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Info Edge India Ltd, the company which owns job site Naukri.com, has finally launched a professional networking site – Brijj.com (The name is a variation of “Bridge” – as in connecting between two people). Naukri’s new launch comes at a time when professional networking sites like LinkedIn have started gaining a good number of users in India, and it has also been used to generate jobs and business leads. Business Networking is taking huge leap in India recently and it is obivious that leading job portals do not want to loose their customers.

The fear is that classic job site like Naukri may become redundant over time since potential candidates will get the job leads through a networking site or other platforms. So Naukri had to move into the networking space at least to plug that gap.  A big challenge for Naukri will be to build the user base. Will it take the capital intensive, high octane advertising campaign to garner subscribers, or will it free float it and expect to get users on its own? Probably a few free ipods and iphones can get the initial traction. But will that be a valuable user base? Finally, all depends on what features the site provides (I am yet to take a test drive) and the branding. It’s also not clear what will be the target user base.

LinkedIn currently enjoys a mixed userbase of junior-middle-senior tech and finance pros. Unlikely they will shift to a new networking site. A good idea may be to get new users who haven’t tried LinkedIn yet. Brijj as of now, looks just an add on to the existing platform of Naukri, where they brought up the concept of Recommendation and invitation.

Also, techTribe, a networking site for tech professionals which recently got funded by Canaan Partners, has converted itself into a career networking website. Let us see further, how many people will come up with their own Social Networking portals.

A new Internet worm capable of stealing bank details and other personal data from users is circulating via Orkut, Google Inc.’s social networking service, a computer security company warned on Monday.

Instant-messaging service provider FaceTime Communications said its software security lab had detected the spread of the electronic virus, the third such threat to disseminate itself via messages posted on Orkut users personal Web pages.

Google’s service, while available globally, is wildly popular among Brazilians which make up the bulk of its users.

The malicious program, dubbed by FaceTime as “MW.Orc,” works its way onto users’ personal computers when they click on infected links on Orkut scrapbook pages. The link is followed by a message in Portuguese that entices the user to click.

Once the link is activated, a file is uploaded to the PC, according to a description of how the worm works contained in a statement by the Foster City, California-based company.

When infected Orkut users using Microsoft Corp.’s widely used Windows XP operating system to find personal files on their PCs through their “My Computer” icon, that triggers an e-mail back to the creator of MW.Orc creator filled with personal information stored on the PC, FaceTime said.

The new threat to Orkut follows an earlier worm, Banker-BWD, which was uncovered by Sophos, an anti-virus company.

That malicious software also disseminated itself through Orkut’s scrapbook pages, but automatically transferred the victims to fake Web pages of banks in order to entice the users to enter personal data that can then be stolen by the hackers.

In recent days, Orkut has published an alert on scrapbook pages, which warns users to be careful when opening links sent by unknown users of Orkut and to avoid clicking on links to pages outside of Orkut’s own domain.

Separately, Google told Brazilian authorities in May that it would shut down community pages created by Orkut users that promote violence, terror or the sexual abuse of children

Source : Yahoo India News