Everyone is in the holiday mood…. not to mention all the committed Christmas dinners and lunches.  Microsoft wants you to make your windows 7 also get into a holiday mood by releasing new themes.

Microsoft has released not one, not two but four new themes for Windows 7.

If you’re interested, visit http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows/downloads/personalize to download the themes free of cost.

Obviously the themes are the Christmas and winter themes, with one of them devoted specifically to the holiday today. Happy Holidays!!

Finding it hard to Keep track of gifts this Christmas\ holiday season? I know, I feel the same too… If you haven’t done all of your holiday shopping or deliveries yet, check out the holiday gift shopping list template for Google Docs. You can reference the list on the go from your mobile phone and update it from any computer too.

Grab and apply the template to your document here

Last week Google introduced its own short URL Goo.gl and now YouTube follows and has its own short URL – YOUTU.BE too. YouTube has used a Belgian domain, Youtu.be. These short URL’s are for YouTube videos and be used in conjunction with the Auto Share function and also all videos on the website through these short URL’s reachable. You cannot use short URL’s for other websites as possible with the Google.

In a blog post announcing the new feature, YouTube writes that the short URL will be used exclusively for YouTube videos (which mean it isn’t as useful to spammers for misdirection). The post also notes that because all youtu.be shortlinks include the YouTube video ID, developers can use that information to surface thumbnails and track how a video is spreading.

Unfortunately, embedding a video ID has a downside: they’re relatively long. Whereas your typical bit.ly link weighs in at around 20 characters, a youtu.be link comes out to 27 characters, primarily because YouTube IDs are a beefy 11 characters long. That may not sound like much, but those extra 7 characters represent 5% of your maximum tweet length. Hopefully the features that video IDs enable for developers will outweigh that cost.

Any videos shared through YouTube’s autosharing features to Facebook, Twitter, and Google Reader will take advantage of the new short URLs automatically.

Techcrunch also reported that the youtube URL’s are Still Pretty Long :). And Mashable says Youtube needs its own Short URL Coz they just need one…. :D

You can also create the link yourself in this format:

To use youtu.be manually, simply take a URL like http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdeioVndUhs and replace the “http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=” with “http://youtu.be/” to get: http://youtu.be/FdeioVndUhs Plug that shorter URL into the browser and you’ll see it redirects to that video.

Aamir Khan, marketing genius is at work again, one can expect the craziest ways of promoting a film. This time the producers of 3 Idiots have struck a deal with online video sharing and broadcasting portal YouTube for an undisclosed sum.

This legal downloading of films is aimed at people who are unable to go to the cinema. Known that this is the first time an entire movie can be legally downloaded from YouTube, of course it was already possible to download camera prints of the movie as a workaround, this is the first time a HQ DVD was available for download.

Bollywood producer Vinod Chopra has announced:

“The movie will be released on YouTube after eight to ten weeks,” The deal with YouTube will allow viewers to download the entire movie from the Web at a fixed price. “We haven’t decided on the pricing points yet, but we hope this will stop illegal download and video sharing,”

According to a recent report released by Motion Picture Association of America, India ranks eight among countries with the highest incidence of online piracy. I’m sure the only way to maximize revenues is to have multiple launch platform and youtube (the worlds largest and popular video service) is one of them.. :) .

The film download is not free, there is a certain amount paid before the movie can be downloaded (pay-per-download). How much should be paid is not known yet. It is also not known how big the download will be and whether there are other restrictions. Stay tuned :).

Google announced today the launch of the beta portal for Google Chrome extensions. Developers have already submitted some addons in recent weeks. The first extensions are only available for Windows and Linux, but Mac is coming soon. The gallery is currently taking over 300 extensions, some of Google itself,

What Google forgot to mention in its announcement about extensions is that they don’t work with the current stable version of Chrome. You’ll need to download a Chrome beta in order to get them to work.

Popular ones include Chromed Bird, a Twitter feed extension, Shareaholic, Torrent Downloader, and the Google Mail Checker. I tried out,Twitter feed extension and Torrent Downloader.

There are actually two steps:
– First you download the extension, then you click the Install button that automatically appears after the download is complete.

Once that is done, the extension immediately appears in the Chrome browser, right next to the address bar. Uninstalling is just as easy. There’s an Extension menu item under the Tools menu. It opens a list of installed extensions that you can disable or uninstall.