Tag: Internet

Google: The Mission 2009

Although still the year not over yet and who knows that if Google still has many things in its bag, but as my recent many articles have gone in updates from Google, I was really serious about compiling a list that what made news for Google in year 2009, but look like, I was not needed to take that pain as Lifehacker already has compiled the list for me early on.

Google’s 2009 Product Release Calendar

This has been a pretty busy year for Google and back-to-back announcement from Google really came to our life better and better. Take a ride through the last four seasons at Google in this list of 2009 product releases and updates, listed in chronological order, month by month.

January

February

March

April

May

June

July

August

September

October

November

December

All credits for this post goes to Life Hacker. I am just taking article from them to convey the info to readers.

photo of Nitish KumarNitish Kumar

 

Merge Duplicate contacts in Gmail

“ Dec 15, 2009, Gmail added a new feature to its contacts module, which lets one to remove every single duplicate contact entry at once from his Gmail contacts. I means to say that if you have many email ids saved against same person name and same email IDs saved more than once, then it consolidates them at once and so saves a lot of your tedious and time consuming manual work. ”

gmail logo

Managing a big address book can be a challenge, so it’s no surprise that the top request for Google contacts is a fast, easy way to merge duplicate contacts. So, here comes Gmail again with its unique innovations with your emailing experiences. Did you remember that when you started with Gmail, then what was special about contacts? They were being added automatically once you reply to any of their mail. Its been a nice feature. There were more related to contacts, like importing addresses from contacts of other email addresses, importing contacts from csv and many other means to make your contact list grew bigger and bigger.

You are sure not that worried from the bigger size of your contacts due to innovative and efficient auto-complete feature of Gmail, but for most of us, to avoid confusion, while mailing or for people, who like to keep them organized, this is a very very welcome idea of having a one-click-merge-button, otherwise it was a just one-by-one process. The implications are more real for those, who might have started syncing their phone contacts with their Gmail account.

Gmail-merge

The basics of how it works is quite simple. This new system runs  a simple scan on your contacts and the one button solution merge the information for each duplicate contacts. It’s a non-destructive method, so you are not going to loose any contacts, but if you have organized your Contacts in some certain way, then only you have to check whether the new system suiting to your method or not.

“ This feature is sure targeting users thinking to make use of Google Sync and will be sure handy for most of tech-savy people.What’s interesting is that why such a delay in announcing such a feature, when Yahoo and Hotmail have given similar long back in 2007 only?”

photo of Nitish KumarNitish Kumar
https://nitishkumar.wordpress.com
http://scifireviews.wordpress.com
http://nitishkumarsays.blogspot.com

LinkedIn now with Faceted Search

Look like Recession really has plugged in some great innovations back on track. Scared from apparent downfall of Facebook and MySpace, almost all the social media sites are on revamping of their interface and features. Here is the another update from LinkedIn: The Giant Business Networking Site.

linkedin

“ Dec 14, 2009, Esteban Kozak from LinkedIn announced the release of another huge improvement to LinkedIn’s people search experience, “Faceted Search”. “Faceted Search” offers dynamic filters that are automatically generated based on your actual query results. These filters let you quickly and easily hone your query over 50 million LinkedIn profiles based on 8 facets: current company, past company, location, relationship, location, industry, school, and profile languages. ”

The concept is based on the fact over what all the network sites were once based upon. “Finding the people, what you exactly wanted to find”, thus improving the technique of searching people faster and efficiently.

Now, how this “Faceted Search” works: As you search for something or someone, this technique automatically generates search filters, based on your query results, which lets you quickly refine your search. Check out the snapshot attached below, find the all new “Refine By” module there. This is what we are talking about.

linked

Currently these filters are based on 8 facets: Current Company, Past Company, Location, Relationship, Industry, School, Groups and profile languages.

“ In practice, it really makes your search queries more efficient like you need to search for an engineer in NCR (Location), has great interest in .Net technologies (Groups), who speaks english and hindi (Profile Language), have working/ worked for TCS (Current/ Past Company) and either in my friend list or in friend’s friend list (relationship). As the LinkedIn implementation is, the search results adapt the filter quickly and thus makes the entire process quick and effortless. ”

As their blog says:

Faceted Search offers the following benefits to your search experience on LinkedIn:

  • Enables True Guided Navigation: A list of filters are generated dynamically for every search in order to guide you through the optimal path to find the most relevant people
  • Provides Intuitive Interface: Refining your search is easier than ever with an intuitive user interface that allows you to slice and dice search results by 8 facets
  • Improves Precision: As LinkedIn continues to grow by the millions, increasing search space requires increased precision to help you find exactly the right people
  • Increases Efficiency: Find talent, business partners, customers or a former colleague faster than ever before.
  • Reduces Need for Complex Queries: It significantly reduces the need for complex Boolean queries. This was a particular need we heard from many of our power users.

