October 2006

GMail a.k.a Google Mail is still in Beta even after 2.5 years in service. However the application is evolving continuously based on user feedback.

This is a snapshot of some of the suggestions that have already been implemented based on user feedback

You can suggest more features to the GMail team via this link. I voted on 2 features:

Automatically apply new filters to old conversations Control whether people I send mail to are added to Contacts

If you have any other new feature to recommend which is not in the default list, you can always use the suggestion box !

I would like to see these 2 new features in GMail:

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StumbleUpon is a nice way to find new sites and today I stumbled upon PCNames.com. Its a domain search engine which uses Ajax to display the domain status (i.e taken, available etc). So in a sense its one of the "web 2.0" domain search engine.

I started typing in random words like Googled,Googler etc. Then I started adding o's to the Google ! And I found that every other domain was taken !

The largest string that I could enter in PCNames search was this:

This had 26 o's and the domain was taken !

I didn't want to stop at 26, so I opened the browser and to my wonder I was able to add 33 more o's.

So

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Recently I started using LinkedIn and sent out invites to a bunch of guys I know.

For those who are new to LinkedIn, this is the Wikipedia definition:

LinkedIn is a business oriented social networking site, mainly used for professional networking. As of September 2006, it had more than 7 million registered users, representing 130 industries.

You can add new connections by inviting people you know and you can also maintain your professional profile within LinkedIn. However after using it for a few days, I don't seem to see any value add in the application.

Even Scoble doesn't seem to like

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Google Reader, the online RSS reader from Google had a major upgrade in terms of features and UI. The most useful features included folder-based navigation and the expanded view of posts. Overall the UI looked a lot similar to GMail. Even while writing about Google Reader, I was wondering why Reader was not integrated into GMail. Like the Google Chat widget, it would have been very nice to have a Google Reader widget within GMail. Then we would have had an "Inbox for web" and "Inbox for E-Mail" in a single place ! Mihai Parparita, one of the lead developer of Google Reader has written a Greasemonkey Script to add Reader into GMail. Here is a run down ...

Since I wrote this post , I have been constantly searching for a good 3 column wordpress theme. I found a few good themes, however when I compared them with the K2 theme, something was always missing !

Today I have finally upgraded to a new theme called Freshy. Thanks to Thilak for finding out the theme :)

The theme has a nice look and feel and the sidebar has a flexible configuration. I can either have "splitted" 2 column or a normal 1 column configuration in the sidebar. However the theme doesn't support widgets and I had to manually edit the sidebar.PHP !

The porting is still not completely over, I have added quite a

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As mentioned in one of my previous posts, my Yahoo account was compromised because of possible a phishing attack. Other than being my first email ID on Internet, many services like Flickr (fortunately not a pro account), yahoo photos etc were linked with this account. To make things worse I am not able to reset the password. The account was created some time in 1998 and I don't seem to remember the Pincode :( I have raised 2 tickets to get the problem resolved and I have not got a single response from Yahoo till now ! I lost hope till I saw this post from Scoble which directed me to this post ! Scoble wannu help ...

Writely , the online word program from Google is now integrated with Google spreadsheets and is now known as Google Docs & Spreadsheets .

I guess this is the first product from Google making use of "&" for combining 2 products and in a way combining word and spreadsheet does make sense. (However as of now there is no easy of dropping spreadsheets into the word document)

As in every other product from Google, the highlight of Google D&S is the clean user interface. The document can be saved into multiple formats(HTML,RTF,PDF) and the collaboration feature makes it easier for multiple users to work

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I stumbled upon MediaMonkey few days ago and if any of you guys are managing tons of MP3, this is one cute little application you should try ! I am still trying to figure out as to how I found this ! Doesn't matter :D Managing MP3 media files is always a pain. Usually you end up with lot of duplicate files and unless the media is tagged properly, it is almost impossible to find the duplicates. However if all the MP3's are tagged properly (ID3) this problem could be solved. Manually tagging MP3 is slow and requires a lot of patience. Even when I ripped some songs of my CD collection, they were all stored as "Track01.mp3", "Track02.mp3" etc. If I copy these songs to my iPod, I will never be able to filter the tracks by Artist,Album etc. MediaMonkey helps you to AutoTag your MP3 files and saves you from the pain of manually tagging every other track in your library. Before getting into the AutoTag feature, here is the list of features of MediaMonkey MediaMonkey is a music manager and jukebox for serious music collectors and iPod users. It catalogs your CDs, OGG, WMA, MPC, FLAC, APE, WAV and MP3 audio files. It offers an intelligent tag editor which looks up missing Album Art and track information via Freedb and the web, and an automated file and directory renamer to organize your music library. It includes a CD ripper, CD/DVD Burner, and audio converter for saving music, and manual or automated playlist editors for creating music mixes. Its player automatically adjusts volume levels so that you don't have continually fiddle with the volume control and supports hundreds of Winamp plug-ins and visualizations; or if you prefer, it can use Winamp as the default player. It also includes portable audio device synchronization that allows you to quickly synch tracks and playlists with iPods and other portable audio devices. Here is how the AutoTag feature works: Select single/multiple tracks and press Ctrl+L to invoke the AutoTag feature The features makes use of the Amazon Web service. You can search for Artists,Albums etc and if any of the tracks retrieved from the service matches the tracks selected for Autotagging, it is marked automatically. For e.g.

Eclipse.org, the official site of Eclipse had a "look and feel" upgrade yesterday. Unlike the Eclipse platform, the site was not so usable, it was always a pain searching for information in the website. I still have to explore the new interface and see whether they have improved on these aspects.

From what I observed after 5 minutes of browsing Eclipse.org is that its only the home page had an upgrade, the home pages of different projects like WTP,DTP etc still haven't changed :(.

I strongly believe that Eclipse should seriously bring in some uniformity in the website. They should seriously start a project just for this ! ( I remember

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When it comes to searching content in Blogs, the default search engine many people prefer is Technorati.

The Technorati engine is totally dedicated for searching within blogs. Bloggers/Publishers can ping the Technorati service to notify Technorati of new content in your blog.

In many of the publishing software including Wordpress, this can be be done automatically/programmatically.

Google has become a synonym for Search, however when it comes to blog search Google is way behind.

It doesn't mean that Google Blog search is bad, its only that the indexing of new content in blogs take lot of time and the content you get is generally not "fresh" i.e. until now !

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