Google recently introduced Google Takeout, a new service which helps you to download all your data hosted on Google which includes your Picasa albums, Google contacts, your Buzz updates and even your Google+ updates.
The downloaded data is useful in many ways, for example, if you sign-up for a new social networking site, then you can use the Google contacts (.vcf) file to send invitations and get in touch with your friends in no time.
Downloading your data using Google Takeout
Head on to Google Takeout and sign in to your Google account.
Under the Choose services tab you can choose what all data you want to download, you will also get the estimated size of the files.
After that, head on to Downloads tab and hit Download (note that you need to re-login).
Don’t worry about the size as you will get it in .zip format. All the formats are open, except the profile file which is of .json format.
You can’t download data from Docs, YouTube, Orkut etc using Google Takeout but there’s another service by Google known as Data Liberation which gives step-by step method to download your data from each Google service.
Drop in your opinions after trying Google Takeout.
The folks at Google have surely been kept busy over the past few months. As Google+ is setting the internet on fire with a mad rush for new invites for checking the new social media product.
Google is convinced that they have got a killer design with Google Plus, and hence are moving to make Gmail look a lot more like Google+.
The Current Design of Gmail
The current design in fine. As someone who uses Gmail everyday, I like the current design was a little concerned what the new design would look like.
Gmail offers users to change the theme at Settings >> Themes and select the Preview Themes which give a good idea of how Gmail will look in the future.
The planned design for Gmail
The new design plans to make Gmail more easy to use, with the user interface becoming a lot more cleaner. Users might not be happy with such design changes as most times, people are used to a particular design and have some sort of visual memory that can make them resist the idea of a new design.
Google will be rolling out new design and features across all Google products to make it more social. It seems this time Google will leave no stone unturned to make sure it cracks the social media puzzle.
What are your views on the design plans for Gmail? Do drop in your comments.
Google has always, introduced new services either by rolling them out for everyone in one go or by invitation. It all started with Gmail, when it was launched, Google allowed people to use and create a new Gmail account only via invitations.
With Google Wave, it was the same and people clamored for invitations from friends and family along with some websites who offered invitations.
How Twitter reacted to Google Plus Invites!
Twitter is usually a good place to look up how much buzz a certain brand, product is creating. This is because, Twitter is open and not private at all.
According to Trendistic, About %1 of all tweets across almost 24 hours on Twitter had the word “Google” included in it. If Twitter gets about 190 million tweets per day, hence roughly about 1.9 million tweets had the word Google in it.
This is a remarkable way to increase word of mouth publicity but it has its pitfalls. When Google Wave was invite only based, it got a lot of negative publicity and that too spread word of mouth. This is markedly different from Apple, which never speak about a new product and lets the media do all the speculating which ends up being free publicity.
More about Google+ later when I land up an invite. 🙂 Do drop in your views and comments.
More than a month ago, Gmail introduced the People Widget. It was being rolled out over a few days but then days turned to weeks and now after a month-long wait, most Gmail users have the people widget available on their accounts.
The People Widget has a lot of useful features like when we click on an email, it shows up on the right hand side with details of the contact. Users can look up recent emails and shared documents. I tested it out with my colleague from work and it seemed to be quite nifty.
Gmail’s People Widget
The obvious idea was to compare with with Rapportive, a Gmail widget that does similar things. I wondered if this People Widget hurt Rapportive. To be more objective I used both of them. After installing Rapportive I got a lot more information in the widget compared to people widget.
Rapportive’s integrated Widget
I took the image above, after installing Rapportive on my Chrome browser. Rapportive is far more informative and shows recent email from relevant contacts just like the People Widget. Best part about Rapportive is that it integrates with the People Widget.
Rapportive offers information on connecting to different networks more proactively, while for similar information to show up with People Widget, the use should have added different networks in this his Google account.
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Where People Widget scores over Rapportive!
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Rapportive works with the browser and so when you change your browser or the computer itself, users have to install it again. While Gmail’s People Widget will show up automatically as it is inbuilt within Gmail.
There is a popular cliché which is often repeated in the blogging world, that quote is “Content is King”. If content is king, then surely Google and Facebook control much of the kingdom. Both are used extensively by people for discovering new content.
Search engines led the way for a long time, but lately people are getting their news, sharing photos and information on group events on Facebook. Facebook has forayed into search by tying up with Bing creating something called “Social Search”.
Google Plus, will be probably be the last time Google gets to challenge Facebook as a social network. If they get this wrong, we can safely assume Google just cannot crack the ‘social’ code.
Is Google on the right track?
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Google actually has all services that Facebook offers. We can share videos on YouTube, send email and chat via Gmail and save our photos on Picasa. So why is Facebook so popular? The reason is that Facebook allows users to do all the sharing in one single place and with one single contact or friend list.
Google Plus will be on the right track if it can manage to bring all these services together but at the same time be simple and easy enough to use.
The answer to the question if Google will crack the social code, only time will reveal. But at here is a video about circles which is a feature of Google Plus.
If you want a demo of visit their official site and sign up to be invited. Google Plus will be rolled out gradually to all users.
Do you think Google Plus will be real competition to Facebook? Do drop in your comments.
A week ago, Yahoo! released their music app “Play” for Android based smartphones. The music player with features like song identification, smart shuffling, music sharing, etc. received mixed reviews from users. Some called it a hybrid of iTunes Genius and Shazam while some felt that the app lacked certain features that other players offer. Well, that’s the reason I decided to check out this app myself.
