Rachit, was actually happy with his new name until he realized that his full name on the affidavit was “Facebook Uppal”, which not only sounded horribly absurd but was prone to be shortened to FU by his friends.

Zuckerberg’s Facebook fan page was hacked after he added a “suggested friend”

Pagal Patrakar — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 11:26:49 +0000

California, USA. Internal investigations into the hacking of “fan page” of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has revealed that the security breach happened after Zuckerberg added a “suggested friend” to his personal profile. Sources indicate that the suggested friend’s profile had a display picture of a rather hot looking girl, which most probably led the Facebook founder to fall into the sinister trap.

The findings has been kept as “top secret” by the Facebook management, but was leaked by a “whistleblower” to credible websites like Faking News and WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks was busy validating the leaked information, while Faking News decided to go ahead and publish it.

“Zuck was rather bored that day and fiddling with his personal profile, like updating his current professional position as ‘I’m CEO, bitch’ etc.” the leaked report read, “That’s when he saw this hot looking girl under ‘People You May Know’ and added the profile as friend without thinking too much.”

Something similar caused the Facebook fan page of Mark Zuckerberg being hacked

The name of this “suggested friend” was not disclosed in the leaked report but it revealed that Sean Parker was shown as a common friend to Mark Zuckerberg’s profile. After Zuckerberg was friends with this girl, which is now suspected to be a fake profile, he is believed to have exchanged some messages, one of which had a dubious phishing link.

“Hey Zuck, you look so sexy in this pic, please allow me to tag you,” was the message that proved to be fatal for the Facebook founder as he ended up disclosing his username/email (shockingly hackingmark123@hotmail.com) and password (privacymyfoot).

The leaked report suggests that Facebook management was in tight spot whether they should disclose these details to the general public. While disclosing the details meant assurance to the rest of users that nothing was wrong in the basic security features of the social networking website, it also risked showing the organization’s founder as a rather dumb person.

Instead Facebook decided to confuse the users further by making them randomly go through a “social authentication” process to prove that they were not fake profiles, who could hoodwink Zuckerberg again.

Orkut user humiliated in full public view by Facebook crowd

Pagal Patrakar — Sat, 22 Jan 2011 11:43:59 +0000

Ahmedabad. Dhiraj Joshi, 19, had to put up with a barrage of insults and ridicule for having logged into his Orkut account in presence of two Facebook users, who also happened to be his batchmates at a local engineering college. They were later joined by a bunch of other students from the same hostel, who made life hell for Dhiraj for a seemingly innocuous act of “scrapping”.

“I was sending a scrap to my friend to wish him a happy birthday,” Dhiraj (whose Orkut display name reads “coolest dude”) recalled the unfortunate moment, “Aakash, my roomie, happened to enter the room at that very moment and it seems he saw it. Before I could minimize the window, he burst into a loud laughter, almost spilling his kitli tea over me.”

Aakash is believed to have frantically called out Pratik, their neighbor, who was playing cricket outside by throwing the ball against the hostel wall and hitting it on rebound. Pratik came rushing in and then both of them laughed like crazy for next few minutes, ridiculing Dhiraj for “still” using Orkut.

Dhiraj uses a Shahid Kapoor “theme” for his Orkut profile, an act that also came for ridicule during the public humiliation

Hearing loud noises of laughter and Hindi abusive words (gaali), at least seven other students are reported to have got “attracted” and walked into Dhiraj’s hostel room in the next couple of minutes. What followed was a public humiliation of a helpless and unarmed Orkut user.

“Pratik ‘poked’ me with his bat at least three times,” Dhiraj recounted the mental and physical torture he had to go through, “They abused me by calling me chirkut, orkutiya, lodu, and gave me strange names like Baba Sehgal, Motorola Pager, and Windows 95.”

The rowdy students, all of whom are reported to be Facebook users, even tried to lift Dhiraj on their shoulders and “parade” him in the campus for his “deeds”, but the plan was later abandoned as India-South Africa match had started by then.

Meanwhile Dhiraj had written to the Hostel warden for providing him security against any such possible attack in future, but shockingly the warden refused to step in and instead suggested Dhiraj to “lock the hostel door” from inside next time he logged into Orkut.

Dhiraj alias “coolest dude” is rated 70% trusty, 40% cool, and 55% sexy on the older version of Orkut. Those who indicated themselves as “fans” of him or wrote “testimonials” for him refused to comment over the issue.

Men spent most time on Facebook watching pictures of women users

InsipidReports — Fri, 31 Dec 2010 13:44:34 +0000

California, USA. After releasing top status trends of 2010, Facebook has released trends on how users spend their time on the social networking site after logging into their accounts. Not surprisingly, the trends show that men, especially those from India, have been spending maximum time browsing through the pictures uploaded by women users in their network. These included engagement and marriage photo albums.

