Google - Part 7

Gmail feature, to track login sessions and some more details

Want to know, the timeings of your last login(like in your AdSense account) ?

Are you afraid or have doubt that, somebody else at office is accessing your Gmail ?

Want to know the Browser, mobile, POP3, etc and the timings and the Ip address of your previous logins ?

Gmail has all these features in one click….Most of us have surly missed to notice this very important security feature of Gmail.

Many of you have seen all the options present in Gmail Settings tab. And you might be thinking, where the hell could this option be present?

You might have missed this because, this option is at the end of the Gmail page(footer).

Here are the screen shots…
last-login-gmail-detail

When you click on the “Detail” link…you can see the details of the last 5 login sessions. And you can also see, if the same email account is being used at the same time in some other places. And importantly, you can “Signout all other login sessions”.
Sessiona-gmail-Ip-log-login

How to use this data

If you’re concerned about unauthorized access to your mail, you’ll be able to use this data to find out if and when someone gained access. Does the Access Type column show any unusual access? If you don’t use POP to collect your mail, but your Recent activity table is showing some POP access, it may be a sign that your account has been compromised.

The IP address column is also useful. If you always or most often sign in to Gmail using a single computer, your IP address should be the same, or start with the same two sets of numbers (for example, 172.16.xx.xx). If you’re seeing an IP address that differs greatly from your usual IP address, it could either mean that you’ve recently accessed your mail from a different location, or that someone has accessed your mail. Your current IP address is displayed below the Recent activity table.

Concurrent sessions

If your mail is currently being accessed from another location, it would be listed in the Concurrent session information table. This could mean that you simply have another browser window open with Gmail loaded, or that your home computer is logged in to Gmail while you’re accessing your mail from work. If you’re concerned about any concurrent access, you can sign out all sessions other than your current session by clicking Sign out all other sessions.

If you think your account has been accessed by someone illegally
You’ll need to change your password and your security question. The first step is to read our suggestions on choosing a good password to make sure that your new password is secure. Then, follow the instructions in How do I change my password? to update your password.
disable-gmail-chat
In the first screen shot, you can also spot another small link “Gmail view: standard | turn off chat | “. You can click on the “turn off chat” link to sign out of chat inside your Gmail. But this can be done at the chat box window itself(so, its not an important, must have option).

Send and receive Orkut Scraps on your SMS enabled mobile phones[India&Brazil Only]

Orkut is a very famous Social networking site in Brazil and India. I have heard that, in Brazil, if 20 are in a cyber, 18 of them will be accessing Orkut. Hope this is not the case in India, but still Orkut is a popular site to get in touch with friends and family.

But its difficult to be in front of computer all the time to get in touch with friends and family. So Orkut had introduced a separate version of Orkut for mobile internet users. But as we all know, most of the service providers charge high rates for providing mobile internet.

So now Google’s popular social networking site Orkut has introduced yet another cool feature, by which we can use Orkut from our cell phones without internet connection. Yes, I am talking about the SMS feature. Orkut had introduced SMS feature in Brazil long back. If you are from Brazil, then click here to learn more.

So I was expecting Orkut to release the same kind of feature in India too. And the day came soon, and now we can use orkut’s new SMS feature, to scrap our friends, look up their contact information and receive scrap notifications.

I always had a thought that Google may merge its Orkut and dodgeball.com to give us a great social networking site. Now Orkut SMS service would look more similar to dodgeball.com( by Google ) service.

To get started click here. There you will see option to specify your mobile number to receive notifications. You will have to verify your mobile number first to start using this service.

When I first saw the list of service providers, I felt like, I am missing something. And suddenly I could realize that, Big players like Airtel and Vodafone where missing from the list! Hope they include them as soon as possible, orelse they will be loosing many customers, before acquiring them.

I use Spice SIM in my Nokia 6630(“3G enabled iPhone will be released on Aug 18th and Aug 22nd by Vodafone and Airtel respectively, in India”. And I will be purchaing iPhone with Airtel soon..).

Spice charges 2Rs for sending mobile verification SMS.

Though I used my Spice number to signup for this service and sent the verification code to the correct number, still this service is not yet activated to my number. I received no confirmation message from Orkut either.

