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I use Twitter a lot. Unfortunately, almost all of my real life friends are only on Orkut. Most of them haven’t even heard of Twitter. That’s how I came up with the idea of creating something like Twitkut.

I update frequently on Twitter. So, I thought how cool will it be if somehow all my Orkut friends can also read them from Orkut itself. That will mean they will not have to register on Twitter to follow me and get updates.

Twitkut displays your recent tweets on your Orkut profile page. Besides, it also shows you which all of your friends are using Twitkut so that you can follow them. It also allows you to post updates to your twitter account from within Orkut using OAuth.
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Update: PollBol is currently down due to server deployment issues. Take a look at the screenshots instead.

PollBol is an exciting web app that adds a twist to conventional polling by adding an additional social aspect to it. After making FriendComparé, which was a mashup making use of the Last.fm API, I wanted to make a more independent app that maintained its own data.

Even so, I fully support the idea of making use other apps’ APIs. It makes it easier for the users to adopt since it builds on the functionality of the more popular app. And so, FriendComparé has had comparatively far more visitors as compared to PollBol due to the popularity of Last.fm.

With PollBol, I had to think of a development platform that would allow me to complete the project within my summer vacations. And what better for agile development than Ruby On Rails. It was exciting to use Rails as it divides the entire project into three parts: Models, Views and Controllers. And this makes it easier to plan on the various modules of the project.

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I just felt like writing today on a hot Sunday evening. A lot has happened over this week and it has proven to be a pretty hectic one for me. read more…

Yes, it is called Friendcomparé. To describe it simply, it basically lets you compare your musical tastes with your last.fm friends and neighbors.  You just enter your last.fm username and it brings up a list of your friends and neighbors with whom you can compare. Once you choose to compare, it shows you the top tracks, artists, albums, tags, friends as well as recently played tracks that are common between both the users.

Though it isn’t anything huge, I am happy with it. It took some effort, probably more in the design part than in the development part, to get it somewhat pleasing to the eyes and yes, functional. But it was a fun and learning experience. Along the way, Sameer gave me some brilliant ideas and criticism, for which I am grateful to him. Also, a couple of people at my favorite IRC channal, #think-digit, who gave me criticism and a third-person point of view, and also appreciation

As I went on coding and adding new little features, I learnt a lot on creating CSS layouts and programming with PHP. I learnt a lot more CSS tricks which are definitely going to help me out in my next webdesign project . And while coding with PHP, I eventually got hints about its object oriented nature and that how it could make expanding the application a very simple task. In future, I would probably like to make use of AJAX to make it a little more web 2.0

I have this idea of probably building a facebook or orkut application for it, will it be useful? You can let me know in the comments.

Here are a few screenshots:

Links:
Build.last.fm: http://build.last.fm/item/433
Shegeeks.net review: http://shegeeks.net/compare-your-lastfm-music-with-friendcompare/
ProgrammableWeb: http://www.programmableweb.com/mashup/friendcompare/
Mashup Awards: http://mashupawards.com/friendcompare/