“While we expected this, this is kinda disturbing,” said Michael Luxemberg of the data-mining and analytics team of Facebook, “We see this as unfortunate Orkutization of Facebook.” Michael also blamed Google for this trend as he pointed out that a Google Image search for “Facebook girls” returned a lot of “inappropriate” results.

“Sometimes we have noticed a guy spending around 10 minutes on a single picture before clicking on it to proceed to the next; God knows what’s happening!” Michael revealed the trends.

In the Hollywood movie “The Social Network”, even the Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is shown checking this girl’s profile towards the end, perhaps setting the trend for other users.

Michael informed that Facebook logs every activity of a user and they had further “interesting” insights into the way users spend time online, but would “leak” them at an appropriate time in future.

“Just after finishing browsing through a woman’s album, we have noticed guys updating their status with some random quote picked from the internet; perhaps an attempt to hide what they had been up to,” Mark leaked a few details.

Some other trends were on expected lines such as:

Activities of women users attracted 78% more ‘likes’ and comments from users than those by men.
Indian users had higher mention of English television series and movies than those from UK or US.
Many people have been using “Paul the psychic Octopus” application to get their daily predictions even after the Octopus’ death.
47% of the users have used the “Poke” feature at least once, due to which Facebook team is not retiring the feature anytime soon.
309 users ‘liked’ Suresh Kalmadi.

While such data were rather easy to mine and analyze, Facebook team is reported to be working on a technology that could read “into” the pictures. An algorithm is being developed that would identify and record patterns, such as clothes worn by a tagged user, in various pictures.

“Currently we have to rely upon users’ data, such as an album’s title, to find out what the picture is all about. But we can’t be over-dependent upon the users,” Michael said, “Say; it’s easy to find out if a picture is of an Indian wedding if more than three people are wearing excessively loud colors. We can surely develop an algorithm to find that out.”

Michael rejected that such “technological innovations” compromised the privacy of Facebook users. Michael had agreed to talk to Faking News on conditions of anonymity, but we decided to ignore his privacy options.

Ayodhya case still being fought on Twitter and Facebook

Pagal Patrakar — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 12:10:24 +0000

New Delhi. Even though the Lucknow bench of the Allahabad High Court pronounced its judgment in the disputed Ram Janmbhoomi Babri Masjid case today, sources inform that the same case is still being fiercely debated in virtual courts on Twitter, Facebook, Orkut and other known and unknown blogs/websites across the world, with all the parties claiming their respective victories just a few words away.

The litigants in these cases have refused to give any importance to the High Court verdict, which they though was “incomplete and illogical”, as well as the decision of the Sunni Waqf Board to appeal in the Supreme Court, and have expressed confidence that they’d soon settle the issue forever on the internet, which would be acceptable and binding on all, especially on their rivals.

“Just a few minutes more and I can get this porki eat his words,” said a verbally confident AmIt ॐ kUmAr, an internet lawyer and Orkut warrior defending the rights of Hindus to build a temple in Ayodhya, who was engaged in an “animated” debate with ~>ZakirNaikRox YaALLAH<~ on “India” community of Orkut.

An internet warrior is seen here, defending his people’s rights

According to trusted sources, the internet world was abuzz with thousands, or maybe millions, of such couples and groups of lawyers and warriors, who were determined to take the fight to a “logical” conclusion.

“It’s understandable,” says internet psychologist Satyen Sinha, “Ayodhya case took 60 years to reach this stage and the case would again be debated in the Supreme Court now, whereas most of these internet courts are not even 10 years old, and only so much old is the debate there.”

“I guess this internet battle will go on for another fifty years or so,” he added.

But the warriors disagree.

“I can already smell victory in air no matter what these guys could be claiming,” says @sexular on Twitter, who has been keeping an eye over each tweet containing the term “Ayodhya” and replying to each comment he found contrary to his beliefs and assumptions. Since “Ayodhya” had been trending on Twitter since morning today, he needed just a click to deliver what he calls as “deadly blows” to people from “the other side”.

@sexular had already replied to over 300 users with logically crafted and detailed arguments such as “STFU”, “very soon you’d know”, “Oh really?”, “LOL! Low lives you guys are”, etc. and had successfully blocked around 50 users; all adding to his strong belief and confidence that victory was coming his way for which he had even skipped his lunch earlier today.

Independent observers claim that the fight between the various groups was “delicately poised” and nothing could be said about the final outcome yet.

“An estimated 3000 new user profiles on Facebook, Orkut and Twitter was created primarily for this purpose since morning,” informs an observer Kabir Kant, “new pages, communities and groups like ‘we want all the parts’ are also coming up at a rapid rate. This battle is going to continue for now as still nobody is sure who owns the land. In fact new claimants would come up now as the High Court has partitioned the land into three parts whereas there were only two original claimants of the land.”

Administrators from the social networking websites refused to comment over the issue although many politicians offered to comment, but Faking News refused.

