I use Google Calendar Sync to synchronize my Outlook calendar items with Google Calendar and this worked fine until I upgraded to Office 2010.

Google Calendar Sync did not like Outlook 2010 and I was no longer able to synchronize calendar items. I was almost tempted to go back to Outlook 2007 and then I found a thread to resolve this issue

Follow these steps to get Google Sync work with Outlook 2010

1. Backup Outlook.exe. If you have done a default install of Office 2010, the file can be found at C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office14
2. Close Outlook if its already running and ensure that Outlook.exe is not listed in Task Manager
3. Edit Outlook.exe in a Hex Editor
4. Replace text 14.0.0 with 12.0.0
5. Save the file.
6. Start Outlook and ensure that its still functioning
7. Start Google Calendar Sync and you should see sync back in action.

As many of you know, the Indian Edition of YouTube is now live @ http://in.youtube.com.

Till now there were a lot of YouTube clones which catered to the local video content and some of them even got considerable funding from VC’s

I am not sure if this edition of YouTube is going to pickup in a big way, but the below snapshot of the videos section might say otherwise !

The above is just a partial snapshot; in fact the entire page is filled up similar kind of steamy videos !

If this is the kind of videos we would see on Indian Version of YouTube, there is no doubt that it will be “hugely popular” !

There has been another round of pagerank  update and I see that many sites have got a higher pagerank and few of them have even managed to get a PR of 4 within few months !

This site had a PR of 4 from quite some time and even during the last update where few sites were penalized for selling Text Link Ads the PR of this site remained at 4

At that time, I thought that I wasn’t penalized since I was not selling Text Link Ads from my home page (which had PR4) and was only having post level ads (Around 5 post level ads were active).

However this round of pagerank update has taken the PR from 4 to 2, reminding me of QOT’s PR downgrade from 6 to 3 !

I am not sure if dividing existing PR by 2 is the way of Google penalizing sites selling text link ads. I immediately stopped Text Link Ads and in a way it was even easy since a new month just began !

I have also raised a reconsideration request with Google !

But again I am not completely sure if TLA is the core reason behind this downgrade ! I moved my hosting from Dreamhost to MT some time back and one of the biggest mistakes I made was not to check on the XML sitemap.

After the hosting change, the XML sitemaps generator plugin for some odd reason started putting the XML file on venukb.com/blog while Google was searching for it on venukb.com. I had manually set to venukb.com and during the move, the option changed to “Automatic” and happened to select the subdomain.

And I realized this only after 3 weeks ! Duh !

The crawl stats also confirmed that the sitemaps were not accessible from quite some time !

I fixed the issue and even then I see that 0 pages from sitemaps are included in the search index.

Has the PR downgrade affected traffic ?

This site for one gets almost 80% of the traffic from search engines (mainly Google) and I have noticed that some of the high traffic pages are no longer in the Top 10 !

I do see a dip in the number of unique visitors, but after including the landing page, the pageview count hasn’t changed much.

I am hoping the reconsideration request to fix the PR And if any of you are running Text Link Ads and also get a huge amount of traffic from Google, you should consider switching the text ads off !

And yes be careful about XML sitemaps when you are moving to a new hosting ! (Though not sure if this is also the reason for downgrade !)

Talking of PR, do share your experience as well ! Has it improved ? Do you see change in traffic with the improved PR ?

I am sure many would be surprised with the title of this post. Gmail for one provides with almost 6.6GB of space and its keeps growing every day. It would be amazingly difficult to fill up this space.

Even on the Gmail’s home page, you would see this marketing statement:

Over 6628.815124 megabytes (and counting) of free storage so
you'll never need to delete another message.

So why would anyone want to clean up/delete the mails on his/her Gmail account ?

I for one find it annoying to store unwanted mails; Note that I am not talking of spam mails and referring to marketing mails etc which are genuine but unwanted !

These mails just fill up your pages and most importantly show up while I am searching for important mails.

So how to clean up your Gmail ?

Most of the time I ensure that I delete the mails as soon as I see them; however some of them still manage to live in my inbox. This is how I clean up my inbox.

1. Click on a message which I find “unwanted”
2. Click on “Filter Messages like these” option (Snapshot shown below)
   
3. The above option was introduced to ease the creation of Filter/labels and for some reason the filtered messages pages doesn’t have a “delete” option !
4. This is where the Gmail keyboard shortcuts come in handy . Select all the message and press #. The selected messaged are deleted !

So even though there are no menu options to operate on the filtered mails, the keyboard shortcuts still does work !

Do you delete your Gmail acccount emails ?

When Google Calendar was launched in 2006, I didn’t find anything unique except the “Quick Add” feature. I might not have spent too much time exploring the powerful features of Google calendar then, but I am sure that most of them would agree that there was no single compelling feature in Google Calendar.

At that time, my usage of Calendar was also pretty limited; However age is catching up with me and I really had to start using a calendar to keep track of my day to day events. (I am not going to write in detail about these events, but these were the ones which made me realize that I was getting old )

When I again checked on Google Calendar, 2 features caught my attention.

Getting Notifications via SMS

You can set your mobile number in the Calendar setting and get event notifications on the mobile as SMS.

This feature is definitely useful for users with regular phones (With Smartphones you generally have the ability to synch your calendar and tasks). You can configure the time before which you wish to receive the event notifications.

Synchronizing with Microsoft Outlook

Google has now launched a new Calendar Sync utility which allows you to sync events between Google Calendar and Microsoft Outlook Calendar. You’ll be able to determine the direction of “sync”, as well as the sync frequency.

Till now, there wasn’t a straightforward way to setup the sync between Google Calendar and MS Outlook Calendar. This new utility make it really simple to setup the sync and is a treat for people using Outlook and Google Calendar.

With the above 2 features, I have become a “regular” user of Google Calendar and is now firmly positioned as my second favorite Google app (The first one being Gmail !)

