~TECH-BYTES~

For the very first time i have seen a google update in progress… i was just uploading my albums from my pc to picasa webalbums through picasa2 software… and it was a matter of just one refresh and Magic!!! picasa web album just changed its looks… i was surprised my first thought was maybe because i have used much of the storage space its some kindof upgradation to increase space but no i was totally wrong…

It was a Picasa web album update… So what’s new:-

• New and more clean looks…
• new tab bar for my photos, Favorites and Explore
• Face tag feature, yes Picasa now identifies faces and allows you to tag them and also offers lots of settings in case you want to hide tags in public album or in certain specific albums.{Quite effective but a bit slow}
• Linked Galleries now displayed on the sidebar.
• Discover photos from around the world on the Explore page.
• Upload photos by email.
• Add Creative Commons licensing to your photos
• Increase or decrease the size of thumbnails when you open an album.

But unfortunately now change in storage space, You still have to purchase additional space.

If you find any more changes do comment…

Knol is a new Google service created for sharing knowledge. The service has been announced in December 2007 and it’s now publicly available.

Knol has much more in common with Squidoo and HubPages than with Wikipedia. The service is centered around authors: each Knol article displays the name of its author and links to a small biography. Google even lets you verify your identity, but this only works if you live on the US.

Knol doesn’t intend to become an encyclopedia, so there’s no single article about a topic. An author can write about almost any topic, but it’s recommended to write authoritative content.

There are three levels of collaboration in Knol:

* open collaboration (any Knol user can edit the article)
* moderate collaboration (any Knol user can suggest changes to the article - enabled by default)
* closed collaboration (only the co-authors can edit the article)

Google uses a rich-text editor borrowed from Page Creator, so it’s much easier to edit knols than Wikipedia articles. Users can rate the articles, add comments and write reviews, much like for scholarly works.

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Google has finally realized that it’s a bad idea to automatically add to the list of Gmail contacts all the people you’ve sent an email. An updated version of Gmail’s contact manager has a separate section for the people you’ve emailed: “suggested contacts”.

“My Contacts is a place to import, store and view all of the contact information that’s important to you. You can also create your own groups of contacts to easily email many people at once. We add people you’ve emailed to Suggested Contacts. You can move contacts from Suggested Contacts into My Contacts at any time.”

There’s an option to automatically move suggested contacts into My Contacts if you frequently email them, but the previous behavior doesn’t seem to be an option.

I don’t have this new version of the contact manager, so if you notice other changes, post them in the comments.

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Google just released Lively, a 3D world where you can chat with others and create your own rooms. Traces of this program appeared back in 2007 under the name of My World (this project also received the rumor nickname Google metaverse; TomHTML, Tony and I also lately saw traces of something called Google Rooms, though we aren’t 100% sure it’s related). After installing the desktop setup for Windows – yes, this is one of the rare Google products which isn’t completely browser-based – you’ll be forwarded to lively.com again. There, you can pick from a number of available rooms, and sign-in with your Google account.

I experienced a couple of problems with this service right now; from odd user name restrictions (I ended up re-selecting my Google ID name, even though they asked me to pick a new name at first), to very slow loading (I mostly saw skeletons at first), to finally, a program crash (the message “Lively has encountered a problem and an error report has been sent” appeared and the program closed). These may be launch problems, though, and nothing permanent… we’ll see.

Once you logged into a room, you can start customizing your avatar. First you can pick from a base type – like male, female or animal – and then you can fine-tune your hair, skin color, eyes and more. You’ll then see yourself surrounded by other avatars, and there’s background music and lots of laughing, grunting and other noises. The graphic has a lighthearted cartoon touch, reminiscent of something like a Lucasarts 3D game. When you talk by using the chat box at the bottom, your words appear as speech bubble above your character.

You can then move around by kind of dragging your avatar (clicking your avatar switches to self-navigation mode, and clicking outside it switches to camera navigation). This may be an unusual mode of navigation at first, but after some seconds it works very well.

Selecting a room from the Lively site

After years of testing, Gmail has finally added a very useful security feature: tracking open sessions. If you log in to Gmail from more than one computer and you forget to sign out, you’ll be able to see the list of locations where your account can still be accessed.

Until now, the only solution when you forgot to log out from Gmail after using a public computer was to change your password. Otherwise, anyone could access your account without knowing the password. Now you can sign out remotely from all the locations where your Gmail account is still open.

If you click on “Details” in Gmail’s footer, you’ll find a lot of interesting information about your sessions. “The top table, under Concurrent session information, indicates all open sessions, along with IP address and access type — which refers to how email was retrieved, for example, through iGoogle, POP3 or a mobile phone. The bottom table, under Recent activity, contains my most recent history along with times of access. I can also view my current IP address at the very bottom of this window, where it says This computer is using IP address…“.

This could be useful if you want to find whether someone else has access to your account: you’ll be able to find the IP address and the date of the most recent activity in your account.

Gmail’s blog mentions that this feature is currently being rolled out in the new version of Gmail, so you may not see it right now. Google AdSense, PayPal and orkut are three other services that show the time of your last login so you can protect against abuse, but Gmail’s new feature is much more advanced.

Among the things you can do to protect your Gmail account, it’s a good idea to sign out after reading your email, not to select “remember me” when you log in from a public computer and to choose a good password that should remain secret.

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