Google secretly developing a competitor to Paul the Octopus

Pagal Patrakar — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 07:08:04 +0000

California, USA. Concerned over the growing popularity of Paul the Octopus for accurately resolving people’s doubts, something for which a lot of people have relied upon Google search results, Google is reported to be developing its own Octopus, tentatively named “Google 8”. The Google Octopus could be launched anytime later this year and would be distributed and sold through retail stores unlike other google products that were distributed and sold through online downloads.

“It would look like a real blood and flesh octopus and would be available in a small aquarium of 3x3x3 feet cubic size. But it would actually be an android running on Google’s complex search engine algorithm, improvised to resolve specific questions like which team could win a match or whether a person would get a job.” informed a popular tech blogger, even though Google declined to comment on the reports.

Google 8, the Google Octopus, is ready to answer all your questions that ever bothered you

Experts believe that Google was indeed worried over the popularity of Paul, the psychic octopus, who could correctly predict the results of all the FIFA world cup matches that Germany played. Earlier, Google was the one stop solution for a person in doubt, a position that now threatens to go to octopuses.

“People would ask all kinds of questions to Google when something bothered them – Will I ever get married? When will I die? Is my neighbor a sex offender? Will Argentina win the 2010 world cup? Will Germany be a Muslim state by 2050? – but soon they could start flocking to octopuses for such queries and google could lose a considerable traffic.” explained an internet expert.

Earlier Google had felt threat from the growing popularity of facebook and was believed to be working on development of “Google Me”, but it’s not clear if the internet giant could shelve the development of “Google Me” to launch “Google 8” in time.

“I believe they would be wise to work on the Google Octopus at this moment as it threatens their primary business – the search engine market. Also, we have specific information that China is planning to flood global markets with smaller and cheaper octopuses that people could buy and keep in their homes to resolve their queries.” another expert opined.

Faking News sources in China confirm that preparations are afoot to market tiny octopuses in smaller aquariums and brand them iPaul, something that hurts Google as well as Apple, two American corporate giants. The Chinese iPaul octopuses would be real alive octopuses and would be projected as having psychic powers similar to Paul the Octopus.

Back in India, domestic babas too are concerned over the latest developments and are planning to protest the entry of iPaul and Google 8 into the Indian markets.

Facebook updates privacy options to allow caste based content sharing

Pagal Patrakar — Sat, 08 May 2010 04:40:49 +0000

New Delhi. Keeping with their policy of frequent changes in features and layout, Facebook today announced that the popular social networking site will soon launch an India specific feature that will allow users to share specific content and information within members of their own caste. The feature, part of privacy options, will also enable users to hide any content or information from other members based on their castes.

“Undoubtedly these new privacy options are aimed at our Indian users. India is a growing market and is supposed to become a superpower; hence we are pretty keen to understand that segment. We realized that caste is one of the major factors in Indian pub(l)ic life and hence we are testing our maiden caste-based feature for its performance.” Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said, hinting that more caste-based features could be introduced in future.

The new set of privacy options have been launched in its beta version starting today morning. Many users were amused when they were asked to mention their caste in their profile as soon as they logged into their Facebook accounts this morning. Once they filled in the details, the following additional options appeared in their privacy options settings:

You can choose what to broad-caste and what to narrow-caste

“Initially I was shocked, but I guess this is not such a bad idea at all. Some days back I had updated my status message with a PJ on Mayawati, and one guy commented if I would have still made joke of Mayawati if she was from my own caste! I don’t know if this feature will help, but caste-based content sharing is not bizarre.” Amar Singh, a Facebook user said.

Facebook is hoping to attract new users in India and increase involvement of the existing users after introduction of this caste-based feature. Although the company has not divulged its plans for future release of caste-based features, but experts believe that these could include caste-based content recommendations, new friend suggestions, and even matrimonial suggestions.

“If Facebook documents castes of all its Indian users, it can as well start a matrimonial site and add new sources of revenue. In fact, there are endless possibilities. If reservations into private sector are introduced, Facebook will have the advantage of launching a competitor of LinkedIn with additional and required information on castes.” said one of the various social media marketing experts.

Unconfirmed sources have indicated that Union Home Ministry too has taken note of the development and is thinking of involving Facebook for a caste-based census.

“Government is already planning to connect whole of India through internet after 3G auctions. If every citizen can access internet, they could as well be asked to make a Facebook account and data regarding caste could be collected with ease. It will save us the headache.” an official working in the office of Registrar General and Census Commissioner of India said on conditions of anonymity.

“We would be happy to help India progress and advance into a modern society.” Mark Zuckerberg said, expressing happiness that the caste-based features had received largely positive feedback.

Dark secrets of many come out in open as hackers have a field day

Tantanoo — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 21:35:52 +0000

New Delhi. In an unprecedented attack, notorious email hackers group MOCODO (MOst COders are DOrks), hacked into the email accounts of millions of users across the world. While a large chunk of critical information was at stake, the hackers instead chose to to release “Secret Questions” of thousands of users on popular questions portal, iBaBaBuBu.com.

