Sunday 23 November 2008

Blog Friendly Unit Shifter

Yahoo! Mail versus Gmail

I was staggered to read on TechCrunch that Yahoo! Mail has 250 million users while the much younger and rapidly growing Google Mail (beta) service currently has a paltry 51 million users in comparison.

I wonder what proportion of these users, in these impressive headline (marketing) numbers, actively use the respective services on a daily basis.

However, I was not surprised at Yahoo's offer of 'unlimited' email storage which gets a cheap headline and was pretty inevitable. A tiny minority will gleefully claim they really need infinite storage and think of inventive ways to upload the entire contents of their PC to a server. Yahoo! will then ban them for uploading copyrighted material.

While I have a longstanding but rarely used Yahoo! Mail account (which I was scanning tonight funnily enough searching for my Flickr credentials), this announcement won't be tempting me back to Yahoo! just yet. I await with interest Google's response though.

I think the Yahoo! Mail screen is incredibly cluttered and the adverts on the right hand side are incredibly intrusive and consume valuable screen estate. As you scroll through Yahoo! emails, the banner ads actually change which is slow and very distracting !

I know this type of thing is very subjective and, in many cases, ones preference simply reflects what you are used to and familiar with but I honestly don't know how Doug tolerates it. Also, Google's spam filter is far more effective which is important.

Also, Yahoo! have a irritating tendency to overuse the exclamation mark as part of the corporate branding. Look at any personalised Yahoo! page and shriek as you count the shrieks. I suspect you will be unpleasantly surprised.

Unfortunately, I appear to have mislaid (or Yahoo have inactivated) my Yahoo! credentials for my world famous Flickr stream so let's try some inline thumbnails. Apologies for the quality.

Yahoo! Adware! Mail!

Note the MASSIVE banner ad on RHS (no I didn't photoshop the red border) and the more subtle ads bottom left.

I continue to use my ISP email account for personal stuff but am starting a gradual migration to Gmail which started around a year ago. Apart from spam, I hardly ever delete a Google email. Consequently, I am barely scratching the surface of my 3GB allocation (35 MB - 1% - of the allocated 2833 MB).

I also like the security of having messages and email address stored on a server (and not my PC).

The ads on Google Mail seem much less noticeable and intrusive to me (yeah I know I'm a Google whore). I can honestly say that I barely notice them. I think this is because of the text (not banner) ads coupled with the white background although I am not sure what advertising men in new media glasses would make of this.

Google Mail

March 28, 2007 | Filed under | Comments (View)

Picasa Web Albums upgraded to 1GB

Google have increased the amount of free storage to 1GB (previously 250MB) available at Picasa Web Albums. This means I can now backup all of my photos comfortably (854MB) in one place. If you have lots of photos of your cat, $500 upgrades the capacity to 250GB.
March 8, 2007 | Filed under and | Comments (View)

in praise of Google Desktop

Like most people, I store information in many different places. Lots of data is stored directly on my work laptop while yet more data is stored on my computer at home.
  • Mail folders
  • Address book
  • Text files
  • Corporate blogs
  • Presentations
  • Word documents
  • Intranet resources
  • Whitepapers
  • Web history
  • RSS feeds
  • Photos
  • Music
Even more data is stored on external servers
  • Gmail
  • Blinklist
  • Web site, blogs and mySQL databases at Bluehost
  • Post-it on fridge
  • Mobile phone
  • Palm PDA
  • My head (last resort)
I first used Google Desktop a couple of years ago when it was first launched. Back then, the ongoing indexing process seemed to add a unreasonable load on my laptop, so I decided to uninstall the program and revert to old-fashioned searching in Windows Explorer and Outlook (and now Thunderbird). However, recently I decided to give Google Desktop another go because I am a Google whore. The initial index of the entire computer took a few hours to index a grand total of 131,854 items (44,118 emails, 5,059 Web history and 82,677 files). After the initial index was complete, the overhead of the ongoing index process barely seemed noticeable (although my laptop has also been upgraded to a higher specification in the interim). Google Desktop scans email folders, text files, PDF, Powerpoint, Word documents, Gmail and Web history. As you might expect, the search is lightning fast, much faster than searching within Thunderbird although the range of options isn't as comprehensive. I find myself using Google Desktop a lot. Often I am not looking for a specific email, article or document but researching a topic, trying to locate all possible relevant information from the different sources available. Google Desktop makes this type of searching across multiple, disparate data sources very easy and quick. Google Desktop caches data locally so you can search Gmail folders and even Web pages while offline. There is also a Preview option available. I can also increase the accuracy and quality of my search results and save some disk space by deleting dated, obsolete or irrelevant information as I find it. Another neat feature which worries the men in white (or black) hats is a positive bonus to me. Google Desktop can be configured to search documents and Web history from my home PC. This feature would be even better if my domestic email folders could be included as this would potentially enable me to reply to Dave's email message about drinks next Thursday or Friday from a hotel room in Prague. Currently, I would have to call the wife, ask her to log on to the computer, educate her how to search in Thunderbird, locate the correct information and mail me the results. All of this is too much trouble given she moans at being asked to perform the simple task of setting the video to record 'Lost'. The only minor issue I have encountered thus far is that Google Desktop does not search within WinZip archives despite claiming to 'search the full text of Zip files'. This is less than ideal as most of my formal reports are Word documents zipped up to save space. Just as well then, that there is precious little of technical value buried deep within those archives. Coincidentally, Google Desktop has just been updated to 5.1 (beta) with a dark, transparent sidebar, improved gadget support and enhanced security. Although I have experimented with the sidebar, I don't actually use this feature as I find it too invasive (i.e addictive and time wasting).
March 7, 2007 | Filed under and | Comments (View)