Talking of favorite Google applications, here is how it stacks up for me: (Note: I have not considered Search as an “app”, for me Google is the default search engine ! )

1. Gmail
2. Google Calendar
3. Google Docs and Spreadsheets
4. Google Notebook
5. Google Reader

What are your favorite Google applications ?

GMail, the most popular (and my favorite) Email service from Google has added IMAP support in addition to the existing POP3 support. One of the advantages of IMAP is that you can sync your mail from multiple clients. With POP3, even if you read a mail from one client, it isn’t reflected on the other client and you have to re-read the E-Mails.

IMAP helps in synching the client operations to the server and this feature is one of the major reasons for the popularity of Microsoft Exchange Server.

You can enable IMAP Access in GMail via the Settings -> Forwarding and POP/IMAP link.

Setup Instructions for most of the popular IMAP Clients can be found on https://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=75726 (Even iPhone can sync with GMail)

I quickly setup accounts on Windows Live Mail and Outlook 2003 to see IMAP access in Action. On outlook once the account is setup, you have to explicitly subscribe to the IMAP folders.

Outlook took almost thrice the time to download the message headers when compared to Windows Live Mail. So on my home PC, I might be sticking with Windows Live Mail to read/sync GMail.

Other features:

• Starred messages in GMail show up as "Flags" in the Email Client and vice versa
• New folders created in the Client show up as Labels on the web client.
• When you move a message to a folder in the client, the labels are automatically applied.

Also you don’t need to worry about the bandwidth required to download all your GMail mails ! Only the headers are downloaded by default and the mail content is downloaded on demand.

IMAP access will definitely help me save some time at my work place (My employer might say otherwise ). If GPRS cost comes down in India, I can as well setup the account on my HTC Touch (By the way its already synching with GMail over Bluetooth )

Orkut’s new look is active on my profile. The Google logo is highlighted in the footer and there is also the link to the official Orkut blog.

Even though there is no major change in terms of features, the new look definitely looks fresh and is a welcome change. What is your opinion on the new look of Orkut ? Meanwhile how many of you are still active on Orkut ? Do share your Orkut experience  

After launching the Internet browser on my HTC Touch, the first site I opened was of my own blog. The browser almost came to halt while loading the home page.

When I loaded other sites such as GMail, Flickr, Google Search one thing I noticed was that all these sites had a page compatible with the mobile browser. The content fitted exactly to the bounds of the handset display. Images were kept to minimal, so was the content !

A search for WordPress+mobile on Google took me to Alex Kings WordPress Mobile Edition plug-in for WordPress. The package consists of a WordPress plug-in which detects requests from Mobile Browsers. It also has a WordPress theme which takes care of rendering your site on the mobile browser.

You can easily read all the posts with no need for horizontal scrolling. The page fits your device display perfectly.

Here are some snapshots of my blog opened in IE mobile browser.

Even the images fit nicely into the display width. You almost have the same experience as reading on your normal web browser.

And if somebody is still interested in seeing the original page (loaded with ads and sidebar), you can always exit the mobile edition and view the standard browser edition.

Is your site mobile browser friendly ? If not install and activate Alex Kings WordPress Mobile Edition Plug-in. Probably I should start tagging my buddies to install and activate this plug-in

Download WordPress Mobile Edition

The other day I was reading about the popular Desktop search tools on a popular technology site. The 3 tools featured were

• Google Desktop Search
• Microsoft Desktop Search
• Yahoo Desktop Search

I was immediately keen to know as to how Google, Microsoft and Yahoo display their respective desktop search products on their search engines.

Search on Google

Google puts its own desktop search product ahead of Windows and Yahoo. However it should be noted that it puts in the Microsoft product ahead of Yahoo Desktop Search.

Search on Yahoo

Yahoo, similar to Google puts its own product on the top. And it also returns favor to Google by listing Google desktop search as the second popular link. MS is pushed to third (probably acquisition fears )

Search on MSN Live

Surprise ! Surprise ! Microsoft unlike Google or Yahoo does not put its own product as the most popular desktop search tool. Its lists Google and Yahoo products and puts itself as the 3rd most popular desktop search product.

What does this mean ? Is Live search the most unbiased search engine ?

The RSS subscribes for this site is tracked using the Feedburner service. From the past week I have been observing an change in the way the feed count is reported/calculated. I am not sure if I am the only one seeing this change.

The site had an average reader count of around 130 feed subscribers. On one Wednesday it suddenly fell to 75 (almost 50% reduction). I thought that there were a bunch of guys who got bored with my posts

The day I wrote a post on Windows Live Writer, the count again shot back to 137. Yesterday I didn’t write any post and the count is back to 70′s.

Feedburner never used to report statistics based on the post frequency/count.

Has Feedburner changed the way it reports the RSS subscribers ? Anybody facing a similar problem ?

Google Personalized Search which was out of Beta this February was enabled by default for every Google account.

Once you login to your Google Account, your entire “Web History” is being recorded by Google. The recording is not just limited to Google Search; in fact searches across the various Google services such as Image Search, Map Search etc are recorded.

This web history could be used by Google to improve the search results. For users it does provide useful information regarding the search done over the period of time(Trends).

In fact you can search for items within your search history

However the problem I have observed from the past few weeks is that this new personalized service screws the Link URL’s of the search results (I am not completely sure Personalized Search is the culprit)

1. Log into your Google Account
2. Search for something using Google Search
3. Copy a search result link

For E.g. The URL of the first search result for keyword “Sudoku”:

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&ct=res&cd=1&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.websudoku.com%2F&ei=ipZYTg&usg=AbYUJnig&sig2=wezA

The link I intended to copy was this: http://www.websudoku.com

For every other link that I intend to copy and use (share), 3 parameters are added to the URL

• ei
• usg
• sig2

Even if you pause the web history, all the 3 parameter are still present in the search result links. So this probably means that even if you pause web history, google internally does collect web search data.