Although it appears to be a minor violation of privacy, this move by the hackers has caused widespread discontent amongst the users in various countries. Embarrassing questions and their answers were posted much to the chagrin of unsuspecting users.

Many experts believe that Answers to the Secret Questions hide many skeletons in the cupboard

Revathi and Ashok were happily married, until yesterday, when Ashok logged into his iBaBaBuBu profile and found Revathi’s secret question posted there. When asked, “What’s the name of your pet?”, Revathi had answered, “Ashok”. On another email address, upon being asked, “What is the middle name of your youngest child?”, Revathi had mentioned “Salman”.

An infuriated Ashok immediately packed his bags and left their house. While talking to Faking News, an inconsolable Revathi said that she had called Ashok a ‘pet’ out of fondness and they didn’t even have any children. Unfortunately the damage had already been done.

In Melbourne, as soon as Vikram Jeet Singh walked into his classroom he could sense that something was wrong. His classmates looked at him suspiciously and some of them even made rude gestures. While he was contemplating whether this was a racist attack, his Indian friends also started laughing and jeering at him. Later in the day his bff Manjit Kaur told him that all his classmates had read Vikram’s response to the secret question – “When was the last time you had sex?”

“Seven years without sex isn’t easy, you know. #fml” – Vikram tweeted later in the day.

Similar incidents were reported at other places. Master Raju’s father discovered that his child’s favorite Cartoon character was “Savita Bhabhi”.

Christie’s mother was shocked to discover that her daughter’s favorite position was ‘69’. “I am surprised”, she told Faking News, “She always secured the first position in her class; I thought that would be her favorite position”.

Elsewhere, Manoos Desai was expelled from his political party because he had mentioned “Lucknow” as his favorite city rather than “Mumbai”.

While experts are still trying to gauge the extent of information exposed by these attacks, the leak of security questions has resulted into a social catastrophe, the worst of which is yet to be seen.

(written by a very lonely person called Tantanoo)

Google launches Mox to help you “search within” your soul

Wimwian — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 10:54:43 +0000

California, USA. Google announced today that it is launching a new service to help users search deep within their soul. “This would not only maximize the untapped potential of our search technology, but also the untapped potential of the human race”, said Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, in an exclusive interview with Faking News business reporter SK Wimwian.

The service will be named Google Mox, a subtle pun on the ancient Sanskrit word ‘Moksh’ which means ‘Nirvana’ or liberation.

“Finally, we shall be able to free all the data buried deep inside humanity’s collective consciousness”, he added.

Google expects that this service will be a boon especially for those users who are forgetful – for instance, you will never again be at a loss to remember where you left your car keys, or which file contained the most updated version of the presentation for that critical meeting. It will also save millions of people from the embarrassment caused when you meet someone at a party and can’t remember where you had met them before.

Apparently, all you’ll have to do will be to ask yourself the question, and Google Mox will pop up with the right answer – all in the blink of an eye.

While Google Mox is expected to be a free service, Google didn’t rule out launching a paid version in future, which would allow users to not only search their own minds and souls, but those of others as well. Maybe men will finally know what women are thinking.

Mox Search, powered by Google, will be simple in interface, though complex in working

Most users contacted by Faking News couldn’t hide their excitement at this proposed development, but there were some voices of caution. “What if I have secrets I would like to keep buried deep within myself?” was a question raised by the noted mystic Mr Aishaaram Bapu.

Recognizing that some people may indeed want to protect their innermost thoughts, Google has pointed to the possibility of launching a premium Anti-Mox service that would prevent any data being accessed by external Mox-bots. Pricing has not been announced, though there is some speculation that it may be linked to the “value” of the thoughts that would be hidden. There is also a possibility that a new advertising-based revenue model may be established, where users will first have to watch a context-specific advertisement – inside their head – before they find the answer to the question they had asked.

The technology underlying the new service has been in development for the last three years in a secret underground bunker. The first step was to be able to provide input using brain waves – this proved to be a difficult task, but was actually proved way back in 2008 when scientists were able to use thought waves to move a virtual ‘avatar’. However, Google has gone much further, to the extent that the team of Mox developers now exclusively use thought waves for ordering food at their cafeteria.

The next step was to understand the way the mind and the soul save information, but this was a relatively easier task for Google’s crack engineers. They eventually decided that it didn’t matter how the data was organized, they could simply copy it all onto a separate server and reorganize it to make it searchable – the additional cost wasn’t much, especially since Google owns a bit too much storage space anyway.

Some voices of protest are already beginning to emerge.

“First they took over the world’s websites, then the books and libraries, and now the thoughts and minds of all of humanity would be copied onto their servers! This is too much to take – I call upon all nations to come together and stop Google before it goes too far”, said French President Nicholas Sarkozy.

Google’s Brin, however, differed – “It is preposterous to say that our intentions are not noble. After all, our motto is “Don’t be evil” – how can we possibly be evil?”

P.S. – This reporter was a bit disconcerted to realize Mr Brin was answering a question he had thought of asking but hadn’t actually asked at that point in the interview.

