Discoverability & Visibility

Out of sheer boredom (and recalling the opening scenes of Wanted) I started typing my name in Google. The auto suggest feature of Google took me surprise. Below is a screenshot of Google’s suggestions.

Obviously, searching for anas imtiaz, the first result was this website. Not only this blog, but my facebook profile, twitter, jaiku and imperial blog also ranked hihgly in this search result. Aur koi anas imtiaz nai hai??

Curiousity crept in and I decided to do some research on my visibility on the web. Searching for anas, my blog came up on the 4th page i.e. within the first 40 results. The search keywords anas pakistan, anas imperial and anas blog produced my blogs on the first page of the results.

The point here is not (entirely) to brag about my blog being ranked somewhat nicely on Google but the uncomfortable fact that I can be found so easily with a few clicks.

This is advantageous to an extent; I can be easily found. Yet this is also the disadvantage, I cannot hide!

One-Click AND Drag-and-Drop Attachments in Gmail!

Attaching files using the web-mail interface can be, and surely is, a painful task especially if you have an obsession of keeping files in deep multiple levels of hierarchy. The most arduous part is extracting the file from that tenth level deep folder while browsing and selecting file to upload. It is especially redundant when that particular folder is already open in your Windows Explorer with the file starting in your face, but you can’t attach by clicking on the file.

As a user of Gmail, one should believe with conviction that there exists all sorts of add-ons to grease the skids and make our lives as easy as possible. With that in mind, I googled the web looking for some sort of software using which I could just right click on the desired file to be attached and the rest be taken care of. I easily found gAttach! which did everything I was yearning for except that it didn’t work for me. (Do let me know if it works for someone) [Update] gAttach! works wonders!! The developer of this gem, Chris, was kind enough to work with me to pinpoint my problem which was resolved after I cleaned up my registry!

So the quest continued. As with any problem, there are always two solutions: the simple and neat straightforward one, and the workaround.

It is this workaround (I’d rather call it improvisation) that I present here to do exactly the same thing – attach files in Gmail with a right-click file option. (more…)

Yes, This Is You!

Gmail is known for many of its top features including labels, filters and search. But did you know that you have an unlimited number of aliases in addition to your primary address? Consider the following:

If your email address is username@gmail.com, then user.name@gmail.com, us.er.n.ame@gmail.com, u.s.e.r.n.a.m.e@gmail.com, etc. are all yours as well. The number of dots can be unlimited, the system just strips out the dots so the whole string of text (with any number of dots) belongs to you.  See the image below.

That’s not all, all those usernames are equally valid on the domain googlemail.com i.e. gmail.com and googlemail.com can be used interchangeably. Why? Read here. The image below shows a test mail.

It’s not yet over! Any thing can be appended to your primary username after a plus sign as well. For example, username+school@gmail.com, username+work@gmail.com, etc. and filters can be made to apply different labels to these and route them to different folders.

With all this and more, how can we not love Google?!!

Read the links below for more info:

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/1-awesome-gmail-tip-you-dont-know-about-seriously/

http://somegirlwitha.com/2008/04/17/the-dot-plus-and-googlemail-gmail-hacks/

http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&ctx=mail&answer=10313#

Google's Web Browser CHROME Features

Google has surprised the world yet again with its very own super web browser’s beta scheduled to be released today. A comic has been released by Google (download PDF here) which showcases some of the features in this innovative browser. Some screenshots have also been leaked which can be found here. I must say that I’m more than impressed by the set of features packed with this browser and can’t wait to get my hands on its beta release. It may be a bit early to say, but I do feel confident enough that I will be switching my loyalty from FF to Chrome very soon. The best part about the browser is that it is OPEN SOURCE!

A brief list of features that I was able to collect is listed here.

• Task Manager like the one in Windows, which can be used to determine which web sites or apps are using more computer/browser resources and hence can easily be eliminated.
• Each tab is treated as a separate process, in complete isolation with the other having its own memory and global data structures, which means that if there is a browser bug due to a certain website, only that particular tab will be needed to close and NOT the whole browser. This has to be awesome! Also, the tabs can be easily detached from the window.
• OMNIBOX. This is the name given to the address bar, which is sure to give a tough time to FF’s Awesome Bar. It offers suggestions, top pages you’ve visited, pages you haven’t visited but are popular (wow) AND a full text search over your history!!
• PRIVACY MODE – You can browse in the so-called INCOGNITO window and leave no trace what so ever.
• SECURITY – Surely, this is the most important issue with all the browsers. They claim to have done enough with SANDBOXING, such that each process is stripped away of their rights and hence can’t right files to your hard drive or read files from sensitive areas. The browser will also warn you of possible phishing. Google chrome is continually downloading lists of harmful sites and a visit to any such site will be notified with a warning.
• Something that hasn’t been mentioned but is obviously apparent that all of the Google’s applications including Reader, Calendar, GMail, Talk, etc. will have some sort of association with the browser and will be easily accessible.
• Memory efficient. There is a great deal of detail of how this is achieved in the comic. A simple example is that when you navigate from Site A to Site B (which are not at all linked with each other), the data stored with the previous site is tossed out recycling the whole process.
• When you open a new tab page, it doesn’t show up as blank. Instead it shows your nine most visited pages. There is also a sidebar that shows the sites you search on most

The download page will be updated anytime now. So the wait isn’t long enough to test-drive all these features, and more.

Speech Recognition in YouTube Search

This is huge. Google has added speech recognition capability in some YouTube videos that enables you to search for text spoken in these videos.

To try speech recognition in YouTube yourself, add this gadget to your Google homepage. The search is currently limited to some political videos only but a good hint of what is yet to come in Google search.

If your search query match some YouTube video, the positions are indicated by yellow markers – hover the mouse to read the transcribed text as in the screenshot.

Like Blinkx search, Google uses their own speech recognition technologies to listen to the audio portion of the video and then transcribe speech into text.

And this happens real fast – Google can search and transcribe text from new videos with hours after they get uploaded on YouTube.

Imagine how useful Google search will become when it expands their video speech recognition to other video content like TV clips, news videos, video podcasts, etc.

This article is copied, as is, from Digital Inspiration.