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:

http://profiles.google.com/mattcutts 

 

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:

http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/

 

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.

http://tech2.in.com/india/news/internet/gmail-suffers-yet-another-outage/67052/0

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).

http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2009/04/new-in-labs-google-search-right-in.html

Twitter keeps on growing especially in australia

Twitter loves celebrities.

We know that Oprah Winfrey's brought a lot of new users to Twitter in the U.S., but according to Hitwise, the popular microblogging service is currently seeing some of its most impressive growth outside of America. In Australia, where Oprah Winfrey doesn't command the same kind of daytime television audience, Twitter grew over 1,000% since the beginning of 2009, and its annual growth since last April tops 3,200%. In Australia, Twitter is now the 37th most visited web site.

According to Hitwise, 38% of the top 50 searches for 'twitter' in Australia include the name of a celebrity. Lindsay Lohan leads the charge, followed by Ashton Kutcher, Miley Cyrus, and Australia's own Hugh Jackman. While Kutcher's much publicized race to 1 million followers increased Twitter's share of daily visits in Australia by 10.6%, Oprah's first tweet only registered a 2.46% increase

Twitter is also seeing similar growth in other Asia Pacific markets. In New Zealand, the official home of RWW, Twitter's share of daily visits increased 305% in 2009, and it is now the 49th most visited web site there, and its growth rate in Singapore is comparable. Only Hong Kong is lagging far behind these other markets.

Twitter is Sticky

One interesting phenomenon about Twitter is that new users tend to stay on the service. In Australia, according to Hitwise, the single largest spike in visits came one day after the queens land election n March, and interestingly, Hitwise did not record a drop in numbers since then. This bodes well for Twitter, which, thanks to the hype around Oprah Winfrey and Ashton Kutcher, was able to pick up a lot of new users who typically wouldn't have been too interested in joining Twitter.

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/twitter_keeps_on_growing_-_especially_in_australia.php

Pixelpipe uploader firefox addon

Despite the number of add-ons available in the Firefox ecosystem, it can still sometimes feel like there are only a few truly good ones out there. That's why when we find one that's actually worth using, we get excited. The latest add-on getting installed into our small but critical collection of extensions is Pixelpipe's new drag-and-drop uploader. This utility lets you upload media directly from your computer or the web to any of the 75 plus services you've configured at Pixelpipe.com.

If you're not familiar with Pixelpipe, you should go get acquainted now. You can think of the service as sort of a Ping.fm for your media. Using their software, you're able to publish either text, photos, videos, and audio to any of the services supported, making it one of the easiest and quickest ways to distribute your content across the web. After it arrived last year, we quickly identified it as a winner when it worked exactly as advertised. Since that time, the company has grown and expanded, adding more features, more services, and even a handful of mobile applications. (We especially love that iPhone one!)

The latest addition to their collection of utilities is a new, experimental Firefox extension called the Pixelpipe Media Uploader 1.0. With this add-on, you can upload media all across the social web either through drag-and-drop or by selecting from a chooser.

After installing the extension and restarting Firefox, you'll see that there's a new orange "P" button in your toolbar. Click that once and the Pixelpipe sidebar will display on the left side of the screen. The first time you go to use this tool, you'll need to sign in with your Pixelpipe account and authorize it to work in Firefox. Once that's done, you can then drag-and-drop any media into the sidebar to upload it to Pixelpipe which then, of course, shoots it out to any of the services you've configured. Alternately, you can right-click on any image on the web and choose the "Upload image with Pixelpipe Uploader" option from the menu that appears.

One of the nice things about the uploader is that you can add the title, any appropriate tags, and set the privacy levels before you click "Upload." That way, you don't have to actually go visit the sites afterwards to configure these sorts of settings. 

This new utility is just another reminder of how desktop software tools are slowly being replaced by browser-based services. Who needs the Flickr uploader anymore when you can drag photos to your browser and send them directly to Flickr, Facebook, and a slew of other sites with only a click or two?

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/pixelpipes_new_uploader_is_a_must-have_for_firefox.php

Power point and TIF in Gmail

A few months ago, we added fast online viewing of PDFs in your browser. As of today, that same viewer now supports TIFF and Microsoft PowerPoint document formats too: you can now view TIFF and PPT files online, directly in your browser, without having to save the files to your computer and without needing to buy, install, or wait for any special software to start up.

We've had a "View as slideshow" option for PowerPoint files for a while; now we've integrated this conversion technology into the same viewer that we use for PDFs and TIFFs.

his viewer provides a richer set of features than the old "View as slideshow" version: you can zoom in and out, select text to copy and paste, and "print" the presentation to a PDF document. And, unlike the old version, we no longer require you to have a Flash plugin installed on your browser.

Courtesy:

http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2009/04/powerpoint-and-tiff-file-viewing.html

Twitter experiments with new status notification

It appears Twitter is experimenting with some additional tweaks that may make status updates easier and faster for its users and could help decrease the back end load on its servers.

A semi transparent notification bar (see screenshot below), slides down from the top of the screen when you update your status via the Web. While in itself, the feature may not appear earth shattering, the fact that updating now feels extremely fluid and is almost instantaneous makes us wonder whether Twitter will begin caching tweets for delivery to its servers.

Source:

http://www.readwriteweb.com/