Google Buzz wait keeps internet savvy dude awake all night

Pagal Patrakar — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 21:41:40 +0000

Bengaluru. Sarfaraz Tabwala, a 23-year-old IT professional, couldn’t sleep all night as he waited for Google Buzz tab to appear in his Gmail account. For over seven hours, Sarfaraz continuously kept looking at the glowing laptop screen and occasionally tapping on the keyboard, after which he suddenly realized that it was 5 AM in the morning and he had to report to his office within four hours.

“Many of my friends had G-Talk status messages such as Not available – I’m BUZZy, YES I AM BUZZING, or simply BUZZ!!!, which made me restless and even jealous to an extent.” Sarfaraz confessed and conceded that he had logged out and logged in into his Gmail account at least 150 times in hope of Buzz tab appearing. He gave up at around 5 AM.

Even the least contact worthy person’s Gmail will be buzzing with notifications about new messages after enabling Google Buzz

Sarfaraz has BSNL Home 500C plan, and has free internet usage from 2 AM to 8 AM, but he denied this as being the possible factor for keeping him awake. He pointed out that even yesterday he had slept around 3 AM, only after his tweet count went over by 200 with a parallel growth in orkut scrap count.

“Yesterday I was completely clueless when I went to bed. I realized that I had actually done nothing and yet I was up so late. Even in my dreams, I saw myself surfing internet. I was a bit scared. But today I had a reason. I believe Google Buzz would be fun.” said Sarfaraz, who is popularly referred as Surf-raaj (the king of surfing) by his friends.

Friends fear that Sarfaraz would start spending even more time on internet after Google Buzz, as he has already been sharing lots of stuff on twitter and facebook.

“I’ve no idea why Google is introducing such features. Why can’t they let my Gmail page be as clean and uncluttered as their homepage? I dread what would happen when Sarfaraz finally gets that Google Buzz tab. I am afraid, I might have to block my good friend.” Deepak Naik, a friend of Sarfaraz said on conditions of anonymity, but we decided to Buzz about it.

Earliest facebook users oppose immigration of orkut users

Pagal Patrakar — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 21:45:57 +0000

Mumbai. A group of facebook users from India, who have been using facebook since it was made public in September 2006, have expressed deep concern over the increased immigration of orkut users into the network in recent times. These users have formed an organization called F4 (Facebook For First Facebookers) and have threatened to hack those users (their accounts), who have migrated from orkut and were distorting the image of facebook.

“Facebook used to be so intellectual and serene before these orkuteers started infesting the site. We used to interact peacefully and meaningfully with our friends and like minded people in those days. Now these guys have made fake profiles and post obscene and spam comments on each community and page. They have spoiled the fun and have sullen the environment. They need to be educated and taught a lesson.” Balraj Thoku, F4 chairman said.

Although F4 couldn’t provide any data to back their claim, the activists have decided to take the matter into their own hand. F4 has appealed to the First Facebookers to poke the orkut immigrants on regular basis and throw sheep at them (an activity F4 activists nostalgically recall and blame the orkuteers for disrespecting such local and original facebook customs), apart from randomly writing chirkut on their walls.

Facebook and Orkut users seem to be on collision course as the controversy gains fire

Balraj Thoku has also written a few notes ‘exposing’ the uncultured ways of orkut immigrants, and has appealed the First Facebookers to tag all the orkut immigrants in these notes.

“Let me tell you that we are not indulging in anything illegal. We are using features and means that are officially permitted by the facebook administrators to register our protest, and our intention is to tell the truth.” said Balraj Thoku, who then went on to issue a mild warning, “But if such peaceful means are ignored by the shameless orkuteers and they keep on coming into the facebook network, I would not be responsible if some F4 activists start hacking their accounts tomorrow.”

Although most of the facebook users have expressed amusement and disbelief over such appeals and actions, a few of them agreed that orkut-turned-facebook users were rash and reckless in their behavior.

“Only yesterday I received a fraand request and a grammatically challenged fraandship message in my inbox, you know, those kinds that were so regular on orkut scrapbooks. I seriously suspect it was some orkuteer who had recently joined facebook.” Jaya Chavan, a 45-year-old lady who had Emma Watson as her profile picture on facebook, revealed.

F4 rejected the criticism that there was any attempt to defame or demoralize the orkuteers. F4 activists also challenged the orkut administrators to redesign orkut in a way that stops the migration to facebook. “Why should our facebook suffer due to bad management and creativity of the orkut team?” asked an F4 activist. “But all they can do is copy stuff from facebook, losers!” pat came the rejoinder from another activist.

On the other hand, Orkuteers have taken strong objection to such statements and have asked F4 to behave and wake up to the reality.

“Orkuteers are multi-talented and are expert at multitasking. We take part in community discussions, scrap to other users, check out new pictures and videos added by friends, become fans of new friends, and rate them as trusty, cool and sexy; and yet we have time to check out facebook activities too, which are rather boring I must say! F4 guys are simply jealous of our skills and are trying to cover up their laziness and dullness by blaming us.” NiTisH $!n6H ~ \m/ said.

