Update to Twitter’s Interaction with Apps
Posted on | September 1, 2010 | No Comments
Twitter just sent out emails to all their users to inform them about the change in the way twitter interacts with external applications.
From now on all twitter application will use OAuth technology that will help application log in users without directly asking password. This means applications are no longer allowed to save password you just need to connect the account once.
All long links will be shortened using t.co and wrapping will be done and displayed in tweets with part of domain and title page. This will be extended to all apps.
egs A really long link such as http://www.amazon.com/Delivering-Happiness-Profits-Passion-Purpose/dp/0446563048 might be wrapped as http://t.co/DRo0trj for display on SMS, but it could be displayed to web or application users as amazon.com/Delivering- or as the whole URL or page title.
Features that Make Gmail Intelligent
Posted on | September 1, 2010 | No Comments
Gmail announced a feature called Priority inbox that would make sorting emails in ones account incredibly easy as it uses an intelligent sorting algorithm which gets better every time you you use it.
That is not the only intelligent feature in Gmail that makes it the best webmail. It also contains several small but useful features. It has an intelligent spam filter. Chances that you will find spam in your inbox is very less as much as 1 in 100000, unless of course you go on giving out email ids in bad neighbourhood sites.
Write ” I have attached” in the message body and try sending it to anyone without attaching anything. You will get a pop up message from gmail enquiring whether you want to send the email without an attachment. It is incredibly useful when you write long emails and you forget to attach any attachment you wanted to attach. It saves you from the hassles of resending the email with the attachment
Suppose you like sending particular emails to a particular group of people. Gmail remembers your group and next time you forget to send it to a particular person it will notify you about that. This feature is in labs and is called Don’t forget Bob.
There is another useful lab feature which is a variation of the above feature called Got the wrong Bob? In this, if you send emails to a particular group of people it remembers the preferences. Next time you try sending an email to this group but get a person’s email id wrong, due to several similar email id’s, gmail will warn you. egs. If you put bobsmith@gmail.com instead bobmartins@gmail.com
And lastly, it has an incredibly good search. You can search through entire set of emails using operators to find the exact email you wanted. It is as easy and powerful as the Google search itself.
Gmail Priority Inbox Launches
Posted on | August 30, 2010 | No Comments
Google and their Gmail team never quite stop to amaze me. They had made email fun and easy from the time of launch when it was still in beta. Better spam filter, ever growing inbox memory (at a time when a competitor gave just 250 mb of space) and lots more.
They launched multiple inbox feature few months ago. It helped you create a new inbox when you login according to the filter you created. I used it create a separate inbox for emails forwarded from my another Gmail account.Hence, I only need to login to my main account to check mails of both the accounts.
Priority inbox is similar to the above but intelligent on its own. The gmail team has been working on the algorithm for past 18 months.
If you have signed up for many newsletter you will find the priority inbox feature very useful to sort out the important mails from the less important ones.
Priority Inbox splits your inbox into three sections: “Important and unread,” “Starred” and “Everything else”:
If suppose Gmail algorithm fails you can use the +/- options to set priority of emails. Gmail algorithm will use this information to intelligently sort your emails next time.
This feature is being rolled out slowly to all users. If it hasn’t been activated yet, it will be soon. Just wait.
Sumo Wrestlers are given iPads as they are too fat for mobiles
Posted on | August 30, 2010 | No Comments
Japanese sumo wrestlers have been given iPads to communicate because their fingers are too fat to use a standard mobile phone reports the Telegraph.
It is amazing to see how people find out innovative and interesting ways to use Apple’s products.
The Japan Sumo Association is distributing 61 iPads amongst it’s 51 wrestlers and officials. They say that doing so will help them communicate as they are too fat fingered for standard mobile phones or smart phones.
Sumo officials decided to go digital and buy iPads as the ancient sport attempts to mend its ways after scandals over wrestlers’ ties with gangsters and illegal gambling, match-fixing and brutal hazing of apprentices.
With a reliance on faxes and phone calls, the sumo association has occasionally failed to distribute urgent messages to its officers and stable masters.
Steve Jobs might get a bear hug from these happy sumo wrestlers.
