Google Buzz- Can it be the Facebook Killer?

Gmail greeted me this morning with a new Buzz. The Gmail blog told the entire story of Google  launching a yet another SOCIAL Feature called the Buzz. Google Buzz is among the very crucial moves which Google has been playing to sustain its dominance in the web especially the social web.

Google Buzz

The Buzz is a lifestreaming service more like the FriendFeed where all your activities on the various social sites get aggregated at one place facilitating a much broader picture of your digital echo. I won’t help you guys with the features, coz the video is easier to follow. Interesting again with the cartoon showing up in a google’s product launch similar to Google Chrome in 2008. What would make the Google Buzz even more competitive would be an integration of the Google Wave along with updates from Google groups and more socail sites into it.  Facebook is not yet a Lifestreaming service, but they did acquire FriendFeed. (I am not still sure what their plans with FriendFeed are)

Facebook recently had its 6th anniversary and hit the 400 million user mark, But Google buzz will already start off with over a 150 million(approximately) user base owing to the fact that its built right into Gmail. What Google Buzz lacks is the all the social games and the apps that people use on Facebook. I guess once an API for the Google Buzz is out, it will go head on against Facebook. As yet it too early to say who will kill Facebook, but Google Buzz definitely has potential.

Google Chrome 4.0 with Extensions-Its just the beginning

I was looking through the browser stats at the W3schools for the past year and the trend clearly shows an upbeat for Chrome. Chrome released their new 4.0 stable builds and they opened the extension gallery officially with this post here (Head over and catch up with some cool extensions ).  With the launch of extension support and extension gallery the stats are only going to better. Well Firefox also did launch a major update the last week moving to gecko 1.9.2 with support for Personas and few other updates but still not a major upgrade

The competition is interesting and still is going to get better this year especially with IE 9 and Firefox 4.0 coming up in the next  quarters. I am more of a Web kit guy and I would still bet on Chrome gaining more market share.  In 2007,when safari got introduced to the windows, i was simply mesmerized with the the font rendering (really miss that on chrome) and the speed of it. I found Weskit to be the culprit behind safari’s elegance.  In Sep 2008 Google created that open community to take Weskit to the place it deserved and a year and half clearly shows the true potential of the rendering engine.

To my understanding what will win in the future of these browser wars is completely based on the potential of the rendering engine and  community they have around them. Firefox  has a big one and Chrome is catching up with them.  IE can file as many patents as they want, but they wont survive long until they help the web with some open standards. Clearly my bet is on chrome, who would you bet on?

Update:- Now Google adds support for GreaseMonkey Scripts which makes Google Chrome take Firefox head on.  read more about the grease monkey script here.  Here is a similar story from Mashable confirming that chrome is indeed stealing market share like i noted above, only that they didn’t take sides on the future about who will win.( o yeah we the users will win )

Google Nexus One vs. Apple Iphone: Why Apple still wins it?

Its surprising to see the huge hype about Apple’s co founder Steve Wozniak liking the New Google phone Nexus one which got launched at CES 2010.  Well its no big deal that a new phone in the market will have some gizmo freaks liking it. Steve is yet another of those freaks who tried it and liked it. At least for a founder and an employee he had the interest to see what his competition was doing unlike Palm CEO Rubenstein who accepts not trying an Iphone still and is not worried of apple as competitor ( a rather silly statement for a CEO to make at any time). I guess, now we know why Palm products haven’t been doing great.

For a phone that sold 20,000 pieces in the first week compared to 50,000 Iphones in a day, Nexus one clearly proves that it just isn’t impressive despite the fact that it has Google’s Branding and had a huge hype of being an Iphone killer. Personally I would say it was a disaster for Google’s image. When the Iphone got launched in 2007, it took the mobile industry by surprise, the design, the UI, the features made all the mobile companies rethink on their products. It was a revolutionary product then. Well that is the kind of phone we were expecting from Google. A huge disappointment for everyone, especially for a Google fan like myself ( I am addicted to Gmail, Greader, Google apps, Chrome, not to forget the SEARCH, Wave & translate, and am eagerly waiting for Google voice to launch in India ).

Comparison of the latest superphones by Bill Shrink still proves that all phones are pretty evenly matched and its only personal preference whether you would need multi tasking and a 5.0 pixel camera or would you like to be an apple fan boy and choose from 93,000 apps from the store for the best touch screen mobile. Well i thought comparing these phone’s never made any sense because, Iphone 3gs is 6+ months old configuration and configuration can change every week for that matter and anyways rumours are out there of Iphone 4G on its way in June and there is news of service providers upgrading their infrastructure as well. Well i expected a super brand like Google to come up  with a 4G handset at the least, now that 4G will be the future.

