Author: Aditya Kane

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News

Twitter catches the language bug

Twitter currently has language support for English and Japanese. Just recently they have announced they will spread outward by offering support for four more languages. They will be French, Italian, German and Spanish.

Many internet based companies when they look to consolidate they often announce support for FIGS countries. FIGS is a acronym of France, Italy, Germany and Spain.

This seems to reaffirm my view that Twitter does not just want to be only known as place where celebrities can be followed but also become a serious player when it comes to distributing content. It seems to be looking at being an alternative to RSS feeds in the future.

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Why FIGS?

Outside US the biggest market for any internet based company is Europe. The economic powerhouses of Europe are France, Italy, Germany and Spain. So now Twitter wants to expand its user base in those countries.

Currently with the recent recession the rise of the Asian economies have been quite evident. Hence its quite likely that in a few months Twitter will support Mandarin. I do not think Hindi will be supported anytime soon as the Hindi speaking population using Twitter would is quite comfortable with English. Obviously more options have never hurt anyone. 😉

Link: Twitter Blog

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News

Facebook sends a rocket to Orkut users in India

On the world stage Facebook has numbers which are so massive that one would wonder why do they bother with a pesky little social networking website like Orkut, which is really only popular in parts of South Asia and South America.

One very good reason is Orkut is owned by the all powerful lord of the internet called Google and Facebook obviously will know that Google will start pushing for a bigger pie of the social networking business sooner or later.

Its pretty obvious that after having thumped very other social networking website on its head and outclassing them they still are very wary of Google. For Facebook, Orkut must be that small baby that will suddenly and magically transform into a giant thanks to Google deciding to stop treating Orkut like a orphan and become a caring parent.

So now that Facebook has decided to send a rocket to Orkut.

If you are in India (Orkut is much more popular in India compared to Facebook) and have a Facebook account, you will come across an advertisement the moment you sign into Facebook.

How this is an attack on Orkut?

Find your Orkut Friends on Facebook. That means no need to go to Orkut anymore.

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Do you have a Orkut account?  Check if your Orkut friends are already on Facebook.

Facebook is clearly telling us move over from Orkut, Facebook is the place to be.

At the moment Orkut can do little and sit back cooling its heels. When I first started using Facebook, I joined because lot of friends only used Facebook. I still do have an Orkut account because some of them are Orkut loyalists and do not really bother with Facebook. But seriously if I had all my Orkut friends on Facebook, would I visit Orkut?

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News

Microsoft will have a free version of Office 2010!

Microsoft is joining the free brigade. First offering a free computer security suite in the form of Security Essentials, now it plans to sell Office 2010 for free. Just before I was about to do happy cartwheels I read the proverbial small print about how exactly is Office 2010 free. 😉

Starter Office 2010

  • Office 2010 Starter will be pre-installed with new computers exclusively. That means you cannot get freeware version and you have to most probably buy a new PC. However that might be just a initial tactic.
  • It will support advertisements and that idea is  not so innovative but quite a time tested way to keep things free. 🙂
  • Microsoft’s official product development blog mentions that Office 2010 Starter will also have reduced functionality. It does say you can view, edit and save files but leaves out exactly what reduced functionality will mean.
  • The Office 2010 Starter will only have Word and Excel. So that means no PowerPoint and no One Note.
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Why free?

One reason Microsoft is offering this free is to get new PC users hooked onto Office right from the time they buy a new computer. Hence the focus on it being pre-installed on new PCs. The rise of Google Docs without Google really marketing it aggressively means that the idea of creating and storing documents online for free is something that people are demanding.

Mostly Microsoft has been a champion of paid software and not free software, but on the other hand US and Europe has fined Microsoft record amounts because Microsoft did exactly that by giving people free Internet Explorer along with Windows in the 90s.

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Tips

Prepare to update to Firefox 3.6 next week.

On Friday, 16th October, you should be able to upgrade to Firefox 3.6 beta version. Firefox 4.0 will be released next year and 3.6 will be a step in that direction. A lot of add-ons which currently in Mozilla Labs might be integrated with Firefox 4.0 and the upgrades with 3.6 seem to be moving in that direction of integration.

Some of the things you can expect with the upgrade.

  • Themes: Some tweaks which will allow users to have themes being applied to browsers and not make the browser too slow. Often its been the case with themes that browsers become slow or crash often. So Firefox 3.6 plans to make them lightweight so as to not compromise the working of the browser.
  • JavaScript:One of the worries for Firefox could be how it compares with Chrome when it comes to performance based of running Java Script. So expect faster Java Script handling.
  • Session Restore: I have not seen my Firefox 3.5 crash too often except a couple of times. Session Restore does not really help. Its not smooth but looks like that will be address with Firefox 3.6.
  • Miscellaneous: Some other things are being tweaked like better synchronized bookmarks and a smoother page loading. Also make its browser more friendly with CSS technology.

Link: PC World

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News

Google Chrome adds art to its themes.

Our readers who are using the Chrome browser maybe aware of themes Google provides with their browser. One can easily change how the browser looks with a lot of different themes to choose from. But yesterday Chrome has gone further. They have an artist section along with their in house section for themes.

The screen-shot of the theme I downloaded from the artist section…


How to activate a theme on Chrome?

  • First make sure you have Chrome’s latest version which is Chrome 3.0.
  • The go to Options and then under the tab ‘Personal Stuff‘ click on “Get Themes” as shown in the images below.