Verisign will give you big bucks for your .COM story
Posted on | August 26, 2010 | No Comments
Verisign is offering up to US$10,000 in cash prize for your story on how .COM changed your life in How Do You .COM contest. Also up for the grabs are $5,000, $2,500 and 10 iPads. .COM here is taken in context as the Internet phenomenon and not just a TLD.
The .COM age changed the lives of many people. Alex Tew of milliondollarhomepage.com, founders of Yahoo and Google, etc and the list goes on.
So, if you have an interesting story on how the .COM age has changed your life then you must enter into this competition. Write a 300 words essay or record a video (less than 2 mins and 2GB) where you describe how .COM changed your life.
You need to send in the entries before 31 August, 2010 23:59:59 MDT. And finally this contest is open only for residents of the US, Canada and Puerto Rico, so I am not eligible to participate.
Innocent way to spam Twitter
Posted on | August 21, 2010 | No Comments
We all loved Christopher Nolan’s movie Inception. It has been trending on twitter even before it released. Now think how to take advantage of people tweeting and searching about the movie Inception. Simple, use the word as a part of sentence and promote it.
The Last Exorcism movie makers have used this trick to good effect. They have advertised their movie on twitter and have cleverly used the popular keyword ‘Inception’ without making it evident that it is spam.
Twitter on its help page has mentioned that only tweets that resonate will be shown. This particular tweet had just 9 retweets after 13 hours but was still being displayed on the search result page of ‘Inception’. Simply, because people who were tweeting about the movie ‘Inception’ were helping this tweet resonate.
Gmail’s interface is revamped
Posted on | August 10, 2010 | 1 Comment
As mentioned in earlier blogpost, Gmail’s interface has indeed been changed today. It looks cleaner with contacts link and an ability to sort contacts by first name , last name and phone number.
Here is the blog post Future design changes to Gmail.
Delhi police using Facebook to track errant drivers
Posted on | August 2, 2010 | No Comments
Delhi police have started a facebook page to help ease traffic problems in the capital city of India.
From NYT
The traffic police department started a Facebook page two months ago, and almost immediately residents became digital informants, posting photos of their fellow drivers violating traffic laws. As of Sunday more than 17,000 people had become fans of the page and posted almost 3,000 photographs and dozens of videos.
It is a cool thing here in India where red tape and bureaucracy slows down everything. A government department using Internet, especially a social networking site like facebook is refreshing.
By Lingaraj G J - Flickr
It will be interesting to see if the police allow the people to film cops breaking laws themselves.
Epic Browser: Browser built on Mozilla for multilingual Indians
Posted on | July 31, 2010 | No Comments
This is why I like Free and Open Source software (FOSS). A Bangalore based start-up called Hidden Reflex has launched a browser called Epic Browser which is based on Mozilla Firefox.
In India, majority of the population don’t speak English or Hindi as their first language. This browser will be a boon to them. Users just have to type their word phonetically in English and it translates into the default language selected for the browser.
Other features include in-built anti virus as Indians are trigger happy downloaders, especially of free stuff.
In-built word processor.
It has greater privacy controls. You can delete cookies in one click.
Indianised wallpapers and themes.
Twelve local languages and many more to come.
You can choose to receive regional news on its favourites tab which includes your favourite social networking and bookmarking sites and popular cricket and bollywood sites..
Here is the screenshot with my favourite actress.
You can download this browser here currently only for Windows (Mac and linux will be launched soon).
Future design changes to Gmail.
Posted on | July 31, 2010 | No Comments
An image uploaded to the Chromium OS bug tracker shows a number of changes to the design and layout of Gmail. This seems as a Google’s internal version of Gmail. These changes may or may not be made public.
Here is the visible list
1. Three new links at the top of the sidebar menu (Mail, Contacts, Tasks)
2. Compose mail link is now a button
3. A drop-down allows you to switch between Google accounts
4. Select all, none, unread, etc. is a drop-down instead of a link list.
5. Call phone option appears in Gmail Chat
6. Chat settings appear as a drop-down
7. Search contacts box has moved
8. Menu at top of screen seems to have been moved from the right to the left.
keep looking »
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