Del.icio.us is broken, badly.

Analysis:

The “saved by _ people page” shows wrong numbers, Zero in many cases. Taking a look at the main page, most of the posts suggest “Saved by 96 people”

We know that a post hits frontpage once it is approaching 100 (people) [or even more in some cases]. The reason for this particular status of the page is due to that, The links marked by 96 people hits frontpage, does NOT increase even though more people are marking, where lies the problem (broken, remember!). New links marked my people are not being counted, in other words, “Saved by” pages are not being updated with new usernames.

Also taking a look at the popular page, most of the posts are atleast a week old, now re-appearing on the page, only because new links are
being rendered Orphan.

The result is that, the social aspect of the site is Zilch.

The del.icio.us feedback team replied promptly to my mail, re-assuring it will be fixed in “the next couple of days“.

2 days is way too much time. This, situation, is giving a hard time to Del.icio.us addicts, who may have to resort to other sites till it gets fixed.

Update 1: Its still broken (although the main pain no longer has the 96 rule)

Update 2: Del.icio.us Founder, Joshua Schachter is leaving Yahoo. How ironic is this? I wonder what happens to delicious 2.0 now?

Update 3: It appears to be working fine, for now, atleast [as of 22Jun08]

Smart thinking by Dog-cat-pet spammers. (who!?)

They have targeted a much less explored segment of users, Social networking.

What has happened: 10 to 12 delicious “users” have bookmarked a set of links of particular (spam) sites within a certain time span. Quite obviously, these links have surfaced on the delicious popular page. The no. of links increased from 3 to 11 within 5 hours time. (from 0800 GMT today)

The result is that the popular page looks like shit, that is, no different than a random-url spam site.

This has also made other news aggregators which features this page look .. well, shitty.

(eg: popurls)

Here is a list of delicious user ids which have been used to spam the site.

saniyamishra78 , retfjku78, tachz.p, ch339ric (links may become dead IF delicious team takes cares of these ids, only IF)

“Cat Go Kitty Krazy Toy beats Stuffed Dog and Cat Blog Archive Petsmart Gift Card” – says the spam page title. Wtf does that even mean apart from the fact that it concerns dogs and cats !

Spammers are stupid yes, but this is outrageous. Nevertheless, “smart” stuff from these stupid spammer. I also observed that not even a single genuine user has bookmarked these links. This also proves blind bookmarking is practically non-existant here.

Expecting some action soon.

Google has launched a gadget for Google Talk. It works similarly to the version embedded into Gmail, but it’s created in Flash, so it has a richer interface. Each conversation has its own tab, so the gadget doesn’t occupy too much space. It’s also easier to search your contacts and to invite other people.

The Gadget can be added to ur personalized google home here.
Some of its features are as follows:

• Can play Youtube/Google video in the chat window by just pasting the url.
• Can see the Picasaweb photo slideshow right in the chat window
• Can add links to videos and albums in your status. If your contacts use the gadget, they’ll be able to see the content without opening a new page .
• Can be added to your web page
  

  

To see the Google Talk Gadget in action on the Google Personalized Homepage, check out this Short video from the google team.

The Original Article can be found here.

Nearly three years after Gmail was first released, the free Web-based e-mail from Google is being opened up for anyone in the world. Beginning Wednesday, everyone can sign up instead of having to get an invite from a Gmail-using friend. Google has been phasing out the invitation restriction geographically, with total general availability offered in Europe last week and in North America, South America and Asia this week. The service is still in beta test mode, however.

Many people thought Google’s ad-based searchable e-mail service with an unheard-of gigabyte of free storage was an April Fool’s Day joke when it was announced on April 1, 2004. Privacy advocates and others objected to Google serving up ads based on the content of the messages. Making Gmail accounts available only by invitation, and thus a scarce commodity, increased their allure and led to auctions of invites on eBay. Later, rival Web-based e-mail services followed with full search functions, vast amounts of storage and ads.

The Original Article can be found here.

If you want to have desktop icons for your favorite Google Talk contacts, there’s an easy to do it.

Right-click on your desktop and select New / shortcut. Then type:

gtalk:chat?jid=[Gmail-Username]@gmail.com

and the name of your friend (of course, replace [Gmail-Username] with the actual username.Infact type your own mail id and watch the fun). When you click on the shortcut, Google Talk will open a new window where you can chat with your friend. To make a shortcut that automatically calls your friend type this instead:

gtalk:call?jid=[Gmail-Username]@gmail.com

You could right-click on the icon, select properties and choose a new icon.

If Google Talk is not open, clicking on the shortcut will launch it, but won’t open a new chat window for your friend.
You can easily launch Google Talk by going to Start/Run and typing gtalk: (gtalk followed by a colon).

Also, the above mentioned commands can be used to call gtalk from the Run Command.

Gmail was made open yesterday for sign-up to users in Egypt.

It was previously available only in Aus, SA and Jpn for sign-ups without invitations.

Perhaps, There is a way to sign up to gmail via proxies located in these countries.

The day when it’ll be open to everyone is not far.

However, on the downside of it, the number of spam accounts will also increase

Bravo gmail!

We all know that Youtube has awesome videos, but copyright infringement claims and DMCA take-down notices mean that any given video can disappear at any time. Having a local copy of the video means you won’t lose access if YouTube removes the video from their site.

You can also convert the video to MP4 format, and transfer it to your iPod as well.

