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Google News Timeline

Want to read Google News like a newspaper? Go to newly launched Google News Timeline by Google.

Google News Timeline is a web application that organizes search results chronologically. It allows users to view news and other data sources on a browsable, graphical timeline. Available data sources include recent and historical news, scanned newspapers and magazines, blog posts, sports scores, and information about various types of media, like music albums and movies.

URL: newstimeline.googlelabs.com/

       

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TinEye - Searching for images the other way

TinEye is an image search engine that employs image identification technology rather than keywords - you upload sample image (or give URL of the image) and the search engine will find for you images that has the similar shapes, concepts, characteristics.

The results can be the same image, modified version of the image or a different image altogether as seen below. Also, the naming of the images do not really matter in this case as long as they match in appearance.

If you want to see more examples of search results, see cool searches page.

Additionally they have iPhone app which allows you to search for products using your mobile phone’s camera. Just take a picture of the product to start searching for product info and reviews. Cool Stuff!

Website: tineye.com

       

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How to share Google Analytics reports with others

Google Analytics is a great service and it’s used by many. One of the features that I like about Google Analytics is - sharing your reports with others.

Sometimes advertisers or potential partners would ask for your blog’s/website’s traffic statistics. And in this time of fraud and forgery, screenshots won’t simply do it (perhaps this might do). They want to see the real, live statistics. So, in this kind of situations G.Analytics’ “share reports” feature is a great solution.

Sharing your reports is easy, can be done in 3 simple steps.

1. Login to your G.Analytics account and go to your overview page of your reports. At the end of the page you will see a link “User Manager”, click it.

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2. Next page will show you the list of emails (people) who have access to your reports. If it is your first time, you will only see your own email. Click on the “Add User” link.
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3. Enter the person’s Gmail, yes it should be gmail and not any other email. And select the access type, you can either make the person “admin” or “view only”. After that, choose the report of the site(s) for him to view, in case if you have more than one site being tracked by G.Analytics.

Note: Be careful when making strangers admin of your reports.
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That’s it. Now the person can login to his Google Account (Analytics) and see your reports inside his account. You can remove the person from your reports anytime.

       

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Google FriendConnect Toolbar Widget

Google FriendConnect added a toolbar widget. Now you can display it on top of your blog or at the bottom of it for your members to join and communicate with each other.

Unlike Yahoo’s MyBlogLog, Google FriendConnect is a bit vague in its positioning. I am still not very clear what its real objective is? How about you?

Do you use it on your blog? If yes, how it has benefited your blog? Share with us your experiences and success stories so to speak.

Here is its description on Wikipedia:

Google Friend Connect is an online service by Google that allows users on the internet to connect with their friends on different websites.

Google Friend Connect is an Open Social application offered by Google that started in May 2008. Google Friend Connect main focus is to simplify the connection between social and non-social websites and standardize the handling and presentation of social applications and content. It uses a blend of open standards, such as OpenID for signin, oAuth to control data, and Open Social for applications.

Google Friend Connect is free but requires approval of the website using it. It requires no knowledge of web programming and enables any website to offer social applications and content from Facebook, Hi5, Orkut, Plaxo, MySpace, Google Talk and other social networks.

At the time the interface is in English and there’s no option to choose other languages. Google didn’t announce any plans to translate it and most words can’t be translated by the site that implements it.

Examples of use are:

1. E-commerce site: Allow users to check whether friends purchased or review the product you are interested in on the product web page.
2. News sites: Allow users insert comments and opinions with their real profile.
3. Organization Sites: Increase marketing and communication within members of the organization.
4. Blogs and Personal Websites: Increase communication within author friends.

Source: Wikipedia

Now after reading that, it makes some sense. Join my FriendConnect by clicking at the toolbar below, let’s get connected!

Website: www.google.com/friendconnect/

       

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Monitor site-hacking with Google Alerts

Google Alerts is great in keeping track of keywords. But it can also be used to monitor your websites if anyone has hacked them (hopefully it won’t be the case), if it does happen Google would send you a notification. Google team blogged about it on their blog saying:

… Try a site: search on your site to see if anything unfamiliar shows up in Google’s results for your site. You can add words to the query that are unlikely to appear in your content, such as commercial terms or adult language. If the query [site:example.com viagra] isn’t supposed to return any pages on your site and it does, that could be a problem. You can even automate these searches with Google Alerts.