Here is the official video of the same feature :—>

While this is going to make work smoother for people, who were taking help of LinkedIn Connections for their businesses, here I am just wondering on the basis of Google’s Launch of Goggles that when this limited feature to Android only, will be released to other platforms as well and we will have capability of searching someone by his/ her face only in Google Search or Orkut search (already picasa started name tags). Its pretty possible technology and its very about time, when Google must have launched the same. Waiting for that. 🙂

Till then you enjoy video about Google’s Goggles.

photo of Nitish KumarNitish Kumar

 

Now its 4G – Not in India but in Sweden :(

Sometimes, we really think that if we could have born in some other developed country… just for joke.. don’t mind.

Here is the news from techcrunch that caught my attention by this morning:

“ Dec 14, 2009, Teliasonera became the first company in the world to launch its 4G services (Currently limited to Stockholms and Oslo). Afterwards, the company is planning to extend the services to other areas (currently the license covers Sweden, Norway and also recently Finland) ”

4 G

So, here poor we, still waiting for affordable and workable smooth enough 3G services (MTNL is sure not that cheap and competent enough) and some other part of world is going to get speed around 100 megabits per seconds.

Although interesting to note that despite the launch of the network, no handsets can yet use 4G. Initially customers will connect via a dongle and a laptop.

“ Fourth-generation, 4G, networks are based around the Long Term Evolution (LTE) technology and downlink data speeds can hit 100 megabits per second – about ten times quicker than the fastest 3G networks. The technology has been designed to overlay existing 3G networks and most operators have committed to upgrading to the faster system. ”

As per BBC News, the company has released no information about the cost of connecting to the high-speed network. The dongles for connecting to the LTE network are made by Samsung, while Phone equipment maker Ericsson has put together the network in Stockholm, Sweden and Chinese firm Huawei is behind the one in Oslo, Norway. Both networks cover the central regions of both cities.

At the end, Handsets that can use LTE are expected in mid-late 2010. 🙂

photo of Nitish KumarNitish Kumar

 

Faster and more effective photo updates in orkut

Last many news from Google side only and I was thinking to make the next post on something else, but here Google again got my attention, this time by Orkut.

After the complete makeover of Orkut and revamped interface from the scratch, a few of good things that came out was expected addition of slideshow etc into photo album of orkut and top of all, it was much faster than ever in facebook way. Although there were a few annoyance like recent photos going at the last of the photo album, but over all, it was faster than anything earlier.

“ Here comes the another addition in features, In-line Photo Browsing: means now if you click on photo update thumbnail from a friend then you will be treated with full photo at the same place with options of navigating to other updated snaps in the same sliding way as it is album (kind-of-brining his album to your profile without your opening a new page), not only that but you can comment or tag over the photos as well from the same place. Not only that but now you could see a slideshow of the same photos as well from the same place. ”

In-Line Photo Browsing

Name tagging from In-Line

The slideshow

The new interface is in-a-way keeping users on the same home page most of the time as they can perform many things from there only, either it be commenting, tagging or most of the daily stuffs, they were used to do by visiting others profiles.

I am also noticing one trend from Google side. They first launch the feature itself and then after hours or a day, the same come through some announcement or via blog. Interesting

Here is the official blog post about In-Line Photo Browsing.

photo of Nitish KumarNitish Kumar

Google Namebench to hunt down fastest DNS

Few days back, I wrote over the promising Google product Google DNS and today I am choosing to write over another related utility from Google side.

Tell me!!! How you perform the task of choosing best DNS server? The famous one? The default ISP one? The knowingly reliable one? Don’t you think that its not a good practice to rely on things without self testing. Technically, DNS is one of most crucial point about your browsing experience, so how can you choose a DNS with not-so-well-defined process? Let’s see, what Namebench does here for your in place of just simplest tests, you might have done for testing the best DNS out there.

Google's Namebench

Namebench: One of 20% projects at Google, is basically an Open-Source DNS Benchmarking Utility. It hunts down the fastest DNS Servers available for your computer to use with a detailed method and report. Its written using open-source tools and libraries such as Python, Tkinter, PyObjC, dnspython, jinja2 and graphy.

Namebench runs a fair and through benchmark using your web browser history (after all, browser behaviour changes over what you visit), tcpdump output, or standardized datasets in order to provide an individualized recommendation. It also determine cache-sharing relationships between different IP’s and removes the slowest of these servers to avoid improperly benchmarking them solely on cached results. It also reports on DNS misbehaviour such as DNS hijiacking and censorship. Moreover, its completely free and doesn’t modify anything in your system. 

Screenshot

It runs on Mac OS X, Windows and Unix and is available with a graphical interface as well as a command-line interface.

Running the Windows/ Mac Version is kind of simple (and even Linux version, if you have right libraries python-tk in your system), you get greeted with a simplest interface as shown in pics, which is almost perfectly fine to run with default settings it appear with. Although, for more detailed description of the options, you may check the official wiki.

