(January 17th, 2010)  help haiti - support disaster relief in haiti http://www.google.com/relief/haitiearthquake/ (comments:5)

(January 7th, 2010)  nexus one - check out google’s “nexus one” phone that was developed with HTC at google.com/phone (comments:9)

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February 20th, 2010

Google Docs, Backup All Your Files


In case you didn’t know, Google Docs now allows you to upload any types of files to your account, not only word docs, pdfs and spreadsheets like before but virtually any type of files.

It can basically serve you as an alternative backup space for all your important data. Google also makes it very easy to share your files with your friends. And if 1GB space is not enough you can easily add up to 16TB (yes terabyte) additional disk space. For example additional 20GB disk space will only cost you $5 per year, more details on pricing here.

google_docs_backup.png

It seems Google really wants to know more about you :) The more info and files you give to them, the happier they will get. But frankly, what would we do without Google and it’s free services?

Website: docs.google.com

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January 18th, 2010

Google and Breadcrumbs


Implement breadcrumbs navigation in your website and Google will reflect it on its Search Results, instead of the URL path that it normally shows (see below).

breadcrumbs_google.png

And the links in the breadcrumbs actually point to different sections of the website, just like the navigation on actual website. That’s cool.

I didn’t know they did that. Looks very user friendly to me. So, if you can, try implementing breadcrumbs in your online projects.

Breadcrumbs and Usability: www.useit.com/alertbox/breadcrumbs.html

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December 23rd, 2009

Track Number of Clicks on Your Bitly Links in Your Tweeter


Bit.ly, the popular URL shortening service has an extension for Chrome and Firefox browsers, which allows you to see number of clicks on your bit.ly links in a tooltip (see below screenshot from my twitter).

bitly_addon.png

Clicking on “More information” link will take you to the details page for that particular link on bit.ly. I have been using it for a week now and find it very useful.

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December 12th, 2009

Google Invites Giveaway


I have some (25) Google Wave invites. If you need one, just drop a comment on this post and I will send you. It will be sent to the first 25 commenters.

screenshot:
google_wave.png

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December 12th, 2009

Google and Your Privacy


Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google has this to say about the Privacy issue on his interview with CNBC:

If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place. If you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines — including Google — do retain this information for some time and it’s important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act and it is possible that all that information could be made available to the authorities. watch the video

This statement from Schmidt has caused quite an uproar on the net, Mozilla’s Director of Community Development Asa Dotzler even pointed out that Bing has a better privacy policy than Google and encouraged people to change the default search engine in Firefox to Bing.

This kind of comment from Schmidt definitely won’t go well with their to-be-launched Operating System Google Chrome.

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April 28th, 2009

Google News Timeline


googlenewstimeline.pngWant 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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March 13th, 2009

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.


ganalytics1.png


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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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ganalytics2.png


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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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ganalytics2.png


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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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February 13th, 2009

Google FriendConnect Toolbar Widget


google_connect_bar.pngGoogle 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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February 4th, 2009

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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January 24th, 2009

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.

feedburner_transfer.png

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!

feedburner_transferred.png

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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