Till few weeks back, I had no issues in copying links from Google Search results, but now its totally messed up. The only way to get out of this mess is to logout of Google, which in turn logs you out of all Google Services.

Are you facing a similar problem ? Is there any way to avoid this mess ?

P.S. Meanwhile I checked for the behavior in Yahoo and Live Search services. In Yahoo the link is screwed irrespective of whether you are logged in or not. In Live Search there is no issue in copying the link.

Just a few days back I bought licensed copy of Mint; the cute powerful Web analytics application. When I wrote about Mint some days back I also mentioned about the poor navigation interface in Google Analytics

Looks like I was not the only one complaining; Jeff Veen and Brett Corsby unveiled the new version of Google Analytics at the EMetrics Summit.

What’s different?
We’ve redesigned the reporting interface for greater customization and collaboration. This should make it easier for businesses and website owners to find and share the data you need to make informed decisions. The new version presents data more clearly and in context, so you can look at a single report to gain insights rather than having to pull up several reports to understand what action to take.

(By the way I was also wondering what Jeff Veen was doing after moving to Google since I wasn’t seeing any progress on Measure Map or Analytics )

The analytics accounts will be activated over the period of time and as of today the new version is available in Australia.

Checkout the demo for more details on the new features.

FeedDemon, the popular RSS feed reader for windows is/was one of my favorite application. It has a clean user friendly interface and reading/managing the feeds is a treat with this application. Its also one of the few desktop based readers which can synchronize with an online service -Newsgator. However FeedDemon comes at a price (30$) and I have been searching for a good alternative to FeedDemon from some time now.

I did try to shift to Google Reader many times but somehow I found the UI sluggish and for certain operations (marking feeds read) you have to go through a lot of clicks.

RSS Bandit is another free desktop news aggregator (also a open source project) for Windows built on the .NET Framework. The user interface/menus are very similar to that of FeedDemon and is definitely looking like a good alternative to FeedDemon. The UI response is not as fast as in FeedDemon but it has all the features that you would need from a good desktop based RSS reader.

If you are bored with your current desktop reader or the online reader, give RSS Bandit a try.

When I initially started this blog I signed up with Statcounter service which showed me detailed data of visitors reading my posts. It was exciting and nice to see the increasing number of visitors every day.

However the free service of Statcounter has limited functionality and you infer less data with more visitors visiting your blog.

Later I started using Google’s free analytics service: Google Analytics.

I have been using it from the past 8 months and I still find it difficult to get in terms with the user interface. Of all Google products, I believe Analytics has one of the worst navigation interface.

There are 2 analytics service I have heard a lot of and I am waiting to try it.

1. MeasureMap
2. Mint

Mint definitely looks good except for the fact that you have to shell out 30$ for the service.

MeasureMap was acquired by Google a year back and even now the site is accepting email addresses for invitations.

There is no update on the future of this service and 1 year is really a long time ! What ever happened to the service ? What ever happened to Jeffrey Veen ?

GMail, Google’s free webmail service is a top class service in comparison to Microsoft’s Hotmail or Yahoo Mail.

GMail which was “invite only”, recently opened up its service worldwide to everyone. Now all you to need to get a GMail account is to signup

Now Google is even running Ads to promote GMail !!

No second thoughts, GMail’s spam filter is THE best and they are marketing the same via their ads.

If anyone is not using GMail as their primary E-Mail ID, its time to switch

Checkout this video (from Google) to get a quick overview of GMail’s features

Update

James has found another GMail Ad; this time showing GMail’s search feature

Koders is a code search engine which enables developers to easily search and browse source code hosted on thousands of open source repositories.

Krugle (which sounds like Google) is yet another search engine focused on developers and intends to make code search easier and faster.

One of the nice features about this search engine is the additional information displayed along with the search results.

There is a section which displays Code snippets from Safari Books Online. It also displays the related Open Source Projects and related Tech Pages.

Also the links within the search page as tabs and this way you don’t end up cluttering your browser.

However the search engine itself was not up to my expectation. After seeing Scoble talk high of the search engine, I took it for a test drive.

Test 1

Search Keyword : Convert String to int
Language : Java
Results: The search results listed all files having name as Convert.java and having String in the code text

Test 2

Search Keyword : parse xml/parse XML
Language : Java
Search Result : No results !!

Krugle couldn’t return any results !! Remove the space from the search keyword (parsexml) and this time Krugle is able to return some results, but not useful results !!

I ran the same keyword search on Koders and Google and these engines came up with better results.

I am not saying that Krugle is totally hopeless. The problem with Krugle and couple of other code search engines is the way they filter the search result. They map keywords to the file name as seen in “Convert.java” scenario.

In case of Java language, the Javadoc is one place where lot of information about a method is given and this could definitely be indexed and used for returning good search results.

If you want to know more about Krugle check these resources

Krugle Demo – ScreenCast

Demo and Interview (via Scoble)

P.S. I haven’t gone through these videos and screencasts. If you do go through, probably you will learn as to how to use Krugle and how to input the right keywords to get the best result out of the engine !

Gmail sign-ups are now open worldwide including India ! No more waiting for someone to invite you just create an account directly at www.gmail.com.

Meanwhile Mark Malseed has an interesting story on Sergey Brin (Google’s Cofounder)

SearchMash as the name suggests is a mashup of a Search Engine and is created and maintained by Google itself !

Surprisingly you don’t see any Google logo in the index page or the search result page. Only the TOS page seems to confirm that the site is maintained by Google !

When it was launched few months back SearchMash was a mashup of Google Search and Google Image Search.

There seems to be a lot of additions done since then and now SearchMash displays results from Google Search, Image Search, Blog Search, Video Search (Displays YouTube videos too) and Wikipedia.