Facebook and Orkut administrators have refused to comment over the controversy, but our sources inform that they were seen smiling and congratulating each other.

Thousands of voyeurs spend whole day thinking about bras

Pagal Patrakar — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 20:05:21 +0000

New Delhi. Thousands of facebook voyeurs had a great day yesterday when they let their imaginative power loose after reading names of various colors and patterns in facebook status updates, which was supposed to convey the color of bra (yeah, that thing that women wear) a woman facebook user was wearing. Although the status updates were supposed to create awareness against breast cancer, voyeurs were just too happy just like that.

“Manisha changed her bra three times man; black, pink and white towards the end of the day. I never knew women changed them so often.” said Roshan, one of the leading facebook voyeurs, who searched for pictures of black, pink and white colored bra on Google Images each time Manisha (name changed) changed her status message.

Her facebook status message read “Leopard”

Roshan had seen 78 different kinds of bras by the end of the day as new colors, combination of colors, shades, textures, designs, patterns etc. kept on appearing on his facebook news feed. While searching and browsing for bra images, which flew as freely as his stream of consciousness, Roshan also learned about new models of Victoria’s Secret. He was an aware man by the end of the day.

“Yeah, I know it was about breast cancer awareness. It was good. Women should avoid toxic bras that cause cancers. Government should ban companies that use unnatural and industrial colors to dye bras.” said Roshan when asked if he knew why women were changing their status messages to different colors. “But none of them wrote ‘nothing’ as the status message. he he he…” added Roshan as he chuckled thinking about the day.

Thousands of other facebook voyeurs had similar stories to tell as they imagined various kinds of bras, and extended their imagination to other lingerie products on their choice of female bodies.

Apart from voyeurs, the color changing campaign also helped those persons, who had weak vocabulary as they got to learn new words like Beige, Fuchsia, Ochre, Pistachio, Harlequin, Paisley and Papyrus among others. Such words were not only flashed on facebook pages, but spilled over to twitter and Google Talk statuses too. The campaign seemed successful, but not everyone was happy.

“I don’t know what was achieved though this day long activity. And it didn’t make sense. Tomorrow men would start telling the color of their underwear to create awareness against piles. I am not impressed.” Somnath Sharma, a sociologist expressed his unhappiness.

Facebook launches Facebook Tsunami to take on Google Wave

Rohit Dinkar — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 17:53:43 +0000

California, USA. Google Wave, in the past few months, has created a lot of debates over what could be the future of online communication. Many speculators believed that Facebook would face its first serious threat and might not survive the competition. In an attempt to obviate these speculations, Facebook team met the precogs (the three girls who have the power to see the future) of the Hollywood movie Minority Report and worked with them on a complete makeover of Facebook. As a result, facebook is all set to launch Facebook Tsunami.

The new Facebook Tsunami gets perfectly synchronized with its users and is able to generate automatic status messages on their profiles, depending upon their current activity and what they plan to do in future. During a beta release of the new version, fluctuations in the status messages were seen all over the world that left people amused.

Miss Dogere received the shock of her life when her status message changed from “chatting” to “having sex with Harry”, five minutes after her boyfriend came to her apartment. She had to answer embarrassing phone calls from her friends and relatives. Gaurav Sahu, an engineering student lost his eight girlfriends as his Tsunami profile mentioned anatomical details of each of his girlfriends.

But there were many others who were quite happy with the results like Santa Singh, whose status message got updated as “thinking”, even though his friends believed that it was a proof that the beta version had some bugs.

For those, who didn’t get to experience the beta version, following is a screenshot from the Facebook profile of our special correspondent Rohit:

Unable to figure out Google Wave, youngster kills himself

Chotu Ustaad — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 19:41:24 +0000

Vadodara. Internet has taken a toll on human life yet again. Dildar Leherwala, a 24-year-old MBA student from Faculty of Management Studies, MS University Vadodara, committed suicide yesterday night after spending two futile days trying to understand the features of Google Wave, a new social networking service by Google. An MS Word file titled ‘Suicide_note.docx’ found on his computer’s desktop has been taken as the conclusive proof. The note explains, with vivid desperation, the mental turmoil this young man had to go through while using Google Wave which led him to take this drastic step.

Dildar watched this video explaining features of Google Wave many times before he gave up

His family and friends revealed that Dildar was an internet freak and had an unmatched fascination with e-mailing and social networking websites.

His close friend, Dhaval, recalls with moist eyes, “I remember the day five years back when Dilds got an exclusive invitation from his uncle living in the USA to join Gmail. He was so happy. He instantly opened an email account and even sent Invites to all his friends. He was so generous. He even treated us with muffins and patties in college canteen.”