Source: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/01/open-redir…

       

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Moving FeedBurner account to Google

For the past few days my RSS feed counter has been showing wrong count. Instead of showing 1200+ subscribers it is showing 700-800 subscribers. It’s clearly something wrong, because even with fluctuations it should be around 1000+ subscribers. Plus/minus 200 subscribers is ok, but when almost 500 subscribers are missing then there is really something wrong.

I guess it’s time to move my FeedBurner account to Google. As you remember after Google acquired FeedBurner, they have been encouraging people to move their FeedBurner account to Google. Everyone must move by February 28, 2009.

Why is FeedBurner merging its product with Google’s?

Our vision when FeedBurner joined Google was to help bring the best of what FeedBurner offered in syndication publisher tools and solutions to the AdSense platform, and vice versa. In the time since the merger, the FeedBurner engineering team has joined the Google engineering team (but still focuses on the same set of tools for RSS monetization, analysis, and optimization) and is not managed as a separate company or subsidiary.

Why do I need to transfer my account?

We are moving all FeedBurner accounts to Google Accounts.

Since Google’s acquisition of FeedBurner, Inc. on June 1, 2007, we have been moving the FeedBurner application to Google hardware, software, and data centers. This allows the application to scale and perform like most Google applications and integrate easily with other Google platforms. It also means more reliability in delivering your content, analytics, and monetization, as well as a more secure and consistent experience for your users.

In order to provide an integrated experience and to support the new features we have planned for our feed platform, as well as to improve security, it is necessary for logins to be handled via a Google Account. from FAQ

Transferred!

It took few clicks and about 1 minute to transfer the account. My new RSS feed is now http://feeds2.feedburner.com/AdesBlog. Old feeds will automatically point to the new one, but for the new subscribers it’s recommended that you give the new feed url.

Google warns that the RSS count might temporarily show “0″ for the latest day, and it might take around one week for it to work normally.

So, when are you transferring yours? I hope not on the last day - 28th February 2009!

FAQ Page: www.google.com/support/feedburner/bin/answer.py?answer=126303
New Login URL: feedburner.google.com/

       

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Google’s SearchWiki - Next Social Powered Search Engine?

Google had launched a service called SearchWiki sometime last month. But it had disappeared for some reason. And now, for the past few days I have been seeing it back again.

SearchWiki is an additional feature for Google which appears when you login to your Google Account. Yes, it only works if you are logged into your Google Account (Gmail, Google Docs…etc). Once logged, when you do search on Google, small icons will appear beside each search result. With these icons you can either promote (i.e move up) or remove particular result from the results page altogether. (see below).

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The effects of your removing or promoting certain websites will only be visible to you. In other words, it won’t affect the real results of Google.com (at least for now).

So, it’s like… personalizing Google results according to your own needs. What if, you know a site that is not there in the results? Well, you can add them, as simple as that. (see below)

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“Add a result” link is located at the footer of the page. You can also manage all your promoted and removed results by going to “See all my SearchWiki notes”

What it means for Google

It means a small step for Google but a giant leap for better search results ;) Seriously, it means a big deal for Google. It’s a matter of time when SearchWiki results will replace the normal Google search results.

Because Google’s current PageRank based system for its search results is prone to manipulation. And it has been struggling to contain this issue - fighting all those who pass PR to other sites (i.e who do not use rel=”nofollow” code on their text ads and other outgoing links. Most banner formats are automatically added “nofollow” by Google).

Google is very smart, by leaving SearchWiki for “personal use only” for sometime, they will actually generate a different set of parallel results for the same keywords searched in Google. And most likely, these combined SearchWiki results will be a better, more accurate results. Simply because they are generated by millions of people.

When leaving it for “personal use only”, it’s also less likely to be spammed. Because people will be improving their own results without knowing that they are actually improving the whole search engine results.

Could it be spammed?

Sure, once it goes public, people will try to spam it. But it’s less likely to affect the results. Because the ratio of the spam entries (submitted by tens of people?) compared to the legitimate entries (submitted by millions of people) would be too small. And even if they make to the first page, people could easily removed such entries by clicking “X” near to it.

