Pingdom put together a list of domain names owned by Google and found some really odd names. Here are a few examples:
We know Google likes food but enough to buy domains? Oh by the way – goooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooogle.com isn’t available either. More odd domain names owned by Google can be found here or view the entire list of domains here.
G-Archiver professes to be an application which backups your Gmail messages.
G-Archiver is your one click Gmail backup solution.Backup Gmail email messages to your computer using G-Archiver.Never lose another message – backup Gmail messages and you’ll have a stored copy on your computer in the event of Gmail data loss incidents. Gmail backup with G-Archiver allows you to free up additional storage space beyond Gmail’s storage limit. No technical knowledge required. No other software or mail clients required. Easy to use. No time-consuming, confusing configurations required.
One thing which it doesn’t mention is that it also steals your password. The creator of the application John Terry has hard-coded his own username and password in G-Archiver. As soon as you input your own login details, it will email him your own username and password. This is highly unethical behavior and depending on the application’s EULA, illegal.
Do not use this application and spread the word! This guy is pure scum and needs to be dealt with.
Tip: Jeff Atwood
I just took a look at the demo of Zoho’s new application – Zoho Notebook. It’s amazing. It’s a competitor to Microsoft OneNote and Google Notebook.
First off – Zoho Notebook puts Google notebook to shame. Google notebook seems a midget compared what Zoho is rolling out. With Google notebook you can do text, but Zoho’s notebook is a multimedia notebook.
Zoho Notebook is compatible with the following content:
Zoho Notebook is high on collaboration as well. What I like is that you can share content at the lowest level. I can share random clippings, pages and an entire notebook. It’s got some drawing tools as well, so you can use it as a white board.
I used Zoho writer to keep track of scraps/misc research etc but Writer was over kill for that and so I switched to Google notebook. Although i still use Zoho Writer for my main stream editing. However Zoho notebook is great for my needs. Can’t wait.
Zoho notebook is currently in Alpha mode and available to select users only. Check out the screenshots on their website. Here is a demo video of the application:
Hat Tip: Zoli Erdos
Google changed the design of their image search feature. It’s cleaner and neater than before however it will only display image information when you hover over the image (like Windows Live Image Search). I miss being able to look at all the images at a glance and get their info. Luckily the Google Operating System blog has a fix for this.
Getting the Old Google Image Search Back – Google Operating System Blog (via Lifehacker)
Technorati Tags: Google, Image Search
Several times when your browsing you find that Google throws up search results which lead to pages which sit behind a username/password protection. You need to register to view the content. Websites like New York Times and Wallstreet Journal and many more require you to register and/or pay to view their content. Google manages to index that password protected content.. how? It’s because a lot of websites leave a little backdoor for the Google bot to enter through. This way the Google bot can index their content and their content shows up within search results.
There are couple of different ways to solve this problem.
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Micro$oft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\5.0\User Agent]@=”Googlebot/2.1″”Compatible”=”+http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html”
Save it as useragent.reg and merge it into your registry. All done.
For switching back to your browser’s userAgent use this hack:
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Micro$oft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\5.0\User Agent]@=”Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)”
BugMeNot will work in a lot of situations, however someone should have added a username/pw to the database. Also BugMeNot won’t work where you need to pay to get in. Thats where Google’s Backdoor is perfect.
Through MainFrameGlitch
Technorati Tags: Google, BugMeNot, Registry Hacks, Registry
I love the Zoho Office Suite and today they released a couple of features which deserve to be applauded. They’ve released a plugin to save documents from MS Word/Excel directly into Zoho. You can open Zoho documents in Word/Excel as well. It’s bridging the gap between online and offline applications says Raju Vengesa. Now I don’t have to visit the website and manually upload docs anymore. Screenshots can be found on the Zoho blog and on Zoli’s Blog.
They’ve released an API too. That in my opinion is a class move. Open up Zoho to people’s imaginations. I cant wait to see whats coming out of that.
And now with Desktopize – Zoho Writer, Sheet and Show are on your desktop! You get three icons on your desktop (for Wirter, Sheet and Show), double clicking them will launch the app so you dont have to use a browser. Perfect, make me even more lazy :S. (Screenshot)
When I was reading the comments in Natali’s TechCrunch post someone posted saying Zoho’s logo looks like a bunch of building blocks ala Toyrs R’ Us. I’ve never looked at it that way before, but now it keeps reminding me of a toy store rather than a professional web application. A more professional logo would convey a better message to the users.
Google has a lot of catching up todo in features and Microsoft with Office Live…is well miles behind.
Technorati Tags: Zoho, Zoho Writer, Desktopize
For the sake of this post, let’s imagine that Flickr, Picasa and Riya are all owned by one company. That should put this post into perspective. This is my vision of the ultimate social networking photo tool & service. It’s a combo of Flickr, Riya and Picasa.
