Shankar Ganesh

Google recently rolled out a new version of Gmail, with some added features and enhancements. Ever since I saw screenshots of the new version, I’ve been waiting to try it out. Today, I was in for a surprise – my Gmail account was upgraded to the new version. May be Google realised it’s Diwali here in India, and gifted me!

Here’s all that I noticed:
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Photobucket, one of my favourite image uploading services has gone ahead and added some new and exciting features. Photobucket now sports a slightly redesigned homepage, private/public setting of photo albums, enhanced Adobe Premier to edit and remix photos and videos.

One important feature that has been added recently is the ability to bulk upload photos to your Photobucket account via a web-based interface.

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Just got invited to Pownce by Kuanhoong and I’m trying it out.

What’s Pownce?
If you didn’t know, it’s Kevin Rose’s (the Digg guy) latest start up. In short, Twitter with added features. That’s Pownce. The sign up form requires you to post the usual details: name, location, email and an avatar. The persons you invite are automatically added to your friends list, nothing much special here.

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Spock is the online leader in personal search, helping users find and discover people. With over one hundred million people already indexed and millions added every day, Spock is building the broadest and deepest people specific search engine.

TechCrunch has an extensive report on Spock, the People search engine

Spock just gave people 101 invites and I’m one of them. If you wanna try out Spock, just drop a comment here so that I can invite you.

Make sure you use your full name in the comments, Spock asks me to fill in both the first name and the second name

First come, first served.

You’ve watched those stunning videos on YouTube. And that’s not enough for you. You need to edit ‘em.

A typical process involves these steps: you have to download the video file in .flv format, convert it to a typical video format (.avi, etc), and then use a software like Windows Movie Maker to edit it and add your stuff. That’s a bit hectic.

Well, all that may sound geeky to a novice. Don’t worry, you can still edit such videos with ease using an online tool called Mojiti. Here’s how: Read the rest of this entry »

Twitter is getting more slow by the day, a lot of downtimes and slow responses, along with third party tools failing. Here are some Twitter alternatives to enjoy with than frown at its bad performance

Jaiku

Jaiku is a similar service like Twitter that lets you post what you’re doing on the internet. But it has some lovely additional features unlike Twitter.

• In addition to posting Jaikus (status messages) you can also customize them with icons
• You can use your smart phone to access Jaiku
• Commenting on your friend’s Jaikus is possible
• If they’re on their mobile, you could have details regarding their location, calendar and availability
• You can live stream your favourite RSS Feed entries as Jaikus on your account
• Badges are available to put up on your website

Get a Jaiku account now here.

Tumblr

Tumblr is another such service, but it’s still unique in some way or the other

• Tumblr lets you create the so-called Tumblelogs
• Tumblelogs have an URL in this form: thenameyouselect.tumblr.com
• Tumblelogs are short, little blog entries that you could use to update your status
• Tumblelogs are faster and easier to post to than ordinary blogs
• You have a variety of themes to choose from for your log
• Photos and videos can be easily added to your Tumblelog
• Your followers are listed out in your Dashboard

In short, Tumblr is a whole new way of posting what you’re doing. Get a Tumblr account here.

Plazes

Plazes is another unique one, but still it can serve in someway the same purpose as Twitter does.

• You have to pin-point your location in a Google maps mashup at first (this facility is still to come, but for now, you have to download a software to join Plazes)
• You can then know who’s nearby you
• Update your status then, a mobile version too is available
• People can subscribe to receive updates about their friends or favourite plazes
• Badges are available to put up on your site, blog or any other profile pages like MySpace, etc.

Go to Plazes

Which among these is your favourite? Or do you still prefer to use Twitter? Share your views in the comments

Bubbl is a very impressive Web 2.0 tool that allows you to create mind maps online. It’s interface is based on Flash, and has developed a lot since it was launched.

