Technobabble

Google has announced today that they are shutting down Google Reader on July 1st 2013. Here's what they said on the official Google blog : We launched  Google Reader  in 2005 in an effort to make it easy for people to discover and keep tabs on their favorite websites. While the product has a loyal following, over the years usage has declined. So, on July 1, 2013, we will retire Google Reader. Users and developers interested in RSS alternatives can export their data, including their subscriptions, with  Google Takeout  over the course of the next four months. Google Reader is one of the apps that I have been relying on, every single day, almost since the time it showed up in Google Labs (itself discontinued in July 2011).  I started using Reader with my @gmail.com account on Dec 7th 2005 and then migrated to my @element77.com account with Google Apps For Your Domain when Reader started supporting it. I've looked at 153,000 items in over 7 years from 20...

The US Geological Survey makes available a small dataset containing the M1+ earthquakes from around the world in the past 7 days . I used this data along with the heatmap visualization layer offered by the Google Maps API to present the earthquake data as a heatmap. Check out Worldwide M1+ Earthquakes, Past 7 Days . One caveat: due to cross origin issues, I am hosting a local copy of the data rather than getting it live from the USGS.

Ever wondered what's on the opposite side of the world for any place? Then check out the Opposite Of The World . It's a "Hello World" exploration of the Google Maps JavaScript API that I wrote for fun. You can scroll and zoom through either map on the page and the other map will show you the opposite side of the world. It's quite basic now but I'm going to add markers and other overlays to make it more fun. PS: You might be surprised to know that Malaysia, is on the opposite side of Ecuador!

Over the past month, several interested parties have revealed their expressions of interest regarding the proposals for the HTTP/2.0 standard. Under consideration are primarily the SPDY and HTTP Speed+mobility proposals. The battle lines have been drawn, and as usual Microsoft wants to push their own agenda. There's also an interesting debate about whether HTTP/2.0 should always use TLS.

Last week, Google announced that they are moving the Google App Engine out of preview status and changed their pricing model . The general buzz is that the new prices are significantly higher and people are disappointed with Google. Here's a comparison of the prices between Google and AWS specifically looking at storage. Google offers the Blobstore API , which is somewhat equivalent to Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3) . Google's free tier offers 5GB which is same as Amazon's free tier except that Amazon offers that for just a year while Google has no time restrictions. In the paid tier, Google charges a flat $0.17/GB/month. Amazon on the other hand has a tiered pricing scheme based on three factors - amount of data, location of the S3 bucket and, redundancy. Amazon's prices in the US Standard region range from $0.14/GB/month (for less that 1TB) for the nine nines redundancy and reduced redundancy storage is even cheaper ranging from $0.093/GB/month to $0.037/G...

I’ve been using Nuevasync for since late 2008 for syncing my Google Apps calendars to my iPhone. At the time, it was one of the few over-the-air syncing solutions for hooking up Google calendars (including Google Apps) to the iPhone. When Google came up with native Google Sync earlier this year, I evaluated it and found that Nuevasync was better . Since then, people have commented on my post about various improvements to Google Sync and it seemed like Google Sync was finally at the point where all my original issues had been fixed. So I had to try Google Sync again. The steps to move to Google Sync were straightforward: Backup the iPhone by syncing with iTunes. Since I use Google Apps, I had to enable syncing for my domain . Configure Google Sync on the iPhone per the instructions . I chose to delete all contacts and calendar data on the phone since my contacts were already being synced with Google Apps Contacts via iTunes. I use multiple calendars on my Google Apps Calendar a...

Having been a Grand Central user since their beta in 2007 , I got the option to migrate to Google Voice . Based on my usage, here are the improvements to the original Grand Central experience: Integration with Google Account   Integration with Google Contacts GMail-like UI that allows for folders like Inbox, Starred, Trash, Voicemail, etc. SMS support Receive SMS on the Google Voice number and have that SMS forwarded to your registered cell phone. This was my biggest feature request from Grand Central! Respond to SMS via the Google Voice web interface and have then be returned as an SMS Ability to respond to call via SMS Transcription – finally caught up with Jott on that front. Ability to annotate messages or SMSes with notes. Here are the things where Google has more work to do (or could have done better during migration): No integration with Google Apps For Your Domain (my pet peeve with several Google features!) No keyboard shortcuts for the UI a la GMail or Goo...