However the number of search results returned by SearchMash is different from the count returned by a normal Google Search. As the “Feature” page indicates, Google is running this site to test user interface ideas and is not a full fledged mashup search engine !

Use SearchMash and do give feedback on the features that you liked and disliked

Technorati , the Internet search engine focused on the world of weblogs has probably one of the worst spam filters.

BSNL, one of the popular Internet Service Provider in India, recently introduced 2Mbps bandwidth across all plans.

I wanted to check the experience of the customers/bloggers using BSNL.

A Technorati search for the same (http://technorati.com/search/bsnl) produced these results.

All the posts had the same title and the same summarized content. And it was not just these 5 results, there were at least 3 search result pages (apprx. 30 Links) with the same title, and each one of them was pointing to a different web site.

Now why is anybody going to use Technorati if spam is not taken care of ? I used to like Technorati in comparison to Google Blog search, as I was finding much better/latest content of the blogosphere !

However these days its being spammed easily and I am not sure if Technorati is serious about controlling spam!

Probably they should consult Matt Cutts; Google’s Spam Fighter

Orkut, the Internet social network service run by Google allows you to post personal or professional information and link to friends and acquaintances.

The service which was available only by invitation was recently opened up for all users. Also unlike other services you don’t need a Google Account to access Orkut.

These are some of the things I have noticed about Orkut

1. Google doesn’t market Orkut as a social network service. The services page has no mention of Orkut.
2. Google Labs page also doesn’t mention Orkut
3. There is no official blog for Orkut
4. Orkut is one service which clearly shows the usage of a Microsoft Technology (ASP) – I am not suggesting that it should have used a non Microsoft technology

So why does Google not treat Orkut like many of its other services ?

• Is it because of the lawsuit which accuses Google of stealing Orkut Code ?
• Or is Orkut not a revenue generating service for Google ?

Google puts in a lot of effort to prevent spam entering their search results. (Again not suggesting that they shouldn’t do this). However when the same comes to Orkut there is no interest shown by Google.

For E.g. Check the snapshot of Eclipse Community in Orkut

I have seen this community grow from 4K to 7k members and it was quite a useful community, until spammers took over. The community moderator is supposed to take care of the spam posts, but not much can be expected from him.

Why can’t Google come up with a good spam filter for the communities ? When a small company like Akismet can come up with a powerful spam filter, is it too much to ask from Google ? (By the way Google does have a totally impressive spam filter in GMail )

Check the User Interface of Orkut Community ! It sucks big time and this comes from a company which boasts of introducing innovative user interfaces with GMail/Google reader/Google Docs.

From what I have seen Google really doesn’t care about Orkut, I am not sure as to what the reason is ! Jeremy Zawdony thinks otherwise !

If you are searching for a meaning of a word or a term, the Definitions feature of Google Search should come in handy.

Till now if I wanted to quickly lookup a meaning for a word say preposterous, I used to search in Google with this keyword

preposterous+meaning

To see a definition for a word or phrase, simply type the word “define,” then a space, and then the word(s) you want defined. If Google has seen a definition for the word or phrase on the Web, it will retrieve that information and display it at the top of your search results.

You can also get a list of definitions by including the special operator “define:” with no space between it and the term you want defined.

However the feature doesn’t take the case of the keyword into consideration. For e.g.

• define SIP returns with “a small drink”. I was looking for the definition of Session Initiation Protocol.
• define LAMP returns with the definition of lamp, not the open source web platform

What I observed is that this feature doesn’t handle abbreviations properly and I jotted this down in Matt’s Smaller Issues Post.

Also note these 2 searches -

1. define Google : Google, a popular search engine, is a tool for finding resources on the World Wide Web. Google scans web pages to find instances of the keywords you have entered in the search box.
2. define Microsoft : NetMeeting, Windows and Windows NT are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation.

Is Definitions search partial ? It doesn’t give a good definition of Microsoft Wonder why ?

Also the definition search might not always return the right answer.

• define donkey – the symbol of the Democratic Party; introduced in cartoons by Thomas Nast in 1874

Irrespective of these “glitches”, “Definition” search is a great feature. I have been using this from past 2 weeks and it does save a lot of time !

I was talking to my brother the other day on phone and I had to quickly convert 4lbs to Kg’s. I was about to search in Google for a unit converter and he reminded me that I could do this easily in Google Search itself !

I just had to enter “4lbs in Kg“ in the Google search box and it returned this result

Some other examples !

• 2^20 in hex
• cube root of 125
• 5 Feet in inches

In fact Google’s calculator goes beyond basic arithmetic to do complex math and crunch physical constants, too. It will process queries such as “G * mass of earth.” or “speed of light * two.”

Next time before you press Windows Key + R + calc use Google if your web browser is already open

You can also do a quick currency conversion also using Google search. More on it here !

[Google Web Search Features]

Now you can search/find full text of U.S patents via Google Patent Search.

Phil points out that Unites States Patent and Trademark Office does have its own search service and its not that really useful.

The first keyword I searched was “Google” and I ended up with this result !!

Sanitary Device for Repelling Mosquitoes… – How does Google have a hand in this 1927 Patent ? I opened up the patent and found that this result came up because the patent was filed by a guy named CHAULES P. GOOGLE.

So when you end up with funny results like this, time to switch to the Advanced Search option

[Via Official Google Blog]

I am still using Java 1.4 and was contemplating on move to Java 5/1.5 and lo Java 6 is out.

Ok now if you are confused with these version numbers check this page.

I am still to get in terms with the new features of Java 1.5 itself and now Java 6 seems to come with a bunch of more goodies !

Also Sun seems to be marketing their Netbeans IDE with this release

Java SE 6 is the current major release of the Java SE platform, with full support from NetBeans IDE 5.5.

I have tried to use NetBeans couple of times and I have to say that probably it will never match Eclipse !

