Remember international pop artists, Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga who started a storm on the internet via social media sites like YouTube and Facebook. ‘Baby’ singer, Justin Bieber and ‘Born This Way’ hitmaker Lady Gaga carved their names in history books of YouTube with, 1,991,153,710 and 1,854,608,268 views on their respective channels on the video sharing site.

However recently, a rage stemmed online initially from India and then the world in the form of  Santhosh Pandit, a south-Indian based filmmaker and actor.

His debut project named ‘Krishnanum Radhayum’, which was damned by trade pandits, has become an online phenomenon as well as 8 songs from the film that have above 15 lakh hits with thousands of hits per day. A song called ‘Rathri Shubrathri’ was a viral hit on YouTube with over 550,000 views alone!  On the other hand, Pandit is suddenly become one of the top words searched for on YouTube. Most websites online have resorted to uploading videos of the actor-filmmaker as well as songs from his film.

According to statistics by Google on 12th November 2011, Santhosh Pandit ranked at No. 2 on Google Trends, second only to social networking giant, Facebook. They further state that Google Chrome and YouTube downloads do not stand anywhere near the Malayalam actor. India ranks as only the 5th country to search for Santhosh Pandit as Malayalees residing overseas seem to hold him high on their searches. Qatar ranks first on list of countries searching ofr Santhosh Pandit followed by Bahrain, U.A.E and Kuwait.

This only goes to show the power of social media and how instrumental a role it plays to elevate brands and personalities on a global scale today. The hype that surrounds the film is received not by promotional campaigns but by immense social media activity.

Krishnanum Radhayum released on 21st October 2011, just 5 days prior to one the biggest releases in Bollywood this year, Shah Rukh Khan-starrer, Ra.One.

With the current hype generated and fame received by Krishnanum Radhayum, Pandit has already began work on his next Mollywood project titled ‘Jithu Bhai Enna Chocolate Bhai’ with their songs already hitting YouTube.

Let’s not rule out the future possibility of the most video views on YouTube for a personality to be held by Santhosh Pandit.

Yesterday, the online vigilante group crashed a large number of child pornography websites and even sent out a warning to many of them to stop their nefarious activities.

This is the first time Anonymous has gone ahead with such an act. Usually, this group of experts is known for targeting renowned corporations and government organizations.

The hacktivist group shut down a server known as Freedom Hosting, which contained 40 different child porn websites. Out of these, a website named Lolita City contained close to 100 GB of data.

Anonymous did not stop there! They even went on to post the names of  1,589 people who visited the website. The list was accompanied with a statement from the group which read,

“If the FBI, Interpol, or other law enforcement agency should happen to come across this list, please use it to investigate and bring justice to the people listed here”

After the websites were hacked, the hacktivist group sent out a strong warning to the Child pornography industry by putting up the following statement online,

“Our demands are simple. Remove all child pornography content from your servers. Refuse to provide hosting services to any website dealing with child pornography. This statement is not just aimed at Freedom Hosting, but everyone on the Internet. It does not matter who you are, if we find you to be hosting, promoting, or supporting child pornography, you will become a target.”

Many people around the world were extremely supportive of the action taken by Anonymous on the microblogging website Twitter. But there were a few people who questioned the decision as well.

Graham Cluley, a security expert at Sophos, an online security management firm said,

“Their intentions may have been good, but take-downs of illegal Web sites and sharing networks should be done by the authorities, not internet vigilantes. When ‘amateurs’ attack there is always the risk that they are compromising an existing investigation, preventing the police from gathering the necessary evidence they require for a successful prosecution, or making it difficult to argue that evidence has not been corrupted by hackers.”

Recently, the hacker group made themselves popular when they declared that they would shut down  the popular social network Facebook. After the announcement the group had to face a lot of criticism from many people.

With their latest initiative, it seems like the group would have earned some amount of goodwill from the online community. Let’s be patient to see what plan is devised behind that mask.

This time, Facebook got into trouble when many users claimed that the network automatically sends out friend requests to strangers without their consent. The friend requests usually go to people who are friends of friends.

The requests even go to the users who are are part of a network that users have joined. This can be a major privacy issue for many users.

Facebook has not been able to give a concrete explanation about this occurrence but they did go on to confirm that the automatic adding of friends is not a Facebook approved or developed feature.

Many social media experts believe that spurious Facebook applications are the reason for the bug. The applications are easy to create and can easily place a bug on your account if users provide the apps with their private data.

Nik Cubrilovic, a technology blogger, told the Herald in an interview that many users do not realize when they are giving away private data and spammers make loads of money ‘phising’ for information.

