Saturday, May 9, 2009

Create your Google profile


We recently announced that Google profile results now appear at the bottom of U.S. name-query search pages. Creating a profile gives you greater control over what people find when they search for your name on Google. Your profile can include online photos, links to your blog or other online profiles, and ways for people to contact you -- and you can restrict contact information like your address and phone number to only the people and groups you choose.
When creating a profile, you have the option to use your Gmail username as a your profile URL (profiles.google.com/yourusername), so it's easier to remember and share. Some examples:
 

If you want people to be able to contact you, but don't want to reveal your email address to the world, you can hide your username and use a 24 digit number instead. Turn on the 'Send a message' feature, and anyone with a Google Account can send you a message through your profile, without having your email address revealed to them.
Don't have a profile? Go to www.google.com/profiles  to get started.
source courtesy:
 

Friday, May 8, 2009

Gmail Suffers Yet Another Outage


Gmail users were greeted with a "Temporary Error (500)" message today, making the service temporarily unavailable.

Calling the outage another Gfail, Twitter buzzed with complaints from all over the world, with some complaining that Google Apps too was down. The Google Apps page confirmed with a red cross against Google Mail, that there was downtime on Friday.










Sunday, May 3, 2009

Google search right in Gmail

I used to have a problem. People would ask me questions, over chat or email, and I'd have to leave Gmail to search Google for an answer. Then I'd have to select the answer, copy it, go back to Gmail and paste the answer into the chat window or my reply. Sometimes I'd get distracted and forget to go back to Gmail, and I'd have to go through it all again when I remembered what I'd been doing.

With the new Google Search experiment in Gmail Labs, my problem is solved. When you turn this feature on from the Labs tab under Settings, you'll see a new search box on the left side of your inbox, like this:
ype your search in, and a window (like a chat window, but a bit bigger) appears at the bottom of your screen with the first few search results. 

You can click on a search result and it'll open up in another window (or another tab) so you can make sure it's what you're looking for. Once you're sure it's a result you need, moving your mouse over the result back in Gmail reveals a pull-down menu that lets you do stuff with the search result.

What's in the menu depends on what you're doing in Gmail:
If you're reading a message, you can start a reply to the message with the search result as the first thing in your reply.
If you're writing a message, you can paste the result, or just the URL into your message.
If you're chatting with someone, you can send the result via chat.
You can also always compose a new message to send the search result.
If you have keyboard shortcuts turned on, typing g and then / will take you to the search box when you're not composing, and Ctrl + g will do it when you're composing (that's ⌘ + g for Mac users).