And surprisingly I spotted another aspect….which I have not shown in the above video. When I click on the link “Having Problem?” It shows the following message

Currently orkut SMS works only in Brazil. If you are still not able to register your mobile number visit the SMS help page.

Here is the screen shot…

What should we call this…an error or is this SMS feature still in pre-launch mode in India or is it a pre-registration or whatelse ?

Is this Me alone or everyone else having the same problem with registering their mobile number?

Google Ad Manager BETA, with some improvements

Google Ad Manager Release Notes

Google Ad Manager is a Service, using which we can handle our private advertisers..
Ad Manager offers a wealth of features to help you with:

Google Ad Manager Release Notes

Google Ad Manager is a Service, using which we can handle our private advertisers..

Ad Manager offers a wealth of features to help you with:

Google-Ad-Manager-infographic

Inventory management

Yield optimization
Ad targeting
Trafficking, ad delivery, and order booking
Creatives and rich media management
Reporting
User interface navigation
Account administration
Google Ad Manager delivers all of your directly-sold and network-based inventory

On August 1st 2008, Google Added some features into its AdManager…Here is a small list:

Creative preview on your site – You can now preview a creative on your site to test the creative before the campaign starts. Learn more here.
New look and feel – Google has changed the style and overall appearance of the product. While most things remain in the same place, it may take a few moments to adjust to the new look.
Additional languages – Ad Manager is now available in three new languages: French, Italian, and Ukrainian.
Unlimited flight dates – Originally you could only set unlimited flight dates for ad network orders. Now you can set unlimited flight dates on any Exclusive, Remnant, or House order that has an unlimited impression goal.

If you have any additional questions about this release, Google encourage you to visit the Ad Manager Help Center, and for complete resource for all Ad Manager topics. Also, feel free to join the Ad Manager Help Forum to share any questions, comments, and best practices you have with other Ad Manager users.

Remember, Google Ad Manager is still in BETA and if your website is designed to have direct ad sales, then you can apply for it here. But Google only selects certain websites for its BETA testing. We are happy that, our blog ( Technotip.org) has been approved for this BETA testing long before, and its been nice to use the Free service to get maximum benefit from each ad spot.

Google Page Creator is no longer accepting new sign-ups

Today Google has officially closed the new sign-ups for Google Page Creator. They say that, they have shifted their focus to developing Google Sites, which offers many of the capabilities of Page Creator along with new features like site-level navigation, site-level headers, control over who can see and edit your site, and rich embeddings like calendars, videos, and Google docs.

If you are currently a Page Creator user, you can continue to use Page Creator and your pages will automatically be transitioned to Google Sites later this year. More information about the transition will be posted as we get closer to the transition time.

And thanks to Google, for allowing us to use Google Sites to create websites. You can use Google Sites to create websites, wikis, intranets, projects sites, club sites, and more. See http://sites.google.com. You can signup for Google Site Creator at any time. Google-Site-Creator

Anyway, Googlepages did not have many features, which is the main reason why it was not a buzz like blogspot or wordpress. So its a welcome sign to see some thing more creative, which has more features and under our(users) control.

But I am worried about one thing, that is the URL structure. Previously it was http://sitename.googlepages.com. What will happen after the transition? Because in Google site creator the URL structure is http://sites.google.com/site/site-name-choosen/ .

As many people have a googlepages account and they simply upload things to their googlepages account and link it to thier blog, to save bandwidth. If the URL structure changes means, all those links has to be searched and modified manually, which is a tedious job. Anyway, lets hope for the best and what we can do now is, to wait and see what Google thinks about this!

Gmail, small security option

This is just a small security enhancement found in Gmail. Anyway, many times these small things help us a lot, so lets not ignore it.
Hypertext Transfer Protocol over Secure Socket Layer or HTTPS is a URL scheme used to indicate a secure HTTP connection.

Https keeps your mail encrypted as it travels between your web browser and the servers, so someone sharing your favorite coffee shop’s public wifi can’t read it. Your bank and credit card websites use this same protocol to protect your financial data.

Gmail use https to protect our password every time we log into Gmail, but it does not use https once we are inside Gmail, unless you ask for it (by visiting https://mail.google.com rather than http://mail.google.com).

And the downside is that https can make your mail slower. Your computer has to do extra work to decrypt all that data, and encrypted data doesn’t travel across the internet as efficiently as unencrypted data. That’s why Google leave the choice up to the users.

