Do you have one of those presentations coming up for which you have less than a day left to create the content? Are you running out of ideas and time? Worry not, rescue is here.

Online Service SlideShare.net is the place to go to. It’s a site where people share PowerPoint presentations for free. You can go there and search for your idea and choose from the many presentations that show up. You can then view them online or download them to your desktop.

For instance, take a look at the results when I searched for “blogging”.

And these are just 6 out of over 8000 results that were returned. I think that is the only problem this site has: too many results. But the content that turns up is fairly good.

This site can serve as a good point to begin researching your idea as well. You can get a lot of markers and pointers just by looking at what other people have to say about the topic you are researching.

There are many features available:

• You can embed slide shows in your blog.
• Share slide shows publicly or privately.
• You can have synched commentary for your presentation.
• Download the PowerPoint or PDF file.
• Join interest groups.

There is also the concept of a Slidespace, which is essentially like a social networking home page. Here’s the Slidespace of the company’s CEO: Rashmi.

Of course, you must remember to give something back. Go ahead and upload any presentations that you can share.

The Url for the mobile site is http://m.orkut.com. Here’s a look at the home page once you log in.

As you can see, the home page shows the Scraps that you have. It also shows the scraps that are in a different language (though I suspect that is a browser function more than anything).

Further features that you can access include Friend Updates, Friend’s list, and also your profile page.

Looks like you don’t need to be sitting in front of a computer to get updates from your friends anymore.

I tool these snap shots from an emulator for Opera Mini.

Kunal has written this simple plugin for Windows Live Messenger which does one thing and does it well. It lets you update your status from anywhere, because this plugin simply displays your latest tweet. And since you can tweet from almost anywhere, by extension you can update your status from anywhere.

I don’t use Live Messenger too much, so I can’t comment on how useful this has been for me, but if it has lit up anyone’s lives, please leave comments.

Of course, like I said, the service is in Beta.

Here’s an overview of my experience with the service so far (the way it is right now, it’s got nowhere to go but up… so it should improve):

• There were no players online in any of the games I tried to play (sudoku, video poker, and bingo). I guess, that will change, but I wish that they would put some dummy players till the site takes off.
• The site keeps losing my session. I had to login at least 20 times in 10 minutes. Almost every time I clicked on one of the links on the left hand navigation bar, it would ask me to login again.
• The navigation is broken. I tried playing Sudoku by clicking on the link on the left navigation bar. That shows the game description page with a “Play Now” button on it. If you click that button, it takes you to the MyTopia home screen and asks you to login (again). The only way to start it is through the Club House which you can access from the MyTopia home screen.
• Finally, they made me create an avatar when I signed up. The avatar that showed after I logged in was completely different from the one I created and saved.

Of course, there are some good things as well. There is no left navigation bar if you access the app from Facebook. The UI is nice and the screens look good for the games (see screen shots below). Hopefully, this site will become much more interesting as time goes on.

Screen shots (click images to see larger versions):

The Home Screen – I got tired of looking at the “Click to Login” message again and again.

Video Poker - I could play finally because there was 1 person online.