“Verified email addresses sell for 20c to one dollar each so if they are able to extract 100,000 verified email addresses from Facebook that is probably worth upwards of 20,000 dollars to spammers” ,

he said.

With Facebook being slammed for Online security this new bug is sure to cause many users to not ‘Like’ the social network till they set things right.

When Google+ started, it created raves around the Internet. But after the initial novelty died down, many people moved on from the network due to a lack of interest.

Initially, Google+ was open only by invitation. As curiosity tends to lead you on, many users eagerly joined the social network. But when the website did open up to the public, its user base declined significantly.

Many industry experts have said that Google+ is about to come to a stand still as there is hardly any activity on the website by users. Popular features like +1 are rarely used anymore.

But today, just under a week before its release; Shah Rukh Khan went to promote his upcoming mega-budget film Ra.One using Google + Hangouts. As the word spread about SRK going live on Google+, many users headed back to their accounts and were interacting with the actor on his page.

Hangouts is an innovative feature by Google+ which lets users have a web conferencing experience with their friends. The Hangout by Shah Rukh Khan that started at 3 P.M. IST today was filled to capacity from the very beginning. Many users complained that they could not access the page because of over capacity issues.

India is one of Google’s biggest markets with over 86 million active Internet users. If Google+ manages to keep the country’s users interested in their network, it could easily help them sustain themselves in the market for a long time to come.

Though other social networks have used celebrities to promote themselves in the past, the move by Google+ takes the promotion to a more personal level.

Looking at the success Google+ received with today’s event, many competitors will soon be turning their heads towards bringing in celebrities to promote their own websites, thus making the war of the social networks more intense than ever.

Will Google+ witness a subsequent rise in its user base with this new introduction? We’ll have to wait and watch.

Ra.One releases worldwide in theatres on 26th October and stars Shah Rukh Khan, Kareena Kapoor and Arjun Rampal.

The website lets users post messages, follow other users and share links on their network. The interface of the whole network is similar to Twitter in many ways.

Some of the most striking similarities between Twitter and ZaraBol are the use of Hashtags, following people and a 140 character limit for posting messages. Other similar features include ‘Sab Ko bol‘, which lets users broadcast other’s messages similar to ‘retweeting’ on Twitter.

The only slight difference that ZaraBol offers is a feature that lets users follow trending topics. Another feature on the website lets users divide messages into streams. Users can either view messages from everyone using the ‘All’ tab, or view messages posted by them and the people they follow via the ‘Me+I Follow’ tab.

This is not the first venture of Rediff into the microblog market. Earlier, they had acquired Vakow.com, a mobile based social platform. But the merger was of no use for Rediff and they had to move on.

Rediff has been staggering from quite a while and this new move might help direct slight amount of traffic on their website. But looking at the mostly negative comments on the portal, ZaraBol will have to enhance their features to maintain user interest.

These are the list of 12 apps that are to be included are as follows -

1. SIMS 3 – Electronic Arts

2. Bejeweled – Electronic Arts

3. N.O.V.A. – Gameloft

4. Texas Hold’em Poker 2 – Gameloft

5. Bubble Bash 2 – Gameloft

6. Photo Editor Ultimate – Ice Cold Apps

7. DriveSafe.ly Pro – iSpeech.org

8. iSpeech Translator Pro – iSpeech.org

9. Drive Safe.ly Enterprise – iSpeech.org

10. Nobex Radio™ Premium – Nobex

11. Shazam Encore – Shazam

12. Vlingo Plus: Virtual Assistant – Vlingo

The company has also gone further to claim that more apps are in the running for a further date. The estimated value of all the 12 apps together is a total of $100.

Free technical support will be available for enterprise customers for one month whereas a one month extension on contract will be added for current customers. For those who do not avail of a technical support contract, RIM will offer a one month trial for this particular service.

The BlackBerry power failure which hit last week was considered to be one of the most devastating outages in the history of the brand as millions of BlackBerry users around the world were denied access to applications and e-mail services.

On one side, a gesture such as this is considered very noble of the company. But the more important  question that arises is, “Is such a gesture a justification to what BB users had to endure in the past week?”

Two weeks prior to the debut of Grimm on NBC, the first episode will be available on Twitter to all  followers of the show.

Direct tweets along with access information will be delivered to users starting this Friday in order to preview the premiere episode of the series on October 28th (9 p.m. EDT).

The episode will also be screened in 10 cities across the nation from Tuesday by NBC. Chicago, Washington, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Denver, Seattle, Phoenix and Minneapolis are in the runnings for the show.

