Gmail, I love you!

Everyone uses Gmail. I've been a loyal user since I got an account in 2004. Back then I probably got it just to show people that I've got one and feel important. To be honest, there was nothing new except perhaps the simple looking ajax interface and the conversations view. And yes, there was this big space available which they later started incrementing indefinitely. That was quite a change in email service that followed. It was only later that other competitors began expanding their users' inboxes. A few other things I liked about gmail was starred conversations, labels as opposed to folders, archiving and chat from within the browser. Remember meebo? Gmail labs came out mid-2008. Again, there was lot of excitement around the launch but I chose to ignore the new "cool" features. However, later I started using some of them.

Recently, I've started using gmail as my mail-client-in-the-cloud (Yay, cloud computing FTW!). That is, I use gmail at work (so I can take some time off and check emails from home). After the initial mapping of outlook folders to labels, I thought a lot more needs to be done to get the 'corporate' effect. Labs came to the rescue. Am going to list the ones I liked best and some more you might want.

Default 'Reply to all'; Google Calendar gadget - portable preview of your calendar; Google Docs gadget - access often used Docs; Multiple Inboxes - this one's amazing. I prefer this over their 'priority inbox', do try it; Navbar drag and drop - move around some of the gadgets above plus chat window; Nested Labels; Quote selected text - very useful when you're replying only parts of a long email; Send & Archive - reply to an email and hide the whole convo from your inbox; Sender Time Zone - doesn't seem to work sometimes. Supposed to show the time of sending in the sender's timezone (against the current time there too!); Title Tweaks - Gets the "Inbox (2)" before "Gmail" in the title so you can know from other windows; Undo Send;

I use most of them given above. Additionally, I use Inbox preview which is great while you wait for gmail to load. Especially if you clear out your inbox and organize them elsewhere.  There are a few more like Superstars, Quick links which I might try but I haven't got around to try it.  This is how my inbox looks like (you can't see all of what I've used, though):

I think Labs is a great idea. It makes sense to not confuse users with too many options and yet make them available optionally. I think users to should take time to try everything Labs has to offer and if possible contribute.

Outside of Labs, users with multiple emails, calendar and/or docs should try and integrate everything inside their gmail inbox. Personally, am excited by what Google has done so far and what they're to create in the coming days.

Bye,
LVS

PS: I do wish they remove the "96 invites left" box from my gmail. Really, who needs it anymore? Read more…

A twitter clone?

Sure, there are lots of twitter like websites and services available on the net. But you surely wouldn't have expected this. I came across an email where someone typo-ed gmail.com as gmail.net - I was laughing at it for sometime. But after a while, inspiration stuck and I thought lets try out http://gmail.net and see what happens. I wouldn't have been surprised if I had got some cheap search engine or 'this domain is for sale'. However, I was expecting a redirection to gmail.com (unlike airtel.in used to redirect to vodafone UK). Surprise. What I got was "What are 'you' doing?" in the header. They've even got versions it seems for says in the page 'Live Comments 3.0.4'
You have a field for name, email (both optional) and a comment field where you can type upto 255 characters. Twitter without accounts? Only am not sure how I can follow someone....Try it! Wonder why Gmail didn't buy it though.

~LVS

PS: A bit more exploring reveals that it is some geeks attempt at trying some AJAX...scroll to the end of the page
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Where are my readers?

Long long ago, I had enabled a beautiful tool, called Google Analytics for my blog. And I had forgotten about it. Today, I thought I'd use GA to track visitors, page clicks etc etc and realised what I already quoted in the first line. This being my second attempt (first here) at statistics for my blog, wasn't as cheerful to look at.
Here are a few things GA measured for me (and I pick the ones which were relatively the best)

• Visitor loyalty - how many times an individual user returned to read my blog
• Visitor recency - how soon did the returning user come back
• Bounce rate - how many just came to the home page and then went away without looking at other pages
• Length of each visit
• Number of unique users
• Page views
  
• and more...

And I scored abysmally on all of the above! 70% of the people visiting my blog, turn away after reading(?) the stuff on the first page, and playing with the fish too perhaps. Unique visitors is about 200. Average time on site is 2 mins. Average number of visits per day is around 4 :-( :-( :-(

So I thought it was time for some action. I guess you now realise that I have enabled summaries (which is not an _available_ feature in blogger). Number of posts per page have been increased. GA also tells me, 64% of the visitors are new and more than 50% come from referring sites. I've decided to make the biggest draw even bigger. Backlinks everywhere! My IM status will almost always say "Blog update" henceforth and things like that...More ideas for blog promotion are welcome. Yes, am on directories like IndiBlogger and Technorati.

