Funny thing, its posted on Youtube, which is owned by Google

Do you have an old mobile phone, like the Nokia 1100, that has no browser and can do little more than make phone calls? Or are you stuck in some remote place where there’s no Internet or no other form of data (EGDE/GPRS/3G) connectivity is available?

Not a problem. You can still use your Facebook account in India by dialing *325# (or *fbk#) from your mobile phone – this service requires no data plan or Internet and it will even work on phones of the Stone Age. Here’s a quick tour:

Use Facebook without the Data Plan

Facebook India has partnered with Fonetwish to bring Facebook on every mobile phone without requiring any apps or even the Internet.

You dial the *325# number, then enter your Facebook username and password and you are in. You can then send number based commands to access various features of Facebook, chat with friends who are online, add new people to your friends list, and more.

I played with the service for some time and it was a nice experience overall. If there were a Unix-like shell interface for Facebook, it would be much similar. Fonetwish says that this service is currently available for Airtel, Aircel, Idea and Tata Docomo users in India.

It may be too much work to read your Facebook news feed stories one by one but this is a good option to quickly update your Facebook status or for chatting with friends who are online. The price is reasonable too – you just have pay a subscription fee of 1.00 per day for unlimited usage.

via Use Facebook on your Mobile Without Internet or a Data Plan.

Google today released a new extension for Google Chrome that will help you quickly access your AdSense earning reports without leaving the page you are currently reading.

Google AdSense Publisher Toolbar for Chrome

The extension, known as the AdSense Publisher Toolbar, offers a summary of your AdSense earnings for the current day, the previous day, the current month and the previous month. In addition to daily earnings data, it also show revenue data for top channels that you have created in your AdSense account.

There’s an interesting “lifetime revenue” section in the report that shows your total AdSense earnings from the day your account was approved for AdSense.

Once you install the extension, it connects to your Google AdSense account using OAuth and then uses AdSense APIs to fetch your earnings data. You need to authorize only once and thus, if you enjoy checking your AdSense report every hour, this extension could save you plenty of time.

I have multiple Google Accounts (for security reasons) and my AdSense account uses an email address that is different from my primary Gmail address. Earlier, I had to log out of Gmail to check my AdSense reports but with the AdSense Publisher Toolbar now available, I can get my basic earnings data without having to switch accounts.

On a different note, I have no idea why the Google team is calling this extensions the AdSense Publisher Toolbar when it only adds a button near your Chrome address bar and there are no toolbars anywhere. You click the AdSense button and your earnings report are almost instantly display in an overlay.

And if you activate the AdSense extension while you are on your website (that is running AdSense ads), you can turn on the “site overlay” mode and it will display a quick summary of each ad unit’s earnings that are available on that page. Channel names are confusing, especially when you have tons of them, so this visual mode will come very handy.

via The Official Google AdSense Toolbar for Chrome is Available.

via NASA Open Sources Aircraft Design Software – Slashdot.

OpenVSP
OpenVSP is a parametric aircraft geometry tool. OpenVSP allows the user to create a 3D model of an aircraft defined by common engineering parameters. This model can be processed into formats suitable for engineering analysis.

The predecessors to OpenVSP have been developed by J.R. Gloudemans and others for NASA since the early 1990′s. On January 10 2012, OpenVSP was released as an open source project under the NASA Open Source Agreement (NOSA) version 1.3.

We are still in the process of setting up all of the things which allow an open source project to work. In the meantime, get OpenVSP for yourself from the links below.

The move is being widely condemned in the press as a violation of privacy but if Facebook would do this right, it could be a huge win for everyone. Facebook could be the biggest, most dynamic census of human opinion and interaction in history. Unfortunately, failure to talk prominently about privacy protections, failure to make this opt-in (or even opt out!) and the inclusion of private messages are all things that put at risk any remaining shreds of trust in Facebook that could have served as the foundation of a new era of social self-awareness.

via Why Facebook’s Data Sharing Matters.

via Failbook: Like This Post – EPIC FAIL Funny Videos and Epic Fail Funny Pictures.

But with its shared items feed shut down, I started to look for other options. My first worry was to import the existing shared items feed back to jeetu.co.in, and loose my 2-3 years of posts.

That’s when I found Seth Battis’ script to convert the dump of all shared items that Google Reader gave me into a wordpress format RSS feed, which could then be imported into my wordpress blog. With a little tweaking, I was successfully able to import all my posts to this blog!

After importing, the oldest post is from December 31 2007 on 3 Smart Things About Sleeping Late, and the latest one was a Little Johnny joke.

Let me know what you think!

Thanks  Seth Battis!

Posted at Jokes – jokes4all.net!

Teacher: “I told you to write this poem out 10 times to improve your handwriting and you’ve only done it 7 times?”

Little Johnny: “Looks like my counting isn’t too good either!”

Posted at TechCrunch

by Rip Empson

Today at The Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, Founder of Khan Academy, Salman Khan, took the stage to share a few quick stats on the growth of his online video education platform. For those unfamiliar, Khan Academy is, as John Batelle noted this afternoon, one of Bill Gates’ favorite educators.

It also happens to be one of mine, but I thought you’d probably resonate a bit more with Bill Gates. But Khan Academy is the institution of Salman Khan, who brought the idea of educating young people, self-starters, people who learn at their own pace — online. “Educational”-type YouTube videos have now been around for years, but Khan Academy’s repository is pretty ridiculous. The educational startup now counts over 2,600 videos in its library, with sessions or classes on everything from arithmetic to physics, including 211 practice exercises, to let students watch videos and learn at their own pace.

While Khan is a not-for-profit organization, the Academy has received donations from The Gates Foundation and also won Google’s “Project 10^100″. With the $2 million+ from Google and Gates in pocket, Khan told the crowd at Web 2.0 today that the academy is seeing 39 million pageviews and 3.5 million unique users per month. That 3.5 million unique users is up 309 percent year-over-year.

It looks like all the publicity and traction Khan Academy has been getting of late is really starting to pay off, which is great to see.