The latest release of Eclipse i.e 3.2 already supports Java 6 features !

By the way Google joined the Eclipse foundation recently as a add-in provider :)

How many of you are already using Java 5 ? If you are ready to make a jump to Java 6 head over to the download page

The integration of Google Talk within Orkut has been in news from quite some time. However unlike other Google products, there isn’t an official blog for Orkut which raises questions on Google’s commitment to this product !

One reason might be the lawsuit on Google by a small company which alleges that the Orkut developer Orkut Buyukkokten illegally took the code that he had written for the company ! Also Orkut is the only Google product I guess, clearly showing a Microsoft Technology (ASP) being used ! Anybody noticed that ?

From the past few months there have been some constant updates on the User Interface front like Message Handling, Reply to Scraps etc ! Also Google Ads have started appearing in a few community pages

Today Google Talk has been integrated into Orkut. Accessing/Enabling this feature is kind of done in a weird way which is anyway not untypical of Orkut. You are supposed to click on your friends list and search for the small status icon. (You can either click on the “Friends” link or the “View Friends” link. Both show your friends list in a different way ! Again Pathetic ! )

On clicking this you are taken to a screen where you can enable/configure this feature ! You can selectively add your friends into the Google Talk List. Truly an “innovative” way to enable an feature !

(I wanted to paste a snapshot of the configuration page, after loafing around for some 10 min I found out that there is no way to access that page again !! ).

Once you add your Orkut friends to the GTalk list

• You can get notifications when your friend scraps you
• You can view your friends Orkut profile from GTalk
• You can write a scrap your friend from GTalk (Again this feature is not that innovative, it just opens the Scrapbook page in your favorite Web Browser )

To be honest, its not a great feature and I don’t see much value add in the integration. If you have read this post properly I have written more about the pathetic UI of Orkut more than the integration

What do you like/dislike in Orkut ?

P.S. If you haven’t already noticed, offline messages is now supported in Google Talk. This was one of the top requested feature, if you want to suggest more features to Google Talk, click here !

Update : Official Google Blog does have a post related to this new feature, missed it !

Google Reader, the online RSS reader from Google had a major upgrade some time back. Check this post to know more about Google Reader.

Mihai Parparita, one of the lead developer of Google Reader has written a Greasemonkey Script to add Reader into GMail. The script added a “Feeds” link within GMail as shown below:

Winston has written another Greasemonkey script to integrate Reader into GMail. Some of the new features are:

• Spilt-window view of GMail and Reader on a single page - I definitely didn’t like this layout, its just not fit for widescreen monitors I guess.
• Links to collapse|expand either GMail or Reader – GMail and Reader are shown in a split pane and this can be collapsed and expanded.
• Integrated Reader uses start-page as specified in Reader’s “Settings”
• Labels selector – You can view the feeds based on the labels in Reader
• Key ‘v’ to open Reader links in a new Window
• Automatic resize of GMail and Reader views

Snapshot:

Requirements to Install the Script

1. Firefox
2. Greasemonkey
3. Winstons Script (Reader in GMail)

Alternatively, you can also try out Mihai’s script here.

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:

1. Creating Filters (and optionally creating/setting label) is kind of pain in GMail. I should be able to select mails and drag them onto the label.
   It should automatically create filters to those set of senders and also apply the label. In the current UI, applying label is easy, however the same is not true for creating a filter.
2. I would really like to see Google Reader integrated into GMail. Though it is now done via quirks like using Greasemonkey scripts, I would like to see a Reader widget sitting within GMail. I guess only a small percentage of regular GMail/Email checkers use RSS, and integration of Reader would definitely make the RSS/Syndication more popular !

What feature would you like to suggest ?

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 finally I had a Google search engine with 59 o’s. Here is the link to what I think is the longest URL on web and the length of the domain was exactly 63.I searched in vain for the owner of this domain .  (Every other link in this page fails, probably because of the URL length restriction)

(According to the domain registrars, the longest legal domain name is 63 characters starting with a letter or number. According to Wikipeida, domain name includes the “com”, “biz” etc which is probably wrong)

I am wondering why would anyone register all these domains ?

And according to the Guinness book of World records(2002), the longest URL on Web is this ! But the Gooooo..gle URL beats this by 7 characters !

Is there any other URL/Domain bigger than this ?

.

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 of the steps to install the script

1. Install Greasemonkey for Firefox from http://greasemonkey.mozdev.org/
2. Restart Firefox.
3. Click on this link to install the Reader script !
4. Click on the “Install” button that’s displayed in the upper-right corner of the page.
5. Visit/reload GMail

You should see a “Feeds” link in the sidebar as shown below !

I had encountered the “Greasemonkey” word in many of posts, however I never cared to look into what it actually is, i.e. until now !

About Greasemonkey

Greasemonkey is a Mozilla Firefox extension that allows users to install scripts that make on-the-fly changes to specific web pages. Greasemonkey can be used for adding new functionality to web pages (like embedding price comparison in Amazon.com webpages), fixing rendering bugs, combining data from multiple webpages, and numerous other purposes.

Most Greasemonkey user scripts are written by hand, using site-specific JavaScript code which manipulates the contents of a web page using the Document Object Model interface.

userscripts.org maintains a database of Greasemonkey scripts, and for each it lists the URLs of webpages to which the scripts pertain.

And the extension is not just restricted to Firefox, Creammonkey and PithHelmet are similar tools for the Safari browser. For Internet Explorer, GreasemonkIE, Trixie and Turnabout offer similar functionality.