Summary

I think Google is onto something great here. When it goes public, we can expect less spam and more accurate results. With all the social networking things going on on the net, it’s definitely the right thing to do for Google - to let the people manage the results.

What do you think? Please leave your opinion in the comments.

       

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Read All Issues of Magazines in Google

Google does it again. It announced that it will be digitizing all issues of (certain) magazines.

Currently archives of magazines like Popular Science, Men’s Health, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, New York Magazine, Maximum PC, Popular Mechanics etc. are available in full.

This is due to the court agreement that Google won:

Three years ago, the Authors Guild, the Association of American Publishers and a handful of authors and publishers filed a class action lawsuit against Google Book Search.

Today we’re delighted to announce that we’ve settled that lawsuit and will be working closely with these industry partners to bring even more of the world’s books online. Together we’ll accomplish far more than any of us could have individually, to the enduring benefit of authors, publishers, researchers and readers alike. source

That means we can expect more and more books and magazines to be available online in full soon.

Enjoy: http://books.google.com

       

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YouTube’s new feature “deep link” fails usability

YouTube has introduced a great feature called “deep link”. It’s a feature that lets you link directly to a specific time-frame within the video. For example, if the video is 5 minutes long and you want to show your friend from 2nd minute 15 seconds onwards, you can do that with this new feature.

How to do it?

This is how it is done - you need to add (manually) at the end of the URL, this code - #t=2m15s. It means the video will start playing from the frame 2minute 15 seconds (#t is for passing the time variables to the video, in this case 2min, 15sec).

Example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rI54UauUtSk#t=0m46s

Usability issue…

But as usual, YouTube (Google) seems to be thinking from programmer’s point of view and not from end-user point. Because,

1. It’s (nearly) impossible for general public to remember this code. It looks easy for you and me but believe me for a non-IT person it will be quite difficult to remember the code structure, symbols, letters…etc
2. It’s not user-friendly i.e not usable - you need to add the code manually yourself at the end of the link. There is also no instructions on the video pages. So, someone who haven’t heard about this new feature wouldn’t know how to do it.
3. It’s prone to typo-error. Since users have to type the minutes and seconds into the code themselves, they might put in the wrong numerals or make a wrong structured URL due to Point1 above.

…all in all, it’s not usable!

What I suggest!

I suggest that YouTube make this feature more usable, and make it available on each video page. This can be done easily. It can also be integrated into the video pages seamlessly. Here is my suggestion:

1. Add a small icon (clock?) at the end of the URL field, similar to the generate code icon (see image 3). When you click on the clock, it would enable “deep link” feature.

2. Once the feature is enabled, you simply drag the slider to the position you want.

3. The video URL automatically reflects the position of the slider that you are moving. Once you are done, it’s ready for you to copy!

This would make it much more usable and reduce typo-errors!

Would YouTube heed my recommendation? Who knows. But I hope they will, because it would make people’s lives a lot easier.

Ping: uk.youtube.com/blog?entry=EoZa0dlFRao

       

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Gmail: Auto-Responder Feature Added

Auto responder feature (kind of) has been added to Gmail. Actually, the main purpose of this new feature is to allow users to create pre-written emails for repetitive replies. So, for example next time you get an email that needs a standard reply, you can just use back one of the “canned responses” (that’s what they are called) that you have created earlier.

Enabling the Feature

In order to enable it, you need to login to you Gmail and go to Settings > Labs > Canned Responses. Click “enable it” and save your preferences.

Creating Canned Response

Now compose a new message, and type the text of your auto-responder. Once you are done, click on Canned Responses link (see screenshot below) and choose New Canned Response. It will popup a window. Give your auto-responder a name and save it.

Creating the Auto-Responder

Now the most important part - creating a filter. As you know gmail allows you to create different kinds of filters. As for your auto-responder, if you want to send everyone who emails you an auto-response, then you have to enter your own email in the To: field when setting a criteria for your filter (see below).

That would mean, all emails that is sent to your@gmail.com would receive an auto-response from you.

In the next step (see below), tick Send canned response and choose the appropriate “canned response” from the drop down menu.

You are done with your auto-responder! Use it wisely though. Don’t spam!

P.S When replying manually, if you want to use particular canned response, you just have to select it from the drop down menu and it will fill your text area automatically.

       

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