Nexus one wasn’t made for the future . Its a no brainer that a revolutionary gadget giant like apple would kill the nexus one with a better specs in the next Iphone. Apple’s products and ideas run years ahead of their time. To beat Apple make sure your products run well ahead of their times, else don’t even think about competing even if you are Google or Microsoft, you would just end up being mediocre. Google’s Nexus One just proved this. Don’t you think so. Feel free to drop a line, I would like to hear your thoughts.

How to: change Send &Receive settings in Outlook 2010

My wishes to you all on this New year 2010.  This post is just to help my fellow beings on this earth to change a few settings in Outlook 2010. Since the beta release, I have been enjoying the new outlook 2010 (of course with out any glitches ). It so happened that I had do a fresh installation of Office 2010 and had to reconfigure my settings (my previous installation had the outlook profile from 2007). Since this time I  was forced to create a new profile, I created one as per instructions and every thing went well, till I got struck with getting outlook to do a send receive for every 5 minutes. It nearly took  15 minutes  (had to go through each menu item thoroughly) to figure out the hidden menu.  Basically the option to configure the Send & Receive settings has been moved  and is now found under the FILE menu , OPTIONS and then Advanced items. Here is a screen shot of Send /Receive option.

Also do note that majority  of the settings(Signatures,Fonts, styles, Calendar formats, etc)  are configurable from this options menu. Its a pretty important menu, but just that its not visible right away. Feel free to share the experiences you had with the software.

Office 2010 rocks!

I am not a Microsoft guy, ask any friend of mine, they will tell you I am apple freak. Office 2010 beta is available for download on the Official site and Technet, Half an hour of using the apps convinced me to write this post. It’s been a day since the Beta version is available for download so better hurry. Trust me when I say its worth the effort.

I just tried the Outlook beta. It feels so thin, like a breeze while using it. There is lot of screen space left for me to play around with. Its pretty fluid with a flow. The Ribbon menu view feels better, now that I kinda got used to the other Office 07 apps. One feature that immediately caught my eye was the file menu where you get to  modify your account settings, etc  i never liked the popup window in the older versions. Its very stable and robust

The Inbox:

The File Menu in Outlook

Never have I seen any Office product start like the beta Excel this time. I Liked their splash screen too. All the other apps have become lighter as well and the usability is even better. Well I always have this interest to search for the “not so resource savvy” apps ( That is why I even ditched Itunes ). Probably for Office 2010 I won’t have that urge. I haven’t had the time to explore all the features yet.  I am looking forward to the online synchronization  and collaboration features that i am still to explore and probably the web Office.

Except for the upgrade everything worked well. Upgrade failed badly. So I had to uninstall the previous version of Office and then reinstall the beta. I would have been happier if the upgrade had worked, but still this was the fresh installation was a no brainer and hassle free. For some reason the icons seem pretty odd in the start menu with all those alphabet symbols. I kinda liked the 2007 icons in the start menu. In spite of all the hitch at the start, I liked it better than any windows product.  After all Scoble was not wrong when he mentioned office 2010 is very cool in these videos. I seriously never thought it would be so cool. Overall it seems a good quarter for Microsoft, with windows 7 earlier and now Office 2010. What do you think? I ‘d love to here from you.

More Chrome Extensions..

Just got to stumble upon this Website while i was searching for  Chrome Extensions. If you came here searching for extensions. Just head over here  you will find some popular extensions on chrome. Feel free to tell me how useful the link was for you.

Bookmark Sync-Now on chrome too

Bookmark sync has been an advanced web user feature for a very long time now. It started probably with Firefox’s Xmarks. To briefly sum it up for those who didn’t know about bookmark sync, its a way of sharing the same set of bookmarks across various computers. This might not seem that important for a newbie, but for those advanced geeks, its pretty much something which they cant live without. The good news is that the chrome team has officially implemented bookmark sync on the dev channel. Getting it to work is all the more easier than getting extensions to work on chrome.  Just grab a copy of the latest chrome from the dev channel and launch it with “–enable-sync” command-line flag.

If you are interested to explore using the extensions on chrome, check out my post on enabling and using extensions from here.

That’s a cool feature to have on your browser, but what i am waiting for is a sync like Weave for firefox. What other features would you wish for on chrome?