Probing further, Faking News came to know some startling facts about his internet life. Dildar, incidentally had 13 e-mail accounts on 9 different e-mail hosting websites. He also had profiles on 21 social networking websites including many which were mostly unheard in India. He had 2132 friends on Orkut, 1477 on Facebook, 771 on Hi5 and 462 followers on Twitter. According to his friends, he had login ids on at least 200 different websites to get access to all kinds of stuff on internet. He even maintained a secret file on his laptop where he kept a note of all those logins and passwords. The file is still unlocated.

Dildar was restless for past few weeks since he heard about the launch of Google Wave. For more than ten days, his status message on almost all his social networking profiles said “Please send me a Google Wave invite. TIA!”

Rupesh, another close friend of Dildar explains, “He would usually change his status message twice a day on all his profiles, but this message stood for almost ten days. That showed his level of desperation. But finally his uncle from US again came to rescue and sent him a Google Wave invitation. This was on Friday. Since then, Dilds had locked himself in his room with his laptop and eatables sufficient for two days. Yesterday, when he went offline on G-Talk, we sensed something fishy and eventually had to break in to find that he had killed himself by crushing and chewing laptop batteries.”

Dildar’s suicide note sums up his need to take this drastic step. It says, “I know Google Wave is going to be bigger than anything else on internet. And being unable to understand its features fully, I feel like a loser and find myself unworthy of this life. I simply cannot show this miserable countenance to my friends and family. Thus I fully own the responsibility of ending my life and hope to be reborn with a brain fully compatible with Google Wave.”

Utterly grief stricken, Dildar’s family is planning to sue Google for his death. But following their advocate’s advice, they are currently going through the ‘Terms and Conditions’ of Google Wave before approaching the court. Net savvy Dildar had accepted thousands of terms and conditions online.

Parliament lauds intense efforts of “India” community on orkut

Pagal Patrakar — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 10:53:31 +0000

Where Indians discuss

New Delhi. Parliament of India today unanimously passed a resolution praising the activities and enthusiasm of “India” community on the social networking website orkut. Parliament entreated the citizens of India to learn from the orkut community, comparing the community forum and the members as resembling the parliament itself. Honorable members of parliament are pondering over empowering the community to take some influential decisions with statutory authority for the betterment of the nation. The concerned orkut community was inching towards 9 lakh members when this report was filed.

“India community discusses and resolves hundreds of issues daily, repeating the process all round the year with the same issues. This is exactly what we do in the parliament. The moderators of the community also do a wonderful job as they delete the posts of members who use irrelevant, obscene or offensive language, this is akin to expunging irrelevant or offensive remarks of MPs from parliament records. The community is really impressive.” Parliamentary Affairs Minister Priya Ranjan Dasmunsi said.

The minister also cited various other similarities between the orkut community and the parliament, including some unfortunate ones like ‘cash for question’ incident, where members initiate discussions with commercial motives. Such topics are known as ‘spam’ in the orkut community, while the parliament considers them ‘scam’.

Parliament members are thinking of outsourcing some of the Zero Hour discussion topics to the same orkut community as the lower house proceedings are usually stalled due to commotion and disruptions by members and the upper house is usually busy electing new members. Constitutional experts too have hailed the decision of the parliament and termed it as a paradigm shift in the concept of e-governance.

Members of parliament have also declared that the members of the orkut community will now be known as MICs on the lines of parliament members being referred as MPs, because the orkut community is also known as IC370. It’s not yet clear if MICs will enjoy the same kind of privileges and rights as MPs, but community members, apart from Google, have expressed gratitude and gratification over the development.

“This indeed is a welcome step and I hope we would now be truly playing our role in the nation building process. People used to laugh at us and mock us why we used to spend so much time on the community. Now they’d know what it means to be an MIC.” Maswood, an IC370 member said. Similar optimism and confidence was expressed by new MICs like Shubham and Moderators (speakers?) like sarkar.matrix and Utkarsh.

It’s expected that very soon the orkut community will have topics corresponding to Zero Hour questions, tagged as [ZERO-HOUR] in the topic name, which will be intensely debated by the members as they would try to find an answer.

Man down with facebook fatigue has started hating all his friends

Pagal Patrakar — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 07:04:05 +0000

New Delhi. Chanchal Kumar, a 28-year-old executive who was hospitalized and diagnosed with ‘facebook fatigue’ yesterday, has shown further signs of complications as he expressed hatred for all his friends today. Chanchal threw food, flowers and (plastic) sheep at his friends who came to meet him and gestured them to go away by putting his thumb down, screaming that he ‘unliked’ them and didn’t want to see them again.

“This is indeed worrying. Yesterday when he was brought to the hospital, he was refusing to talk to anyone. Today he talked and spoke but appeared very violent in his actions. It seems he has started hating all his friends, especially those with whom he is connected through facebook.” Dr. Mark Mehta, a psychologist treating Chanchal said.

Chanchal’s family members inform that he used to be very regular and addicted to facebook, reading and replying to ‘feeds’ and ‘updates’ of all his friends, apart from updating his own profile daily. He had more than a thousand friends and was happy to have been voted ‘the coolest person’ by his friends. He seemed to be happy.