Version 8 of Opera also added user scripting functionality and both Opera and Firefox support the W3C DOM. Hence many Greasemonkey user scripts work correctly on Opera also ! This should make Opera users happy

If you want to write a Greasemonkey script, Dive into Greasemonkey is a good book to start with. There is a free download of the book available, in a variety of formats. (HTML,PDF)

Other Greasemonkey scripts

As mentioned earlier, userscripts.org has a huge collection of Greasemonkey scripts. These are some of the notable ones from Digg

• Greasemonkey+Lightbox script for Images
• Google Redux
• DuggMirror Greasemonkey Script
• Digg V3 With Right Hand Menu Greasmonkey Implementation.
• Turn Greasemonkey Script into an Firefox Extension
• Gmail Preview Bubbles
• Get videos from Google Video and YouTube

Let me know if there are any other interesting Greasemonkey scripts !

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 on the document. There is an experimental Find & Replace feature as well !

As in Writely, you can even publish the document to your blog. I wrote almost half of this blog using Google D&S until I faced a problem, because of which I had to shift back to Live Writer!

I was not able to insert a image from a Web URL ! The insert option allows only a file URI.

One option I had was to edit the HTML ! However the cursor position in the doc is not synched to the appropriate position in the HTML code and it was a pain searching for the correct location and inserting the image tag ! Not sure why this feature is missing !

(Google , if you are reading this post, do add this feature ! I will guarantee one dedicated user of D&S )

Another issue was w.r.t searching ! There is no way of searching only Docs or Spreadsheets and the search result includes documents from both word and spreadsheet !

Find the official post about Google D&S here.

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 !

Yesterday Google announced the introduction of Ping service for blogs. Now Bloggers can ping Google to notify about the new content and I guess this should make Google blog search service more usable.

If you are using WordPress you can programmatically ping the Blog search using the Pinging Service API

The update service can be accessed via:

Administration Console -> Options -> Writing

Add the following URL in the Update services:

http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2

I have still not tested whether pinging works properly, I will be testing it using this post itself

Test Update

After 5 min, I tried to search “Ping google” in Google blog search, however this post was not listed in the search results. Then I checked on the changes.xml of Google Blog search: http://blogsearch.google.com/changes.xml

I found my blog in the XML file, however the “rssUrl” field was empty !

http://www.venukb.com/blog/” rssUrl=”" when=”65″/>

As per the Pinging Service API, there should be 5 parameters with only one being optional.

Parameters: (should be sent in the same order as listed below)

• Name of site
• URL of site
• URL of the page to be checked for changes
• URL of RSS, RDF, or Atom feed
• Optional a name (or “tag”) categorizing your site content. You may delimit multiple values by using the ‘|’ character.

I am not sure if the rssUrl field is also mandatory ! Anybody had success pinging Google blog search ??

Google Reader till now was one of the most “unusable” applications from Google’s stable. Google which re-defined usability with applications like GMail did not extend the same usability aspects to Google Reader.

Now after hearing to the constant complaints/suggestions from the users, GReader has introduces a total new look and feel, and to be honest I am kind of liking it. (I will try the new GReader for a few days and hopefully it will end my hunt for a good RSS Reader)

So what is new with Google Reader ?

Anyone who has used the old user interface will immediately find the difference in the layout. The first thing I did was to delete all the subscriptions within the Reader and import the OPML file. To my surprise, GReader maintained the Folder structure while importing the OPML file.

You will love using Reader once you start using the shortcuts. You can easily move between the posts in a feed and also between the different subscriptions.

The posts can be read in two layouts:

• Expanded view – If bandwidth is a constraint, I would not recommend this view
• List View – This mode shows the list of post titles and for a big feed and you can press “o” to expand the post.

There are 4 options available for each post:

1. Star – You can star the post (as in GMail) and access the starred post via “Starred Items” link. However this option is kind of redundant since there is another way of “starring” the post.
2. Share – Share the post
3. E-Mail – Mail the post.
4. Add Tags – I don’t remember seeing this option in the old UI, but this is really a very useful feature.

Additionally GReader has added few default Feed Bundles. Click on “Browse” in the sidebar to access the same.

If any of your friends are using Blogger/MySpace etc you can easily subscribe to those feeds by inputting the user name.

And if you don’t like this new UI, you can go always go back to the old interface. I am not sure why would anyone do this !

What more changes I want to see ?

I am not sure why Google is not having the Reader within GMail. I would definitely like a GReader component (like Google Talk) within GMail. I can read mails and feeds at one place. And as in the case of Google Talk, many people would start using Reader once it is made part of GMail.

It might be little difficult to handle the keyboard shortcuts of both GMail and Google Reader, but its not impossible !

Another option I would like to see is the “Filter” posts option via which I can filter out the RSS feed posts of my interest. This is similar to the “Watches” concept in FeedDemon.

Try the Reader and let me know what you think of the new interface ! Also don’t forget to subscribe to the RSS feed of Online Diary

Check this screenshot:

This is the memory usage of Yahoo IM when its initially started on my machine ! So with this kind of memory usage, why would anyone want to run multiple instances of Yahoo messenger ?

My first E-Mail ID was with Yahoo and was created 8 years back. I recently created a new yahoo mail ID and I wanted to use this as my primary Yahoo ID (including Yahoo Messenger).

I was faced with the problem of moving my buddies from the old ID to the new one. Unfortunately there was no easy way of exporting and importing your chat buddies in Yahoo IM.

(As I am writing, I think I could have done it via Address book import/export, again I am not completely sure if it works ).

Initially I imported contacts from my Outlook address book (which is always synched via the Plaxo service) and I guess it took care of importing 60% of my Yahoo IM buddies.

The only other way I could add the remaining 40% was to startup 2 instances of Yahoo IM and add the buddies manually ! However there is no straight forward method to start multiple instances of Yahoo IM.

So when I went searching in Google and I came across this post. “Multi” Yahoo IM is achieved by patching the registry.