According to NBC Entertainment Marketing President, Len Fogge, this will be an entirely new and unique approach that compliments the nature of Grimm series.

Grimm is a crime drama series that includes supernatural tones that is inspired by the classic failry tales of Grimm Brothers.

The star cast includes David Giuntoli in the lead and others like Russell Hornsby, Bitsie Tulloch, Sasha Roiz and Reggie Lee.

The Grimm series will also be promoted by NBC via a 20-min preview on the channel’s official website, iTunes and Hulu.

You can also follow the handle of Grimm on Twitter.

Apple’s revolutionary tablet, the iPad has gained a lot of popularity around the world with many brands creating applications for the App Store. Banking on its potential as an efficient Internet browsing tool, Facebook seems to have created an official application for the iPad.

The application has been fine tuned to meet the needs of the iPad. The app had been created a couple of months back and was to be launched during the f8 Developers Conference held last month. But due to ongoing talks with Apple, the launch had to be delayed.

Before this, third party developers had created many independent Facebook applications for the iPad, but this is the first time an official app is made official.

Using the Facebook application, iPad users can browse through their profile. The photo albums have been upgraded and the swipe function can be used to browse through the photos. The app even supports chat functionality and lets users view HD quality video.

Now here is the flipside to this story.

Almost within a day of the launch, many users experienced and voiced their problems with the application. Due to bugs on the software, the application crashed the moment users opened it. Software developer Daniel Pasco had a post on Twitter saying,

‘Downloaded the new Facebook app for my iPad and I have to say, the new crash-on-launch feature is amazing’

A Facebook spokesperson said that all products were tested thoroughly before they were launched. But he did say that some unexpected bugs in the app could appear.

Despite some negative reviews, the application has become a favorite among many iPad users. The Facebook application is available free of cost and can be downloaded from the iTunes store.

Recently, there were reports that suggested that significant amounts of Internet traffic is generated from tablet computers. With the new Facebook application, it can be expected that Internet traffic will rise up even further.

In the recent past, Twitter has been very insecure about the fact that the Technology bubble might just burst crushing their future aspirations. The network has been putting a lot of pressure on it’s employees to increase their profits at least till the company remains popular.

Currently, Twitter is valued at £5 billion, but many analysts have their doubts about the valuation. The main reason for the mistrust is the fact that the social network has not been able to define its core USP. This can prove to be very doubtful for its future share prices.

According to Twitter co-founder Evan Williams,

“We’re a fraction of the way into creating the value and growing the size of the service we know it can be. It’s precarious, and it’s always precarious when you’re in that position.”

Twitter developers have been disappointed from the past couple of months because of the lack of new additions to the portal. Other competitors like Facebook and Google + have come up with radical changes on their platforms since the past couple of days.

Apart from this, the lack of a strong user base has been a matter of worry for Twitter. Though they have 100 million users, the number seems insignificant when compared to Facebook’s 750 million users. Even the 30 million users of Google + can cause a problem for Twitter in the future.

With the Internet market being in a volatile situation, Twitter’s lack of upgrades on its network may just make their worst nightmare become a reality.

Hazare said that the blog will let people know about his views and ideas instantly which will motivate them to join the cause.

In order to make the blog a more open environment for everyone, content is posted in multiple languages. Apart from English, posts can be read in Hindi and Marathi as well. Hazare even plans to take the blog global by reaching out to his admirers in Germany and France.

The content on the blog will be managed by Anna’s loyalists Vijay Kuvalekar and Raju Parulekar. But Hazare did go on to say that all the ideas and views on the blog will be his own.The portal will be launched on the popular blog hosting platform - WordPress.

During the recent Anti Corruption protests, supporters of Anna Hazare had made extensive use of Social Networks like Facebook and Twitter.

Realizing the potential of Social Media, Anna will soon  be active on the websites. By doing this, he can enhance the interaction with his supporters. Awareness campaigns will also be carried out on various social networks.

The new move will also help Hazare tap the Indian youth who are extremely active on social sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

Today, Hazare put up a Blog Post which read:

“My Sisters and Brothers,It is after a long time that I am directly communicating with you. Henceforth, it is from this blog that I will be constantly in touch with you.”

In the post, he also went on to thank Myanmar activist and Nobel Prize winner Aung San Sui Ki and a popular news channel belonging to the Times Group for their support during his campaign.

On it’s first day itself, the blog - Anna Hazare Says gained massive popularity with many fans discussing the websites and sharing posts on Facebook and Twitter.

With the new move, Hazare can expect to get a lot of support from Netizens in India and abroad.