Author: Saroj Kunnakkat, an avid blogger from New York.

I was born in the United States to parents who were themselves born in India. I don’t think I really knew what homosexuality was until I was perhaps in my early teens. It was a topic that my parents kept under wraps, and if even a whiff of it were to arise, they quickly stifled it, not allowing such talk to fall on my ears.

It wasn’t so much that they hated gay people—both have friends who identify somewhere along the LGBT spectrum—but they were probably more struck by how unfamiliar it seemed. Indians who are gay never are as open in public as those in other societies, so it was perhaps the degree of openness they are allowed in American society that struck them as unusual and perhaps even negative.

I ended up learning about homosexuality as some of my friends started to understand their sexual identities, some of them coming out as gay, bisexual, or lesbian. It never struck me as odd, and it never struck me as deviant. I realized that, in that regard, I was far removed from the views of my parents—who still held…

When Yahoo acquired MyBlogLog last year, I was wondering if Google would acquire a similar company to add some cool Web 2.0-social networking gadgets to its portfolio. Finally, Google has come up with its newest socializing service called Google Friend Connect, that may enable a website to provide ’social features’, and to increase its traffic (theoretically or practically!) by attracting more visitors.

The set up is fairly simple, and as a first step, we just need to sign-in using your Google ID, and click on ’set up a new site’. The next step requires you to upload two html files to the root folder of your website, and obviously you have to use an FTP client like FileZilla or CuteFTP.

Once uploaded, the subsequent steps verify and take you to the ‘Member Gadgets’ page where you specify the dimensions, generate code and add the same to your website’s sidebar, or wherever you want that to be displayed.

Once done, the widget looks like this..