The Registration Entry file can be found here:

http://kalphegor.googlepages.com/ym8multi.zip

If you run into any problems, you can uninstall by running this file

http://kalphegor.googlepages.com/ym8multi_unist.zi…

I patched the registry entry and I was able to successfully launch 2 instances of Yahoo IM and synch my chat buddies . If any of you guys have been thinking of running multiple instances of Yahoo this should be helpful, but do note the memory usage of Yahoo IM.

Isn’t it nice If I could do the same with Google Talk ? In fact there is a method to do this, and its much easier compared to Yahoo IM.

A typical Google Talk shortcut looks like this: “"c:program filesgooglegoogle talkgoogletalk.exe"

You just need to create one more shortcut which looks like this: "c:program filesgooglegoogle talkgoogletalk.exe" /nomutex

The “/nomutex” is the one which does the trick, and with this switch you can run multiple instances of Google talk !

Here is another mashup which puts both Google Maps and Yahoo Maps together.

When you scroll a map in one of the maps, the other map is also automatically updated. One thing you immediately notice is that the level of detail in each map is different. In some cases, Google Map seems to have more info, in few others Yahoo has the upper hand !

Why leave out MSN Local Map ? I guess soon there will be a mashup of these 3 services ? Or is there already one ?

As you can see from the Archives section of my blog, I have compiled about 109 posts over the past 4 months.

One thing I could make out from Google Analytics statistics is that the entry and exit posts were same for most of the visitors. i.e visitors rarely check the other posts in the blog, this is especially more observed from visitors coming from Search Engines. (This is termed as Bounce Rates in Google Analytics).

Google has been the major referrer to Online Diary and the early inclusion of the blog in Google Sitemaps has done wonders ! Tag Cloud was added some time back to help users in digging the posts easily via tags.

I was considering adding the top posts/most popular posts from quite some time, however I didn’t want to bloat the sidebar with lot of content. Currently I have created a separate page for Top Posts and you can find it here. I would definitely like to have this as a part of my homepage header (as in Problogger), probably I will take care of this while shifting to a 3 column wordpress theme .

For those who are lazy to click on the Top Posts page, here is the list of Popular posts as of today

The Top Post content is delivered via Alex Kings Popularity Contest(PC) plugin and its pretty simple to configure and use. But I cannot completely agree that it really shows the top content of the site. The popularity rating of a post is calculated using various factors such as number of comments, trackbacks etc. Also if you are using the WordPress Cache plugin, the pages will be delivered via the cache and hence, the PC plugin will not consider those hits.Unfortunately I do use the WP Cache plugin and I have no intention of disabling it in the near time since I am constrained by my hosting speed.

If you don’t want a plugin calculating the popularity of the post, you should definitely consider using the Featured Posts Plugin. You can handpick your favorite posts and mark them as featured posts. Additionally, you can select an image for each feature and optionally add a small description.

P.S. The Top Post list was dynamically generated. I used the Exec-Php plugin which can be used to make php calls within static pages ! Do try it out

This has to be the coolest feature of GMail. This post at Modern Day Alchemist explains how you can have unlimited GMail Addresses by using a plus-addressing scheme, i.e adding a + after your GMail user name.

Though the post covers details on how to use the feature, I will reiterate it again. (I had to read it 2-3 times to understand and once I did, I was amazed )

Here is my simple explanation:

1. Say if your GMail address is onli...@gmail.com
2. The User name here is : onlinediary
3. You can add any valid sequence of character literal and append it to the user name via a + operator (You can use _ , . and combination of these also)
4. So I can have unlimited number of valid email addresses like onli...@gmail.com, onli...@gmail.com, onli...@gmail.com, onlinediary@so_does.dot@gmail.com etc etc etc (Hopefully you guys are not thinking of onli...@gmail.com )
5. And mails addressed to these “plus addressed” email address will still land on your normal onli...@gmail.com inbox !!!

How will this be useful ?

I can use this email plus addressed email to categorize or label my mails automatically. Say for all bank related mails I can give something like onli...@gmail.com. I can setup a filter that will label and archive mails having this address as a part of “To” field.

(Note that the “To” address will still be the plus addressed name, i.e. there is no stripping of the plus addressed characters)

So next time you signup for some newsletter or when you give your mail address while downloading some software, use the plus addressing scheme. If you receive any spam on this plus addressed email address, you will find out who the culprit is

Now why did I say this as the coolest feature of only GMail ?? Because I tested this with Yahoo and MSN and I got this response:

Yahoo

The e-mail system was unable to deliver the message, but did not report a specific reason. Check the address and try again. If it still fails, contact your system administrator. SMTP; 554 delivery error: dd This user doesn’t have a yahoo.com

Hotmail

The e-mail account does not exist at the organization this message was sent to. Check the e-mail address, or contact the recipient directly to find out the correct address. SMTP; 550 Requested action not taken: mailbox unavailable

P.S. For Non-RSS readers of my blog, if you guys have still not subscribed to the newsletter of Online Diary, do it and remember to give the email address as your...@gmail.com

And if you don’t have a Gmail ID, its high time you had one. Let me know if anyone needs a GMail Invite, I have few to be sent out

1. I log into my GMail account
2. I click on Spam folder.
3. I select all the mails as I am very sure that every mail in this box is spam
4. I “automatically” click on “Not Spam” button on the toolbar !!

Thinking I am crazy ! After all, GMail has the best spam filter, why would anybody report spam mails as Not Spam ?

I guess this has to do with the confusing User Interface of GMail.

This is how the toolbar looks when Inbox is the active folder:

Notice the positioning of “Report Spam” and “Delete” buttons.

When Spam is the active folder, the toolbar looks like this:

In this view, the “Not Spam” button is on the right of “Delete Forever” button!!

After selecting the unwanted messages in Inbox, my hand automatically goes to the last button in the toolbar which happens to be the Delete button.

I am so used to this, that I do the same after selecting the messages in Spam folder. So instead of deleting the messages, I end up marking the spam messages as Not Spam .