There are two options to select from. One is to bookmark https://mail.google.com and then use it everytime we login to Gmail. Orelse we can set it inside our Gmail Settings. Below are the screen shots….

First click on settings. And then search for the option, in the General tab.

general-tab-gmail

Select whichever option you are convenient with.

It is good to see that, Gmail supports https scheme. But we can see that, some other Google services like Google Toolbar doesn’t support https scheme. Lets hope that Google is hard at work, to implement https protocol scheme to all its services.

Google Guide for Bloggers

Each and every blogger on this earth should watch this video fully, to learn some of the best practices, which Google itself follows.

This is a video recording of Marissa Mayer’s keynote that she recently delivered at the Google I/O Developers Conference. You’ll learn some very interesting facts about Google in this video. But more importantly, you should observe and relate or compare every aspects followed by Google to that followed by you, on your blog.

This would give you some idea of where you are doing wrong and what you should do, so that, to be on right track.

Here are some of the points you should observe and learn from this video….
1. Google has employed designers, fashion designers, cartoonists, choreographers, developers etc mainly for its iGoogle project. So that, each and every aspect of their website is professional looking. So we should also give importance to every aspect of our blog, starting from the logo, design, content, layout, advertisements etc. It should be handled professionally.

2. Watch the video at 4min 55 sec, here Mayer is talking about the simple design of Google homepage. We should also make our website/blog as simple as possible, Without including more images, flash, etc, which increases the load time of our blog.

3. Get some friends and tell them to use your blog. Get some unbiased feedback. Take all the feed backs positively. Actually, negative feed back will help us a lot to improve our blog.

4. You have to know about how the data transfer takes place when a user visits your blog.
When a visitor visits your blog, all the http request is sent from the users computer to all the http objects present on your blog page. So if you have many objects displayed on your blog from different servers, then the load time would definitely be higher.
Its ideal to place all the objects like images, scripts etc inside one server and then link them on to your blog.
Also the speed of the server(where you have hosted your blog) is also important. And if you have frequent downtime means, you should think of changing your host. Technotip.org recommends Doreo host.

5. A/B split testing. Use some testing methods to determine the logo positioning, advertisement positioning etc.

6. Positioning of each thing on your blog will contribute to your success or failure. So be careful in A/B split testing.

7. “If you don’t listen to your customers, someone else will”. — Sam Walton.

8. “If I had asked people, what they wanted. They would have said, faster horses”. — Henry Ford.

9. Number of items displayed on your blog also play a vital role.
It is recommended that, you should remove all those widgets, badges, social networking link logos etc from your side bar, as it increase the load time and contributes for the bad user experience.
Social networking link logos can be displayed in your about me page or contact page.

10. Faster loading websites get more returning visitors over time.

11. Allow the comments to show on your blog, by making comment moderation quicker. And it will be good to see their comments live as soon as possible. And also reply for the comments quickly and aptly and promptly. This will show your commentators(who are the actual contributes of your blog) that, you value their voice(opinion).

12. Always welcome feedback.

13. Be upto date and blog according to the current trends of your niche.

14. Once you have implemented everything in your blog(after A/B slip testing), just don’t think its the perfect one. You need to run A/B slit testing again after a year or two. Because, the user requirements change along with time and you need to be quick to act accordingly.

15. Translating your blog to multiple languages would help to gain more visitors. But if you are not comfortable with that, then you can always make use of language translation tool, to give the option to read your blog in multiple languages.

16. Have “Healthy disrespect for the impossible”. — Larry page.

17. Nothing can be a perfect solution. We have to work constantly and keep moving nearer and nearer to perfection.

18. Imagination is muscle…We need to assume ourselves for What problems to work on, what products to develop etc.

19. Respond faster, for all those who report any bug on your blog.
If you can’t resolve the problem, just inform them that, you are working on it currently.
In some cases, the reporter of the bug himself/herself may even give the solution to the problem.

20. Watch from 45th min of the video to see a small Summary of this video.
Watch from 46th min for the question and answer session with Marissa Mayer.

These are some of the things that I could make out while watching this video. But this is not the end. Each person has his own ability to watch and understand. You may even get some more ideas after watching this video. If this is a case with you, then please share your thoughts in the below comment section..