Happy Diwali!

This is the message I saw when I logged into orkut today :). This inadvertently brought a smile on my face.

The message appears in the header on the top where you have the site nav and is fairly ignorable. Apparently, the message also has some action associated with it which I was unable to test on the slow GPRS connection on my iPhone :(.

Things like these mean a lot to tech nerds like me. It shows that the big giants are paying attention to the vast traffic that hits their servers from India. India (read Indians) is undoubtedly a major consumer of web services trolling around the web. And its high time that the service providers support customization for India. Google started with support for Hindi across all its services and the state of the art Google indic translator revolutionized the way people type in Hindi. Yahoo followed with Yahoo India maps (http://in.maps.yahoo.com -copy & paste as there is no insert hyper link feature in WordPress’ iPhone version).

Now Google is gearing up with Android which I am sure will support i18n. There are rumors for an Indian version of Amazon as well!

This will bring a new paradigm in Internet awareness in India. I can foresee more and more homes signing up for broadband connections.

With customized content for the most dynamic market in the world, the opportunities are endless.

A very Happy Diwali to all of you !

[UPDATE] Clicking on the “Happy Diwali” link on the top changes the CSS! The specially designed CSS for Diwali looks great on orkut ! Thank you Google !