Also, I need to make sure the visits spike on the day of a post is not too much higher than on other days. Any ideas for that?

OK, I made this post just to tell you people that some changes on this blog (visible/otherwise). A change of template didn't work. Someone suggest one?

Thanks and keep coming back for more! :D

Update: 'ravukalam' and 'i am an idiot latin translation' are keywords that show my blog as the first result on google search! :P yay!
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Glitch or gibberish?

Here's an interesting case of how iPhone can jeopardize marriages. A friend forwarded this in a mail. Its a case of how a husband took a "raunchy" picture of himself and mailed it to some female. While his 'Sent Items' claims this, the guy claims it is an iPhone bug! So the wife, who doesn't want to believe him, but still is open to it being iPhone's fault, got onto Apple discussion forums and decided to ask people. This is what followed.

I do wonder what happened to the couple and feel sorry for that female. Personally, I don't think this is a real iPhone bug, however, I did notice something very similar can be done with Thunderbird (my favourite mail client). Similar in the sense of getting a mail in your Sent folder or (Inbox itself) that you never sent! See screencast below: Sorry folks, I couldn't embed the screencast here, If you're interested, you can see here (SWF).

Here's what I did. I have two mail accounts set up on TBird, Gmail and my work email. Now, I select some random mail from one of the accounts (say gmail) and drag-drop it inside my work email's inbox. Now, my gmail (webmail) account shows the same mail as if it was sent to the account. Of course, the 'To' address field hasn't been modified, but it looks identical to case of being in 'Bcc' when the mail was sent.

I don't think this feature can affect businesses (though it is quite easy to modify the 'To' etc fields using some software) however, it can be used as jokes on your friends or if you want to cut out someone from your life....

Coming back to the troubled lady's case, I have shown that these things can be made to happen but I do not know what the chances of all these happening on its own are. But its not impossible; improbable but not impossible.

Update: The husband seems to have gone as far as creating a new account on Apple Discussions to reply to his 'wife' that he (ie some 3rd person) has also experienced similar problems :P
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How to...Why is...

Google can be as enthusiastic as girl in class who knows all the answers to the teacher's questions.
Recently, Vishal discovered that in a Gmail Atom feed. I for one, found something similar. At first I thought, "Why is Google being so silly?". Take a look at the suggestions (automatically generated) given by the Google search bar in Fx3 for "How to ".

Then I tried with some other keywords, I've got a grab of that too.

This is when I realized (and with some shame, remembered), that Google gives these suggestions based on frequently searched keywords! Woah, are there really so many people who have second thoughts about their marriage?! Ask google indeed!!


Update. Seems the suggestions change with time and is also affected by what you searched. Sample, a N(a)RI-in-US's results:

~LVS
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Idiot Totalica

Well, perhaps this post ain't really got anything for you to read. The sole (there has been no typo here) purpose of these few lines are to get Technorati's (TR) spiders on to my blog. So that they can know this is really my blog.

I am supposed to post a special/unique link somewhere here, so that they can cross check. Of course, I could've given them my blog link and password, but as you might already know, am not very forthcoming in trusting someone with my passwords.

So here you go TR, Technorati Profile. As the name suggests, this leads to my profile which I haven't updated as yet. (Sorry TR the lack of trust, and thanks for this opportunity for another post!)


Ahh..I almost forgot, the name of this post comes from what a friend called me for giving her devious hints as to how to claim your blog on TR. Well actually my own Latin translation of 'complete idiot'. :-)

Have fun,

~LVS
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Firefox 3 - The best yet!

Update: Firefox does it! A Guinness record for most software downloaded in 24 hours! A stunning 8,002,530 downloads, verified by Guinness Book of Records over 3 weeks! Check here for more details.

Hello readers,

This is a quick post on Mozilla Firefox's latest release. To refresh Fx (or FF) users' memory and educate the ignorant IE users, that there is a better browser around; better than even Fx2!

Firefox 3, on 17th July 2008, comes with a plethora of features, many of which are simply merging Fx2 add-ons into the browser. We'll come to that later.

