Tag Archive for 'google'

Google Sunsets Urchin

Published on January 23, 2012 in Miscel. 2 Comments

Of late Google has been busy trimming the list of products and services it owns. Most of the acquired ones have been integrated into some core Google product and thus makes sense to drop them. For example, Pikniks features have been integrated into Picasa and is thus being shut down in April.

Another such product is Urchin. Having acquired the web analytics company, Google went into overdrive to create the Google Analytic service. Needless to say Google Analytics is way better than Urchin. The modified urchin.js (now called ga.js) does much more – it can track events and client side activities better than urchin.js. Thus the announcement to sunset Urchin. However, this might not be very well received by every one out there.

Google Analytics requires one to feed their logs to Google servers. Yeah you could un-check the tiny box to stress that the data should not be shared with Google, but still a lot of people will be uncomfortable with storing their data on servers not owned by them. With Urchin one had the benefit of locally installing the service. The UTM logs would be collected on boxes owned by the companies and also the log processor would run inside their firewall. Every company needs this sense of security. The moment log collection and parsing are pulled out of a company’s firewall eyebrows are raised. This is the reason why I believe that there will not be many takers for their Google Analytics Premium service. A person who is willing to pay 150000 USD per year have privacy and data security concerns no matter what the contract says.

For quite a while the Urchin software had not been updated. Google could have let the situation be as is. But by announcing that no new licenses will be sold from March onwards, they have challenged everybody – give us the logs or get lost. This kind of goes against their Google Is Not Evil policy. Not a good move in my opinion.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Google Inserting Ads In Maps Interface

Published on November 19, 2011 in Miscel. 0 Comments

I only noticed it today! Now when you click around at objects in the Google Maps, you might just see an advertisement inserted in the popover. Here’s a screenshot. The description for Kyra Power Dining & Theatre has an ad from justeat.in.

googleMapAd

Popularity: 1% [?]

A Spam Mail That Gmail Failed To Filter

Published on November 14, 2011 in Miscel. 4 Comments

And it should have! It’s such a common template!

Your email address has won 753,000 G.B.P in this year special HOT DIAMOND DIWALI EXHIBITION. To receive your award, send your name and mobile number to Mr. Mark the officer in charge via email:  info@hotdiamondpro.com
Your Sincerely,
Skiles Jerry
Public Relations Officer

Popularity: 8% [?]

My Gmail’s Gotten Too Slow

Published on April 26, 2011 in Tech. 0 Comments

I love Gmail. I’ve used it as the only mail service since 2005. And thanks to the generous capacity, I’ve never had to delete any conversation. The tons of thousands of chat logs are all archived in my account. And when they rolled out the labels feature, I adopted it pretty quickly and cleaned up my inbox.

I am currently using 1808 MB of space – 23% of their allotted capacity.

But I have a complain now. My gmail’s gotten too slow! It’s not because of network issue. At home I have a 4mbps broadband connection. And yet I have to wait for like half a minute after sign-in action for the inbox to appear. Also when I send a mail, it takes forever. In fact, it has now become a routine for the message – Sending – to appear when I hit the send button.

And apparently, I am not the only one. Read this article at TechCrunch : http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/05/gmail-new-deal/

I know a few seconds or a minute is not going to kill me. But I hate having to stare at empty screen waiting for the action to complete. It’s the user experience which is being effected now.

I can only hope that whatever issue is causing the latency gets resolved soon.

Popularity: 4% [?]

TOW I Preferred Facebook Messages To Gmail !

Published on March 12, 2011 in Miscel. 0 Comments

I needed to contact Amit Tiwary immediately. He wasn’t online. I called him. No answer – probably busy in a meeting or something. What to do? What to do?

Facebook Messages to the rescue.

Facebook -> Messages -> New Message.

To: Amit Tiwary

<the message>

Check the box on the lower right corner to send the message to mobile as well.

A few minutes later, I get a reply from Amit. He replied to my message, which was sent to him as an sms, and the reply was updated in the messages thread and simultaneously sms’ed to me. Work done!