“He was very sociable. He’d feed the virtual pets of his friends join their mafia to rob enemies. There was virtually no request he had declined. He’d respond to all the queries by his friends and suggest them the color of the collar they should buy for their brown Chihuahua. He’d poke friends back and ask how they spilled water on their dining table or console them after reading that they had lost their blue hanky in a crowded bus. I don’t know what happened a couple of days back.” Chanchal’s younger brother Gambhir wondered.

Chanchal’s friends too are surprised and shocked over his condition and they have multiple theories to explain this unfortunate incident. Many believe that Chanchal could not digest his friendship request being declined by Priyanka Chopra, while others think that he was shocked at his position being slipped to second number in the ‘coolest person contest’ on facebook. Friends have been discussing Chanchal’s condition on facebook since the last two days as they still try to find out the reason why Chanchal had to go through all this.

“I guess the last nail in his coffin was driven by his ex-girlfriend, who uploaded all her honeymoon pictures on facebook and published them with naughty captions. She even wrote a rather hot note on her marriage and honeymoon experience and tagged Chanchal in her note. I really hate that bi*ch and pray Chanchal recovers soon.” one of the friends of Chanchal wrote it in his facebook note.

Man showing symptoms of facebook fatigue

But Doctors believe that Chanchal has been a victim of a latest diseased diagnosed as ‘facebook fatigue’. The disease grips people when they struggle to grapple with too much of information and activity that happens around them on facebook. Doctors warn that a person slowly goes into hibernation and then coma if he fails to deal with the fatigue. No cure yet has been found but experts advise some precautions.

“Don’t accept arbitrary requests, whether to join an application or to make new friends. Use your news feed settings to control the level of information you want to receive on your homepage, and if needed, hide or block news feeds from particular sources. Don’t feel bad about it, you are not disrespecting your friends by doing so, rather you are saving your friendship and of course your mental and physical health.” Dr. Justin Jokerberg, a facebook expert gave some tips.

Mafia Wars player surrenders before police, sent for rehabilitation

Pagal Patrakar — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 19:38:38 +0000

Games we play

Mumbai. Sixteen years old Sachin Gawli, a level 501 player of Mafia Wars with a family size of seven, surrendered in Borivali police station today. Sachin had been playing Mafia Wars for more than nine months and had amassed huge cash and property by robbing other mafias and visiting Cuba. Sachin also possessed a huge cache of weapons and vehicles, which the police are trying to recover, but his energy level had dropped alarmingly, the most likely reason he decided to surrender.

“He came to the police station very dejected this morning and looked battered. We thought he had been assaulted by some local bhai but we were shocked when he confessed that he was a member of mafia and wanted to surrender! He promised to hand over all his guns, property, cash, etc. to the government but wanted a safe passage to hospital to get his energy back. We couldn’t understand what was happening but told him that we agreed to his demands.” Zinga Lala, the local police inspector told Faking News.

The local police officials rang up the top bosses in Mumbai Crime Branch to inform them about Sachin Gawli’s surrender, who later visited Borivali police station to interrogate Sachin. Sachin handed over his laptop to the police officials and started crying profusely for mercy. Police could get the hang of the whole situation only after the thirteen years old Bunty, son of Mumbai Police Commissioner, happened to visit the local Police station.

“Bunty was getting restless outside in his daddy’s police car as he was getting late for his kung-fu-cum-salsa classes. He barged into the police station to ask his dad how much more time he would take. When he heard the whole story he was hyper excited and embraced Sachin Gawli, pleading him to allow an entry to his mafia family. We were all very shocked but later on Bunty explained the situation to us.” Zinga Lala recounted the turn of events.

Mumbai Police have confiscated the laptop of Sachin, which couldn’t boot due to some virus attack, and are now trying to recover the data, such as Sachin’s weapons and vehicles, from the hard disk. But Sachin told them that all his property and weapons were stored on a central server and only The Godfather could release them. Sachin again started crying and pleaded that he shouldn’t be punished for having contact with The Godfather.

Sachin was reassured by Police officials that he won’t be punished for anything, and they would appeal to the government to pardon his crimes like possession of weapons and his multiple illegal travels to Cuba. Sachin wanted a written assurance, to which the police agreed keeping in mind the delicate nature of the case.

Sachin was sent to a juvenile remand home for rehabilitation after he got the letter of assurance. He is reportedly happy with today’s turn of events and hopes to start a new life now. Sachin agrees that he made a mistake.

“I am not going to commit the same mistakes again in my life. I’d keep my family size smaller this time and would never allow an energy pack to go waste. I’d also add Bunty as a friend on facebook because his family members could be of help. Man, his dad is in police, can you believe it! God, I’m so thankful that I took the right decisions in my life, now I’d kick the asses of other mafias!” Sachin told Faking News as he was being taken away to remand home.