GMail (including Google Apps ) has a Labs feature that enables the addition of location to email signatures: As with other location-based services from Google, it relies on IP address as well as Google Gears. When this Labs feature is enabled, it adds a new setting to the Signature settings (look under General settings): Once this is done, whenever a new email is composed, a line is appended to the signature with the location. Seems like Google’s going overboard with location-in-everything (including offerings like Google Latitude ). Weren’t web-based email services supposed to offer location privacy (since originating IP in mail headers was restricted to the IP address of the email provider)?

For a while Nuevasync has been the best choice for over the air synchronization of calendars and contacts with Google (including Google Apps). As a bonus, it has supported multiple calendar syncing since last month. (For contacts I've been using the iTunes data sync to Google Apps contacts.) With the recent announcement of Google Sync I decided to give it a shot expecting it to have better support than any third party sync with Google. Since the iPhone supports only a single Microsoft Exchange Sync, I had to delete the existing Nuevasync configuration (after a backup!) and switched over to Google Sync . I was immediately disappointed on multiple counts: Google Sync did not retain my contact photos. It replaced them with the Google Talk photos for my contacts. (This is documented.) Google Sync lost all my birthday settings for contacts (since it is not supported by Google Contacts. (This is kinda documented if you read between the lines.) Google Sync supported only my default...

Here are the free steps to migrate from Palm's date book (or Pimlico's DateBk6 ) calendar to Google calendar for full iPhone sync. First, sync Palm with Palm Desktop . Next, open Palm Desktop, select the Calendar view, navigate to File | Export, select Export Type as Date Book Archive, Range as All and provide a file name. This will export the calendar data as Date Book Archive (.dba). There's a paid tool called DBA2CSV that converts .dba files to .csv files. However this can be done for free using Yahoo Calendar. Login into Yahoo Calendar and via Settings/Import, import the .dba file. It helps to have an empty Yahoo Calendar. Via Settings/Export, export the calendar as .csv file. Login to Google Calendar (also works with Google Apps For Your Domain GAFYD Calendar) and import the .csv file into any of the calendars. It is a good idea to create a test calendar and test the import before importing into your real calendar. That way if anything goes wrong, you can delet...

Google has added template support to Google Docs. There are over 300 templates available for documents, spreadsheets and presentations. Some of the useful templates are the ones for resumes and personal finance calculators. At this time there is no mechanism for users to create new templates (other than starting from an existing doc) but this is a step forward in gaining feature parity with desktop tools.

A former Google employee - Hans Cardinal - has apparently vented about Google's recruiting practices and the way things are inside in Google. I'm not surprised though, especially about this statement: "... most of the new hires work on ads. Maintenance. Bug fixes." This is inevitable in a large company that has a well-established product. Technorati Tags: google , recruiting

Yahoo! Finance Quote for YHOO Earlier this morning Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT ) announced that it had placed an offer before the Yahoo! (NASDAQ: YHOO ) board to acquire all outstanding shares of Yahoo! at $31 per share, payable in the form of $31 in cash or 0.9509 of a share of Microsoft common stock , subject to the proration that one half of Yahoo shares will be acquired for cash and the other half for Microsoft shares. Based on yesterday's closing price of Microsoft shares - $32.60 - the deal valued Yahoo! at around $44.6bn. Predictably, Yahoo! shares shot up by 48% to close at $28.38 while Microsoft shares fell around 7% to close at $30.45. Right-now, that values Yahoo! at around $43bn. Many are interpreting this a sign of Microsoft's desperation in the battle of dominance against Google (NASDAQ: GOOG ). On the Yahoo! side, it's definitely a big boost given their dismal outlook and impending layoffs , announced just three days ago. The Yahoo! co-founders will ma...