Lovely features it has:

• Each bubble unit can be created by pressing the Enter or Tab button
• Zoom in/out using your mouse wheel
• Click and drag empty space to move around the sheet
• Undo-ing is possible
• Bubble arranged automatically, and you can click and drag the arrow in the top left of the bubble to manually position them
• Control panel to manage multiple mind map sheets
• Each unit can be customized to change its colours
• Printing feature to print your sheets
• Collaboration is possible, and you could give your friends read-only or full access to you sheets
• Your mindmaps can be embedded into your site, just copy paste the code provided
• Export sheets as XML, HTML or image files

Here’s a sample sheet as an image:

Bubbl.us – Brainstorming made simple

Spotback is a kind of a social bookmarking site that aggregates popular items in the web according to user ratings:

Spotback gives you a rating widget which you can incorporate anywhere – on your blog posts, pages, pictures and others, and give visitors and readers an opportunity to rate them.

Now, Spotback has gone ahead to release a cool plugin for WordPress that lets you to easily implement the rating widget on your blog without any hassles.

The plugin comes with a custom widget designer, which allows you to customize the widget with ease. Choose whether you want a star, slider type rating widget or any other.

This plugin is also widgets compatible.

Go to the Spotback Rating Widget WordPress Plugin page to grab it now!

Schmedley, a start page that was launched earlier this year, is currently being improved rapidly.

Schmedley prefers to call its homepage widgets ‘Schmidgets’ and it’s released recently a schmidget that checks your Gmail messages, and those for AOL Mail, Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail are expected soon.

An SMS schmidget is expected soon and support will be added for international gadgets, the team says. A reference schmidget is also in the offing, that helps you to search Dictionaries, Wikipedia and other such sites. Tabs feature for the start page are also gonna be out soon, so watch out if you’re a Schmedley fan.

What’s different here?

Though Schmedley is currently not as feature rich as other start pages, it still looks promising and eye-catching. Schmidgets have a Mac Look. The interface is simply amazing. If you like Schmedley, why not you participate in the survey to suggest new features?

Schmedley Start Page

I’ve been using Twitter for the past few days and I’m hooked. I searched for some Greasemonkey scripts for twitter and found these. If you don’t have Greasemonkey, download it here.

Twitter Add, Follow and Leave links
This script puts ‘add’, ‘follow’ or ‘leave’ links in a twitter user’s page for you to utilise.

Twitter Last Twitter Preview
This script will display your friend’s last twitter when you hover your mouse pointer over his or her image in the twitter sidebar.

Post2Sbm
This script has an UI to help you post your bookmarks to twitter

Twitter Profile Pop up script
This script displays your friend’s profile details when you hover over his/her picture in the Twitter sidebar

Twitter Lite Client
This is a little twitter client that functions inside your Firefox browser. Hit Shift + T to bring it up in the bottom corner. Another such Greasemonkey client is here. If this didn’t work for you after installation, go to Tools >> Greasemonkey >> Manage User Scripts >> Twitter_Lite >> Click ‘Add’ under included pages and Type http://* and click ‘OK’ and then use Shift + T to check whether this works.

Know what? This client has many useful and hidden features? Check this comment

Twitter Friend Name Helper
This script will show a list of your friends’ names when you key in ‘@’ or ‘D’

Browse with Twitter
Updates your twitter status to ‘Browsing: Document’ whenever you load a webpage :S

Twitter Mod

This script improves the User Interface of Twitter’s Webpages. It’s got a lot of features which beautify and add some functionality. There’s a search feature available when you install this script, which allows you to search for a particular string in twits. Another notable feature is the TinyURL handler, which brings up the original URL when you click on a TinyURL, so that you can decide whether to move to that page or not. In real terms, it’s actually many scripts blended into one.

Twitter with Meebo
If you use both Meebo and Twitter quite often, then this one is for you. This script shows up a twit box on your Meebo page where you could type in your messages. You can also set your Meebo status message and your twit at once, in a single click.

Note: I found some of these scripts not working, but still, you could try them and check whether they work for you. And this post will be updated constantly. Make sure that you’ve bookmarked it!