Even the All Mail folder also has a interface consistent with the inbox folder.

I tried to analyze whether the buttons in Spam folder werereversed intentionally, but nothing seems to make sense. Spam mails which are more than 30 days old are automatically deleted, and there is no reason not to have the “Delete Forever” button on the right !

Am I the only one having this problem ? Anybody has any other views on this ?

I guess I have to get accustomed to using the new “Delete all spam messages now” option

Tagging is one thing which you will notice immediately in most of the new community based/social networking web 2.0 applications. I first saw this in Flickr and later in many other applications like Technorati , Riya , Del.icio.us etc.

Tags are usually chosen informally and personally by the author/creator of the item. Tags are typically used in dynamic, flexible, automatically generated online resources such as computer files, web pages, digital images (Flickr, Riya), and Internet bookmarks (del.icio.us etc).

(As a example of tagging a web page, you can check out the tag cloud at the Archives page of this blog)

Tagging of Digital Images has helped in users getting relevant results for a particular keyword. In a community based site like Flickr, you can expect to see more relevant images for a keyword than compared to a search in Google Images.

As an example, check the search results for Taj Mahal in Google Image Search and Flickr.

Flickr uses the tag information keyed in by the users and Google Image Search probably uses the Image file name (which is part of the source URL) and the ALT text (Alternate text) embedded in the HTML.

Again I am not sure what algorithms Google Image bot uses to index the images in web. The only two sources I can think of is the Image name in the SRC URL and the ALT text used for the image. But many web pages don’t use the ALT text for images and hence Google Bot might miss out on these images.

So in order to make the image search results more relevant, Google has started labeling the images !. And they are doing this is in a way typical of Google; using the brain power of Humans

The Google Image Labeler Beta automatically pairs 2 random users and both of them will be shown the same set of images. If both the users give the same label, the users are prompted with the next image. The idea is that if 2 people come up with the same label, it is probably a good/valid one and will make Google’s image search better. The concept is based on the ESP Game created by Carnegie Mellon professor Luis von Ahn and is now licensed by Google.

You can find more details about Google Image Labeler here and here !

So is tagging the answer to better, relevant image search experience?

Riya re-defined the way people search images. They built a face recognition/detection engine which could recognize faces in the pictures uploaded by the registered users. After a little bit of manual training, the engine builds a visual signature for a face, and the same was used to find/display all photos containing this face. The initial version of Riya focused on running the face recognition engine on the photos uploaded by the user.

Now Riya 2.0 is focusing on searching images in the whole of the web. I believe Riya’s crawler has already started indexing images and started building a repository of visual signatures.

Riya’s engine can be used to efficiently search for faces and text within the images. However, Riya additionally uses tagging so that users can input additional information about the images.

I believe Google Image Search with the “human” labeling will help in better search experience, but it lacks face detection and recognition. This might be one of the driving factors for Google’s recent acquisition of Neven Vision.

Riya on the other hand has face recognition in place, but the images they index might not be tagged. Riya also might need a Riya Image Labeler as a part of their Riya 2.0 Roadmap I believe !

Other Interesting Reads:

BusinessWeek : How Google’s Neven Vision could track our lives

Munjal :

• Questions about Google and Riya
• Google Acquires Neven Vision
• Riya 2.0 Roadmap

I was checking out on a new analytics service called CrazyEgg. The application is supposed to help you get a clear picture of where your visitor are clicking including the Ads. Accordingly the user can change/customize the layout of the site. It does display the clicked links pretty nicely. You can view the results in 3 modes

1. Overlay – Get Details of Each Individual Link in the page

2. List – View full summary of click data

3. HeatMap – View what is hot and not on your page.

With the free version you can track only 2 pages and the number of visits is limited to 5000/month. The free plan does not support live reporting !. Check this snapshot for their pricing plans.

So is the paid version really worth ? The same functionality of tracking outbound links can be achieved in Google Analytics. I guess very few people are aware of this feature. The analytics is primarily used to track the incoming statistics. However you can also track outbound links in your site.

And with analytics no longer requiring “invites”, its more inviting to use this application

Tracking Outbound Links using Google Analytics

1. If you check the source of this page, you will observe for that all the hyperlinks, the onclick attribute is set. This is one example

onclick=”javascript:urchinTracker
(‘/outbound/article/www.ageofempires3.com’)

The onclick attribute is the one which does the trick. The urchinTracker takes care of logging the click in your analytics. (Note:The path doesn’t need to be exactly like mentioned above)

2. How to check in Google Analytics ? Open “Content Drilldown” under “Content Optimization”

It should show “/outbound” as one of the Directories. Click on the folder icon and you can further navigate through the links

You should be able to see the statistics for all the outbound links. Another way of checking this is through the “Top Exit Points” option

Just type “outbound” in the filter text to view the statistics.

3. Do I need to add the “onscript” manually for all the links ? If you use wordpress, the answer is NO . There is a nice little plugin called Google Analytics plugin available here. Once you activate the plugin, it automatically adds urchinTracker tracking script for all outbound links.

Google Analytics is a free service offered by Google that generates  detailed statistics about the visitors to a website. Google recently acquired Urchin Web Tracking system and made it available via Google Analytics.

If you have content behind a security firewall or on an intranet or internal network that prevents you from using the Google Analytics service, you can use the original Urchin Software (Note that this is a paid service )

Download Urchin Software

Till few days back, Google Analytics was available only by invitation. In contrast to “invitation” based marketing, this invitation could not be sent by users using Analytics, it was sent out only by Google. When my AdSense account was approved, I immediately got the Analytics Invitation as well.

2 days back Google announced that they are opening Google Analytics to everyone. Now you don’t need to wait for an invitation.

Go sign up with your Google account grab the analytics script..

Other Links

Analytics Installation Guide

Urchin Software Corporation

Tour of Google Analytics Features