  • This will take you to the Theme Gallery which is online. There you get to choose which theme you want to apply to the Chrome Browser. The new addition made yesterday is the Artist Section which allows you to apply artistically designed themes which are not necessarily plain and simple but quite eye catching.

I do wonder if this will open the door for users to customize the theme as they want on Chrome in the future? Now that would be quite a feature. 🙂

Link: Chrome Browser

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Tips

View websites in different languages with Google toolbar.

Google recently announced that it has added a new feature to Google toolbar with Firefox browser. You can now read just about any website in different languages. This is quite different from having a translate widget or button on websites. This allows you to read any web-page in a different language. Below is the image of Devilsworkshop translated in Hindi. 🙂

Screen-shot of Devilsworkshop in Hindi.

Google has released a plethora of applications and options for translating web pages and documents from one language to another recently.

Translate from Toolbar

  • Google has allowed the Translate button with Google toolbar only with Firefox 3.5 users and above. I guess it will soon be introduced with IE browser in the near future.
  • Just about any web-page can be viewed in many different languages.
  • The Translate feature is synchronized with Private browser feature of Firefox. This mean when you are looking at a website in different languages it turns off features like page history, page rank and side-wiki. The obvious reason for this is that developers might not like their page being ranked or commented on depending on how good the translation of the page is.
  • I have not carried out a extensive study on this but its obvious that some websites will have issues of certain words being translated differently. For instance “Devils-workshop” was translated as “D”, “Evil” and “workshop” as different words. So two words were split into three and that can be undesirable.
  • All said and done it is quite a cool feature and very good for people to read websites in different languages. For instance I read a German website by translating it. The English had its faults but I could get the gist of it very well.

Link: Google Blog

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News

Google Docs adds translation function to spreadsheets.

Google Docs has now enabled language translation in spreadsheets. I will explain how you can enable one cell in the spreadsheet to translate what is typed in another cell into a different language.

The result will be that you can enter a sentence in English and after you specify the language code it will show you the translated sentence.

How to go about it?

  • There is a new function for translation with Google Docs spreadsheets and that is “GoogleTranslate“.
  • You need to enter the Translate function into the cell which has to display the translated sentence.
  • The format for entering the Translate function into a cell is
    =GoogleTranslate(“I work at rtBlogs”,”en”,”Language Code”
  • Now replace “I work at rtBlogs” with the cell name where the sentence to be translated is typed.
  • Also replace “Language Code” with the cell name where the language code is entered. For better illustrations see image below.

  • You can change the language into which you want the original sentence to be translated by changing the language code. For Example change “hi” to “fr” and it will translate the sentence into French instead of Hindi.

Links: Language Code | Google Docs Blog

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News

Browser Wars: Internet Explorer’s pie shrinks.

With the release of Chrome 3.0 and the  Chrome Frame controversy I was waiting quite eagerly to see its impact on the browser market share of Chrome and Internet Explorer in September.

  • Internet Explorer has a market share of 65.71% but it had 66.97% share when the month began. That means Internet Explorer has lost 1.26% in just one month.
  • For the August survey what Internet Explorer lost was almost entirely gained by Firefox and Chrome. This month is not different. Firefox  has gained 0.77% and Chrome has gained 0.33%.
  • Chrome has now broken the 3% barrier by cornering 3.17% of the pie.
  • One worrying factor for Internet Explorer is that over the last 3 months they have lost 3% of its share which means that it if continues its downward slide it will end up being below 50.0% in the next 15 months.

Credits: Marketshare Hitslink

  • Safari has stayed on at 4.24% for over 2 months and Opera has shown marginal growth with 2.19% by probably taking away numbers from Internet Explorer.

One major factor that has gone against Internet Explorer is that IE8 has not really gone down as well as expected. I find IE 8 a much better browser than IE7 but it does seem to be have problems crashing on older machines running Windows XP.

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News

Twitter testing a new feature called Twitter List.

Twitter is simple, uncomplicated and so easy to use, that first time users usually ask themselves if this is all there is to it! Now Twitter is adding features.

Twitter just announced on its blog that they are testing a new feature called ‘List’ with a small group of users.

Credits: Twitter Blog

Lists on Twitter

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  • ‘List’ will allow users to organize the people they follow. This means you can now have similar accounts on one list.
  • People who follow you can also follow the whole list you have organized instead of doing this individually.
  • The ‘Lists’ will be public by default but will have an option to keep them private.

Twitter claims that this is being developed for better organization of accounts which was the common grouse of people who follow a lot of people on Twitter.

In my opinion Twitter is making a transformation from being a social networking or micro blogging site into a feed-provider service.

Maybe people should stop comparing Twitter with Facebook and start comparing it to RSS in the future.

Twitter will be allow ‘List’ feature to all its users very soon after tests are completed.

Link: Tiwtter Blog

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News

Google Docs get Equation friendly.

Any student using Google Docs previously must have realized the difficulty in inserting mathematical and scientific equations into a document. Google has now added a new feature which allows you to type in the equation with many pre-set symbols. Very aptly this new feature in Google Docs is called ‘Equation Editor‘

Equation Editor

  • When you open a Google Document just click on Insert and then select Equation. This will pop up the Equation Editor to be used.
  • Equation Editor can easily display complex equations in a way which is similar to the way we write them on paper.
  • This is a tool to input and display equations and not to solve them. It is not a program for calculating results on equations. I guess if that is ever achieved by Google no one will learn how to solve equations. 🙁