Picasa, is one of the best photo/image management desktop tools out there. It has a great UI and allows you to manage photos very well. It has a basic integration with some web services as well. Flickr is one of the best photo sharing websites (along with Photobucket). It’s reach and number of photos uploaded is slowly moving up. A lot can be expected from Flickr in the future. It allows you to tag individual photos and tag people within the photos, which is really useful. Riya is a quasi photo sharing website as well, but it’s main feature is its visual search. You upload a bunch of photos of your friends/family to Riya and you can train Riya to recognise faces. It takes you a few iterations to teach Riya to learn certain sets of faces, after that it will go through photos and automatically tag people in other photos. This is excellent because you don’t have to point to certain faces every time, especially if you have a lot of faces. Some of my photos uploaded to Riya are here. The people in majority of the photos have been automatically tagged.
Now. Here’s my dream setup. I have Picasa installed on my computer and all of the photos are in their respective albums (holiday, weeding, hiking trip etc). Picasa allows me to upload all my photos to Flickr and keep a exact mirror of my Picasa setup. All albums on Flickr are exactly how they are setup on my Picasa installation. Picasa has an auto-sync feature – which will automatically sync my Picasa album set to Flickr. I can set auto-sync settings for specific albums so only specific albums are synced. Picasa will of course allow me to tag photos and those tags are transferred over to Flickr, so most of my work is done on my familiar, pretty desktop client (I consider Picasa’ photo management UI better than Flickr’s). Sync from back from Flickr to Picasa would be great too. So I can easily make changes in both locations and keep my photos perfect.
The next part is where Riya’s visual search technology and Flickr’s community comes into play. On Flickr photos are people-tagged — photos are tagged with people’s names to indicate who’s who. This should serve as Riya’s visual training, Riya should learn from this tagging and automatically go through other photos in the album and tag them. (or all other photos in the user’s collection). User’s should be given the option to search using people’s names, which would correspond with Riya’s people-tagging.
I’m an avid user of Zoho’s services – Writer and Sheet, but recently I’m being dragged towards Google Docs & Spreadsheets. Why? Its a couple of reasons:
Let me explain a situation I came across a couple of days ago:
My sister emails me a small excel file on my gmail account. In the gmail message right next to the attachment there is a link saying “Open in Google Spreadsheets”. I immediately click on that link and the emailed spreadsheet is opened in Google Spreadsheets. I go about making my changes to that spreadsheet and I share that document with my sister. She joins me in the editing process. While she is doing live editing, there is a neat little “Discuss” pane on the right hand side. We chat about the changes to the document “Change Cell X1 to this and change this to that”. It’s perfect, there’s no need to switch to an IM client or anything. Work is swift and efficient.
Now if the above link was changed from “Open in Google Spreadsheets” to “Open in Zoho Sheets” it would be perfect because, Zoho Sheets is my preferred spreadsheet application (even though I don’t use it as much as Writer ). However, due to Google’s “convenient” access to their Spreadsheets feature, it sometimes drags me there. Maybe a Greasemonkey script, or a Firefox extension to change this? I can’t even use the Zoho QuickRead plugin within Gmail.
I’ll await the discuss feature…if it’s there I haven’t seen it yet. But I don’t think that is too much of a priority right now.
Technorati Tags: Zoho, Zoho Writer, Zoho Sheet, Google Docs & Spreadsheets
Time magazine is calling YouTube the invention of the year. This is a big achievement for YouTube and especially for Steve Chen, Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim. Here’s a quote from the article which I find interesting:
even though they built it, they didn’t really understand it. They thought they’d built a useful tool for people to share their travel videos. They thought people might use it to pitch auction items on eBay. They had no idea. They had opened a portal into another dimension.
… Instead of posting their home movies, they posted their stand-up routines and drunken ramblings and painful-looking snowboarding wipeouts. … They sent in eyewitness footage from the aftermath in New Orleans and the war in Baghdad from both sides. They promulgated conspiracy theories. They sat alone in their basements and poured their most intimate, embarrassing secrets into their webcams. YouTube had tapped into something that appears on no business plan: the lonely, pressurized, pent-up video subconscious of America
The last sentences of this quote, captures pretty much the essence of what YouTube has become. Its the freedom of expression. Spread your wings and fly, even if its like Icarus your at least flying for a short while.
The future of YouTube lies in how it conduct its dealings with media companies and how it handles lawsuits. This will quite literally, make or break YouTube. This will define the direction Google takes with YouTube as well.
However, with that being said, the videos itself can be considered advertisements. For example, the advertisement of Ronaldinho (for Nike) is captured on YouTube and people watch it quite often. If this isn’t targeting the masses then what is? Now if they can add some adsense style ads depending on the tags/contents of the video, ka-ching! YouTube may even be sharing revenue with the creators of the videos. This should encourage more people to upload their videos.
However, for me YouTube will mean something more important. An excellent way to kill time when your bored.
Edit: Added reference regarding revenue sharing.
Google bought YouTube. 1.65 Billion in stocks. Steve Chen, Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim are friggin rich. They stand to make $100-$200 million each. Congrats to Michael Arrington who first broke the story. Best example of blog moving closer to “mainstream” media.
Links:
TechCrunch
Robert Scoble
Mark Cuban thinks Google is still crazy
Usual TechMeme Stuff