There was a lot of hype surrounding the release; having used it since beta 3, I thought it quite deserves it. They are even trying to set a Guinness World Record for the most software downloaded in 24 Hrs! Going by the stats, I think they can easily create a world record. w00t!!

You can follow the count right here. I urge you to take part! You even get a certificate! Here is mine. Remember though, this is open till 2100 hrs IST only. After which of course, you will be able to download and use Fx3 but not contribute to the world record. Sad, but quite fair. My bad for not blogging this before! However, looking at the world wide stats, I feel let down that there has not been enough downloads from India. For instance, Iran and Australia have fewer Internet users than us. Yet, there have been more downloads in these countries. Although, there are a few surprising entries into this world record.

• Samoa - 6
  
• Tonga - 6
  
• The Gambia - 16
• Somalia - 7 :P
• Mauritius - 530 (I guess most of them were tourists on their laptops. hehe)
• The Chad and Western Sahara Liberia - 1 each (a friend Vishal suggested it was perhaps the President :D)
  

Coming to the features, here are some which I found absolutely cool!

• one click bookmarking! Yes, that easy!
• search bookmarks/history/RSS feeds simultaneously
• search with keyword (type anything related to the site, part of the URL, title, keywords added to bookmarks etc and get relevant results)
• multi-select. God, I've wanted this since my first computer!
• smart bookmarks
• a list of 'most visited' sites, automatically generated
• a new about:mozilla page :D
• true fullscreen exprience
• anti phishing and anti-malware
• parental control
• read here for more features
• they claim to have made more than 15,000 improvements!
  

I really did this in a hurry and didn't have time to show you enough screen grabs. I'd love to though. Still, its best you go download it yourself and try it out! Good luck, and rediscover the web, again!


Note: At 1639 hrs IST, the total downloads was at 5,910,353.


Thanks,
~LVS


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Open Sesame

Passwords. A string of case sensitive characters requiring you to type them verbatim; no typos allowed.
One needs passwords (or pass phrases) everywhere. PC, email, website, mobiles, ATM, suitcases and what not.

I decided to do a bit of a research on how people like to keep their passwords. This is what I found :

1. Mostly one password for all the accounts, sometimes with minor variations, is preferred
   
2. It might carry some information related to the account
3. It might be contain your favourite person's name/birthday/mobile number etc
4. It is preferable when its short and not alphanumeric

I'll say the best combination of "security and easy-to-remember" is when your password satisfies (2) and is alphanumeric. Personally, I like to have a different password for each account I have. Only recently, and covering most of my accounts, have I started to put some characters related to the account. My gmail and yahoo passwords are totally random. It does not even contain numbers related to me or people I like most. It was just a random word and some numbers thrown in between. Back then, when I had only these two passwords to remember (and one for my PC admin a/c: ok, my password was 'enhance'; come and screw my system!), it was easy to relate this random thought and the account. But around the time I finished college, I was having an increasing number of passwords that I considered keeping 'ishallnotremember' as a password for the next account!

My current count is 30+, some of which I confess, I rarely use; "Forgot my password" is perhaps the most clicked hyperlink on these sites! And I like to think I'm security paranoid and maintain different passwords for each account. To lay less strain on my memory, I maintain the same id for everything: lvshankar or use my gmail a/c.

Here's the list of accounts (not passwords) I use:

gmail(2), photonmail, yahoomail, skype, ubuntu (Home),XP(Office), launchpad, ubuntu counter, cooltoad, digg, ilugc, zapak, linux mint forums, geni,mayajaal, IPMS (work related), sparknotes, hotornot (my bro forced me into this), zedge, mediafire, mabango,olts (work related), axis iconnect (2+ATM PIN), hdfc(+ATM PIN, +CC PIN), bugzilla, spreadfirefox, windows live, lifehacker, irctc, mastercard securecard (?!?!), SIT Chennai... :-)

Besides the above, I remember some friends/relatives' passwords/ATM PINs.
A final tip. You might want to try L33t.

Update: A kind of universal login id is available these days. Open ID. It is similar to M$ Passport, but in a sense open. I haven't really tried this yet. One, am waiting for it to get *really* popular, and another, it dejects me to forget most of those passwords and remember just one. Just too easy for me.


Happy remembering!

~LVS

PS: If you thought this post was a show off, you are probably right!

PPS: Since I've been reading uleadin's blogs lately, I have got this PSing habit! Aarggh!
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