What I liked about this system is that, as a person sending a message you should not fuss about the medium of delivery. It is Facebook’s responsibility to ensure that the other guy gets your message, be it chat, mail or sms. And the other person should conveniently be able to reply to the message.

This is something Gmail lacks right now. They could perhaps let a Gmail user select a subset of contacts whose mail notifications be sms’ed if the user is not online on Gtalk or if the Gmail session is not active. And this should not be something difficult to implement.

Popularity: 2% [?]

The Gmail Delegate Feature

Published on December 20, 2010 in Miscel. 0 Comments

gmail Pictures, Images and PhotosGmail has this feature using which a person can delegate someone else to read and reply on his behalf. This could be an interesting and useful feature for a lot of people, myself included. I have two email ids, Earlier I had enabled multiple sign-on to be able to open both the gmail accounts in the same browser. But the multiple sign-on is a beta feature.

The delegate feature on the other hand simply lets me delegate the second id to the first one. So logged into the first one, with the click of a button (two actually) I can have the second email id opened up in a new tab. I can view all the mails of both the id’s and reply to the mails as well.

One important thing to note is the sent-by and sent-from addresses. The sent from contains the original email id and the sent-by contains the email id of the delegate.

The setup is pretty simple. One can turn on the delegate feature from Settings -> Accounts and Import -> Grant Access To Your Account.

grantAccess

Once the access has been granted, a drop down option appears besides the email id on the top right corner of the screen. In my case, I have delegated s.anuvrat to take care of my singh.anuvrat mails.

delegateInfo

Now when I click on the singh.anuvrat link in the Delegated Accounts sections, a new tab opens up to show the inbox of singh.anuvrat. I can compose any mail on behalf of singh.anuvrat.

mailReceivedGmail displays that the email is sent from singh.anuvrat but by s.anuvrat. And when you click the reply button, the default to-adress is the singh.anuvrat address.

Popularity: 5% [?]

Want A Free Chrome Notebook?

Published on December 8, 2010 in Miscel. 2 Comments

Woke up in the morning and found this mail in my inbox.

Want a Free Chrome Notebook ?

I checked the from-address and it was indeed from Google domain : chrome-notebook-team@google.com.

The mail contains a link to a form which contains questions about how one uses a computer, which applications are preferred, etc. And finally there’s a text box in which you have to justify yourself as an ideal candidate to receive the notebook.

Unfortunately, I am not a resident of USA. I might forward it to someone though.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Downloading All GTalk Chats

Published on November 23, 2010 in Tech. 0 Comments

There might be various reasons why one would want to download all of their gtalk/gmail chats. Google does not provide any api to do so. So quite naturally, I googled my problem and found a workaround.

Log into your gmail account from Google Chrome. Create a filter that labels all the chats.

Click on the Create Filter link which can be found beside the Search Mail box. For the search criteria, use Chat With text in the Subject text area. For the action set, you may just choose to have all these filtered mails to be labeled as LOGS. Make sure to have the filter applied to all the previous mails as well.

Now that we have filtered out all the chats, we need to have them downloaded. Go to Settings->Offline and toggle on the option. Since we are only interested in chats, choose only the LOGS label for downloading. Wait for all the chats to get downloaded. It may take a while.

Google chrome has a local folder where all the gears files are stored. The location at which our file can be found is:

%AppData%\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\Plugin Data\Google Gears\mail.google.com\https_443

We are only interested in the main database file. You can identify it by the following name:

.com-GoogleMail#database

Copy this file to a convenient location, say the Desktop. Rename the file to candorz.

Next a couple of scripts need to be downloaded. They can be found at extract.7z and sql4.7z. Extract these two files to the same location as above. Double click on the sql4 script and watch as a new folder called msgs is created and populated with all the chats. The extracted chats are in xml format.

Popularity: 3% [?]

China to Taiwan

Published on November 22, 2010 in Miscel. 0 Comments

Apparently, swimming 165 kms across the Pacific is how one gets to Taiwan!

China to Taiwan6

Popularity: 1% [?]

Paagal Google

Published on August 17, 2010 in Miscel. 0 Comments

Paagal Google

Paagal Google

Popularity: 2% [?]