Chrome-3.0 & Extensions

On 8th July  Google announced officially on its blog that a chrome OS is under development and will be available in the market from mid next year, though you can still get the source code’s starting this year end. The news is all over the blogosphere and twitter. Well few days back, Google silently launched the 3.0 version of the chrome browser on the chrome dev. channel. This did not have the hype as what Chrome Os has even before its release has, but it didn’t miss my attention as well.

So what’s hot in this 3.0 version of the release?  The latest builds support extensions, has a customizable new tab page and a lot of other bug fixes under the hood. Extensions is really an awesome feature that everybody has been longing for on Chrome. I have posted some screenshots of the latest build with some extensions, so that you could have a sneak preview.

 

The New tab page, with the customizable UI, to pin your most visited websites in the thumbnail view. Still waiting for that tips & suggestions to populate.

 

A screen shot of the new tab page in list view.

  My installed extensions (chritter and gmail checker)are visible on the status bar( they call it the tool strip)

My chrome extension screen shows the extensions that i am using currently. (Don’t be scared by the error, its just that i deleted something i was trying)

Now that you have an idea as to what it looks like, try it out your self. It would be unfair if I wouldn’t post links to the site where i got to read through and try the extensions. So here they go..

Firstly head over to the HOW TO page. Once you are done the  the basics you can try these suggested extension samples from here. Do make sure you have the latest build from here or you are on the dev channel subscribing to the latest builds.

The extensions that i use on chrome are listed below. I have linked the original  site incase you wanna try

1. Adsweep – removes adds. This one gets a 5 star from me.
2. Cleeki  an interesting and a MUST try extension its very much like IE 8 Accelerators, in fact you can use all the IE 8 accelerators with chrome from here.
3. Chritter – the twitter extension that shows the last tweet of all the folks you are following.
4. Gmail Checker- displays unread mail count.
5. Rss subscription- finally you can see the feed icon on the URL bar.

If you are interested in Google page rank you can try this extension here.

Well there’s lot more to be done on the extensions development and their periodic updates etc, so far I am enjoying all the extensions i tried. Incase you know something i haven’t tried, do let me know i would be excited to try them.

Chrome hasn’t dropped me, and am already getting addicted to chrome. With such rapid development on chrome, Firefox has a lot of challenges coming ahead.  Well that’s really healthy for the web..What do you think?

Opera Unite- Not convincing Yet.

This morning’s news paper took me to this article by Chris. Chris Shared his views elaborately on Unite services. There’s a good amount of conversation on his site, i would recommend you to head over to his post to get more on the discussions.

I am writing a post here in detail as i could not  share all my thoughts  on his site due to lack of time.

Opera Unite is a set of services that are integrated into the browser using which one can  share files, photos,  chat with people, and better make it your web server.

These are quite interesting features you can expect to run from a browser. I tried them yesterday, and i was really excited to see the review by Chris. I have to tell you Chris, opera deserves an appreciation for such an attempt given the fact unite is still in its alpha stages and has to go a long way. Its true that all the services are implemented pretty neatly. I felt all the services offered are really not necessary for the layman at least for majority of them. The following are reasons why i think.

1. Hosting a server on my laptop is good, but it has a long list of limitations and that is why we prefer web hosts.

2. As for as file sharing goes,  there are a variety of options which i use already, why would i need  to use this. 

3. With respect to other services,  If i am already using a lot of social sites (facebook, flickr, etc. where i am happy with what i am)  then why would i be interested to move everything into opera’s services. I am sure most of my friends are not on opera’s communities.

But there are a few things i really would like to appreciate. Opera is slowly getting that polish as browser which lacked in the previous versions. It really did not seem like an alpha experience, at least not to me trying out the browser and the service. The browser still rocks when you compare it with Chrome or Firefox or Safari or Flock, etc.

facebook:- Have you updated?

“Yes I have”, would be your answer if you were living on the edge like me. Well for those who did not get what I am talking about, Facebook  has come up with vanity url for all of us, which got implemented from today. Well i am ranting our here just to say that i have chosen mine and wish you also get one if you haven’t. Just login to your facebook account and you will see the update on your home page. Just select your url and confirm.  Quite simple wasn’t it.

Feel free to connect with me on Facebook by clicking here. I also tweet as simplysaru which happens to be my vanity url on facebook, feel free to follow me. Don’t forget to update your blogs and social media sites so that people can identify you quickly.