To start with, I was really impressed by the clean and simple interface of Play. It has a simple, easy-to-use interface and a homescreen with 3 basic options : Library, Shuffle and Identify. ‘
Library – As you all know, Library is the place where you will find your entire music collection. Like any other music player, this app too organizes your music collection based on artists as well as albums.
However, a unique feature about this player is that it integrates with Yahoo! Music news to provide you the latest updates about your favourite artists. Unlike most players, Play fetches missing album cover arts automatically.
Smart Shuffle – The Smart Shuffle feature of Play lets you create custom play-lists based on your mood. You can create a playlist based on a single song or even create playlists from the songs that you mostly listen to. The more you play, the smarter the song selections will be.
Identify – With the Identify feature, Play enables you to recognize the song currently playing on the radio, in a bar, a disco or even on TV. While there are many other Android apps available that enable you to do so, then why use Play? Well, compared to other apps in the Market, Play gives you an added feature. It lets you set the app in “Continuous” mode, which means it continuously listens to the music playing, takes samples every 30 seconds or so and builds a list of tunes. This can be really useful, if you want to know the songs that are playing in a club or at a party.
Highlights
Cover art – Automatically fetches missing album cover arts.
Artist News – Provides you the latest news about your favourite artists.
Built-in scrobbling to Last.fm – Automatically scrobbles the songs you listen to your Last.fm profile to track and analyze your listening history.
Social Integration – Easily send status updates about the music you’re listening to using Facebook, Twitter, E-mail or even text messages.
Identify songs – Identify a single song or a series of songs as they’re played.
Smart Shuffle – Automatically create custom playlists based on your mood.
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Disadvantages
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Insufficient music identification – Compared to standalone music recognition apps like Shazam, Yahoo! has a smaller library.
Lacks basic features – Basic features like equalizer and screen lock controls are missing.
Not suitable for Tablets – It is designed specifically for smartphones and doesn’t look good on a bigger screen.
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Conclusion
Well, looking at all the features, I personally feel that Play is a really good music player for Android. But it still needs to improve the music identification feature as well as include certain basic features. Other than that, it is really a complete music player for Android.
You can download Play for your Android device by searching for “Play by Yahoo” in the Android Market or from the link below.
If Bing and Google were competitive boxers instead of search engines, then Bing would be the underdog and Google the overwhelming favourite to win. But over the last year according to a report by Compete, Google has been given a real counter punch.
Google has lost the search market share by an astounding 10%. The reasons have been primarily a consolidation by Bing powered search engines which now includes Yahoo search.
Why is Google losing share of search market?
The answer is complicated but mainly over 2 years, Google search has been perceived as lacking in innovation. Also previously, people would search for any content on Google, now people tend to use Facebook for discovering new content through friends.
Also Twitter has become increasingly popular medium to keep in touch with current events and news.
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This is where people might be flocking away from Google.
Bing is not really a threat…
The obvious point to assume is that if Google falls, Bing rises. That is not necessarily true as Microsoft is still pushing great amount of money into its internet services including search but are not making profits of it.
This means, Google is still the only profitable search engine around and as long as that is happening, Google will still rule the internet.
I had recently written about storing your Microsoft Office documents on Google Docs, thanks to a plugin. But on my laptop, I do not use MS Office and prefer using OpenOffice which is free. I still like to save my documents on Google Docs, as when it comes to collaborative work, there is nothing better than Google Docs.
OpenOffice.org 2 GoogleDocs is useful to import or export files between Google Docs and OpenOffice.
Firstly, download the plugin on your computer from link below. Now run the file which installs a add-on for OpenOffice on your computer.
Then start OpenOffice software on your computer and you should see a new add-on installed on it.
Just import any file from Google Docs to OpenOffice by clicking on the Import from Google Docs options.
It has a helpful feature which shows all your Google Docs in a list for users to either download or open via a browser (see image below).
Similarly, we can export the document on Google Docs by saving the document and updating it. Just make sure that the credentials of Google are complete, as in users need to insert “@gmail” after as shown in the image below.
Subsequently, you can also choose to auto-update your document. 🙂
If you are using OpenOffice and Google Docs, do give it a try. Do drop in your comments.
Google has recently added, search by image a feature which allows users to use an image file from the internet or even your desktop and get relevant search results about the image. Today, with its search results Google has introduced related searches.
Using Google Squared technology, Google is bringing related search results in the form of organized list of search results.
Google’s masterstroke with related search results!
On searching for something like tyres or cricket bats, Google will now show related searches above all the search links.
This will encourage people to search deeper than they would usually, which means more revenues for Google if they end up clicking on a sponsored link.
Having brands and stores showing up automatically as search results, will help users a great deal to actually find things online.
Lately, Google has received a lot of bad press about not being innovative with search and that it was stagnating. Also with Twitter and Facebook becoming popular for content discovery, Google had to pull up their socks.
With related searches it does bring about a really useful and simple feature to help users. Maybe it is because of their new CEO Larry Page who took over this April. Or maybe Google is just getting back to its roots of innovating and then figuring out how to make money of it.
The internet has billions of images stored on it. A lot of them are unknown and Google Images has been a good way to search images online. Google has now enabled Search by Image, where in you can even drag and drop an image into the search from your desktop.
Go to http://images.google.com and we get to the search bar. If you are using the Chrome developer version, we can see the camera icon at the end of the search bar.
Enter the URL of an image from the internet or even drag and drop an image from your desktop as shown in image above. The search results will show similar images using the image to search the internet.
This probably borrows a lot from Google Googles which is an app with Android and carries out similar search by image.
Here is a video demo by Google on the new search by image feature
So try out Google Search by image on your Chrome browser and do drop in your comments and views.