how to display Google shared items on WordPress

This post put me in a quandry. I found the video very amusing so I was torn between leaving a grateful comment on Donncha's blog and awarding the article a (Gold) 'Star' in Google Reader. But if I only did that, my friend and a couple of (ex-) colleagues who might appreciate the joke may miss it. That would be very selfish. Forgive me Father, but briefly, I toyed with reverting to Web 0.1 (beta) and sending an mass email to 'Friends/Ex Colleagues'. I compromised by posting an article on my blog referring to Donncha's article so he sees the pingback and gets the credit for spotting the video. So Donncha's happy, I'm happy, everyone's happy. Well - not exactly because I had to write some additional words on my article to justify its existence. This is exactly the situation that Google Shared Items is for.
These items might be interesting or useful snippets of information quickly noted in passing which I wouldn't necessarily blog about.
I just want to display a RSS feed on my blog for articles like this that I find interesting, amusing or thought provoking. This is trivial to implement in WordPress so I simply grab the feed URL for 'Shared Items' from Google Reader and create an RSS widget to display 'What I am currently reading' on the sidebar in this blog. Unfortunately, that didn't work. The feed and article names were displayed but the formatting of the links was broken on WordPress 2.1. Curiously, I tried the same configuration on a test blog on hosted Wordpress and it worked fine. A little research revealed that the WordPress RSS widget does not appear to support Atom 1.0 format (which is precisely the format used by Google Shared Items). No problem. Just create a Feedburner feed and see if that works. This should automatically, dynamically and intelligently convert the feed format into a format the recipient can digest. Unfortunately, it doesn't. Sigh. Give up in disgust and make a note to ask in the WordPress/Reader forums. Only you can't give up. You want this to work and this is now a challenge. Read the Feedburner FAQ which implies that SmartBurner is what you need. This automatically, converts the original feed format for the consumer on the fly. However, SmartBurner is enabled by default so I wonder why it isn't working. Examine the configuration of SmartBurner. By default, the output feed preserves the format of the original feed (Atom 1.0 in this case). However, it is easy to force conversion to different format (RSS 2.0) by setting the 'Content-Type'. Revisit the WordPress RSS widget. Success ! So, after all that time and effort, I sincerely hope you both enjoy my 'Gooogle Shared Items' feed.
February 21, 2007 | Filed under and | Comments (View)

am I a Google whore yet ?

'OK. OK. I give in. Please stop hurting me, Brin. I now realise that resistance is futile.' 'Look I did what you asked. I have now converted to Google Reader. Please, no more. I will do anything you want. Please, Sergey - let my wife go.' Even my son (newly hired Google enforcer) has now installed Google Desktop and is busy indexing the entire contents of the PC. Just about the only remaining product in the Google portfolio I don't use is Adsense. Am I a fully fledged Google whore yet ? If not, what else do I need to do ? 'Oh no - you've discovered I am not using Blogger. No Sergey. Please. I beg you. Please, Brin. Show some mercy. Not the pliers and electrical cord. Please stop. Aaaarrgghhh. I give in. Please stop now.'
February 19, 2007 | Filed under | Comments (View)
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