Not only Youtube, but many other video sites like Dailymotion, ifilm, metacafe offer similar video content.

Doing this appears to be in compliance with YouTube’s Terms of Use, as long as you do not distribute the videos to others, and you retain any copyright notices on the files.

The are 4 things we can do to watch these videos and/or storing it our disks.

1. Watch the video as it is in the website.. pretty simple this
2. Download the video using Keepvid or the mozilla Add-on called Videodownloader. This downloaded video is in FLV format.
3. Watch the Video on your disk using FLV player or VLC player.
4. Convert the FLV files into mp4 format using iTube. This takes the youtube url,downloads the video, and converts it into mp4 fromat.The videos in mp4 format can be put in our Ipods!

The original article can be found here.

The primary use of bookmarking is to store your bookmarks online, which allows you to access the same bookmarks from any computer and add bookmarks from anywhere.

Many bookmarking sites are available which offer many other stuff such as web hosting.

Some of them are:

• Delicious
• Digg
• Reddit
• Clipmarks
• Google Bookmarks
• Spurl
• Yahoo Myweb

Add-ons are available for your browser (IE and Firefox) in case of most of the bookmarkong sites.

My favourite is Delicious , the reason being its simple interface and add-on support in firefox.

Some Survey has Ranked Digg,Reddit and Delicious as 1st, 2nd , 3rd in social bookmarking.

Del.icio.us describes itself as follows.
“del.icio.us is a collection of favorites – yours and everyone else’s. You can use del.icio.us to:

• Keep links to your favorite articles, blogs, music, reviews, recipes, and more, and access them from any computer on the web.
• Share favorites with friends, family, coworkers, and the del.icio.us community.
• Discover new things. Everything on del.icio.us is someone’s favorite — they’ve already done the work of finding it. So del.icio.us is full of bookmarks about technology, entertainment, useful information, and more. Explore and enjoy.

del.icio.us is a social bookmarking website — the primary use of del.icio.us is to store your bookmarks online, which allows you to access the same bookmarks from any computer and add bookmarks from anywhere, too. On del.icio.us, you can use tags to organize and remember your bookmarks, which is a much more flexible system than folders.

You can also use del.icio.us to see the interesting links that your friends and other people bookmark, and share links with them in return. You can even browse and search del.icio.us to discover the cool and useful bookmarks that everyone else has saved — which is made easy with tags.

All you need is a browser and an internet connection.”

The Video files in Google video can easily be downloaded by using a simple tweak.

Now here is the Method.

In the respective video page, Click the download button in the right side. (you should be knowing that ) Also note that all videos don’t have this option of download.

This will initiate the download of Google video player. DON’T download it. (Thats the whole point, to play the video in YOUR player)

Now, This will open a sub-menu in which there exists an option that says ‘Manually download the video’ (Using the Drop down beside it, choose the file format-Avi or mp4)

This will initiate the download of a .gvp file. Open the gvp file with a text editor (notepad/wordpad etc, preferably Wordpad in windows)

Ahhh.. here we come.. In the 3rd line of the text there is a tag ‘url:’ .Following this is the actual download LINK to the VIDEO.

Copy the link (startin from http://) till the end of the line.(Just before tag ‘docid:’starts)

Hurray! We have the Holy link!

Paste this onto your browser address bar to download the video as a whole!

Download it and ENJOY!

This link can also be used in web-pages as a direct download link.

(Tip: Right-click->Save target as DOES NOT WORK!)

Lets illustrate this with an example.

Here is a link to the MS Ipod Parody in google videos.

Now ,THIS is the actual download link for the video.

(Please forgive me for the over-use of exclamation marks and small braces!)

Alternatively, the video can be viewed using the Google video player (which involves streaming of the video), if the video is not worth a download

All the GVPlayer does is pick up the URL in the .gvp file and play!

Note: This itself is an Original article.

If you enable saving your chat history in Gmail, your conversations from Google Talk are saved as standard emails. To make them stand out from the rest of messages, Gmail adds two labels: chat and chats.

If you want to search your chats, you just have to add label:chat to your query. If you want to search only your mail, exclude the chats by adding -label:chat.
(Instead of label:A, you can just type l:A)

Gmail has many other hidden labels that can make your life easier, so you don’t have to use the advanced search:

* label:inbox – search only your Inbox. It’s a good idea to keep your Inbox clean.

* label:star (label:starred) – search only your starred messages. You can use the star button like a bookmarking system. Star only important messages.

* label:draft (or label:drafts) – search only unfinished messages. Drafts could be used for storing notes or emails that must be sent later.

* label:sent (or label:sentmail, label:sent-mail, label:sent mail ) – search only sent mail. It may be useful to restrict your search only to messages you’ve sent, or only to messages you’ve received if you add a minus.

* label:all (or label:allmail, label:all-mail, label:all mail ) – search all your mail, including messages from Trash (label:trash) and Spam (label:spam).

* label:read and label:unread. Restrict your search only to read mail or unread mail. For example, to find all your sent messages that have unread replies, you can search for label:unread label:sent.

* label:voicemail (or label:voicemails ) – search only the voicemail received from a Google Talk user.

You can also combine all these labels with user-defined labels in a query. To show results that have both label A and label B, just search for label:A label:B. To show results that have one of the labels A and B or both, just search for label:A OR label:B. 

You can find the original article here.