People, who like command-line tools more than GUIs, will get disappointed in case of its Windows version, but rest two versions has a pretty efficient command-line. You could find the info related using Namebench command-line here.

So, what you waiting for? Wanna be a geek? With Namebench, get a reality check yourself that are you in safe hands (right DNS server)? or which DNS is more better and how much better? Download it from here.

Here, I also want to comment over that “What a Google 20% project means?”

Google offers its engineers “20 percent time” so that they are free to work on what they’re really passionate about. Google Suggest, AdSense for content, Orkut and this Namebench are among the many products of this ‘perk’.

🙂

photo of Nitish KumarNitish Kumar
https://nitishkumar.wordpress.com
http://scifireviews.wordpress.com
http://nitishkumarsays.blogspot.com

Get back to reading with FeedDemon and Google Reader

online-journalism“ Have you ever noticed that most of us haven’t wrote a full page by pen from long, even if might have tons of tweets/ scraps, thousands of blog posts or hundreds of email of their own. In the same way, have you noticed that how your regular reading habits slowly shifted to web more than the traditional books and then shrinking to headlines from twitters or some random blogs from search results only. If you made the notice then its high time to make yourself managed to get time for more awareness and energy like your early best days. ”

This post is for layman’s like me, who really needs to pick upon basic things.

First of all, its all about how you read web.

Blogs? Obviously!!!
Famous ones? yeah Sure!!!
Official ones? Definitely, whenever required for authentic info!!!
How many of them you read? As any info required or have spare time, not a fixed number!!!
How do you manage to remember addresses? Bookmarks!!!

Here I am to introduce a very basic yet most powerful thing about reading web, many of layman’s like me might not have yet started with: web feeds (RSS). Have you ever noticed the very common orange icon Feed-icon.svg, which appear in almost every site you surf to read for. Its the thing called web feed.

A web feed (or news feed) is a data format used for providing users with frequently updated content. Content distributors syndicate a web feed, thereby allowing users to subscribe to it. Making a collection of web feeds accessible in one spot know as aggregation, which is performed by an aggregator (like our Google Reader, newsgator or FeedDemon is).

In Simplest words, web feed brings content to you via an aggregator (generally summaries) and an aggregator brings many feeds means variety of contents to you in their short forms, so that you may take a look over all of them without any need to visit all the sites to just looking for that if anything might have been updated.

feedDemon_logo google-reader-logo

There are many aggregators around like Bloglines, MyYahoo, Windows Live, netvibes, myAOL and Google Reader and sure Google reader like other Google products has taken most of the users attracted towards itself due to its simplicity and intuitiveness. Moreover, with features like reading from Mobile and reading offline, it doesn’t leave much of the space for most of the users to think for any other RSS Reader.

A simple account of how Google Reader works, could be found in video given below:

Lets see what FeedDemon offering more with existing Google Reader Account and subscriptions in it (Courtesy Labnol Article).

    1. Integration with Google reader: Its close integration with Google reader makes its able to follow you anywhere you  go. You might categorize your subscriptions into folders and as the same change will be passed to Google Reader itself, you will get the same structure everywhere, you use FeedDemon or even Google Reader’s online account (means you might have FeedDemon installed at your Office workstation/ Home one, both of the same will have the same folder structure, same subscriptions).

      feedfolders
    2. Real Time watches and Desktop alerts: You could set keywords to be watched for, so that any of news item having the same keyword will undergo that watch item and you may easily choose them to read. Moreover, you could put FeedDemon running in tray icons and it could show whenever a new feed appears in your inbox.

      rss-watch
    3. Deleting unused feeds: It shows you subscriptions/ feeds that are not being updated from last 2-3 months, so that you may unsubscribe from them, if you wish so. It also shows feeds, which are in your subscriptions, get updated, but you rarely read them, same could be deleted as well.
    4. Integration with Windows Live Writer: This is a particularly special feature for blogger. You may directly take any of the feed entry to Windows Live Writer or clipboard from FeedDemon easily.

      windows-live-writer
    5. Offline reading: With FeedDemon, you can choose to download all the unread subscription to be downloaded to your local disk for reading offline later.

    6. Themes per folder/subscriptions: That’s a particular thing, I like most about FeedDemon. Currently there are six cool themes (Blue Vista, Expando, Outland, Photo Strip, Prince, Surfer) to choose from to set over any folder/subscription and all these theme are particularly useful for reading different type of blogs (like Photo Strip suits better than anything else for Photo Blog). I am also putting a few screen shots for each theme to let you feel, what the experience is.

  1. blue vistaphoto strpsurferexpandooutlandoprince So, what are you waiting for, you will come to feel the power of information management, once you start with something like Google Reader and FeedDemon. Just give it a try, I am sure its worth it.

    Download link

    photo of Nitish KumarNitish Kumar