Twitter is increasingly becoming a threat to Google, in the form of Search. Other than Google, people also started looking at Twitter as alternative. In some cases, the first choice is Twitter. No wonder, Twitter made it’s impact with it’s real-time search.

Real-time search is the in thing. Recently, I have come across news where people have been rescued by searching there information on Twitter along with a GPS device. An other example of a real time Search can be found in this Telegraph article.

Having said the importance of real time search results and Twitter in the search arena, here is an interesting Greasemonkey script developed by Mark Carey of MT-HACKS. When implemented/installed, this script will show the most relevant 5 tweets for the search query entered in Google. The results will be displayed at the top. This will have no impact on your Google search results. Moreover, you will have real-time search results and Google results both on the same page.

How to install this Greasemonkey Script in Firefox?

1. Install the Greasemonkey Firefox plugin which lets you customize a web page with JavaScript.
2. Visit Twitter Search results on Google and click on the INSTALL button.

If you want to install this on Opera, please read the instructions below.

1. Installing Scripts in Opera.
2. Supported Greasemonkey Scripts in Opera.

Twitter has still a long way to go before it can overtake Google as the top Search Engine. Twitter may work better in the case of real-time search. But for programmers, developers and many other professionals, Google is the favorite.

We have seen browser wars between Firefox, IE, Opera, Chrome. Do we get to see the Search Engine wars between Google and Twitter in the future?

Technorati Tags: Twitter, Google, Greasemonkey, Search Results, Firefox, Opera

Do you check Weather forecast before stepping out of your home/office? Do you forget to wish your loved on their Birthday’s or Anniversaries? Are you a sports enthusiast? How to you keep track of all your billing dates of various Credit Cards and other services? Do you watch the Price Quotes on Stock Markets and price changes on millions of products? I wish there is someone behind to let me know about all these things at the correct time. I’m sure, you wish the same. We should subscribe to Alerts.

Thanks to Alerts.com. A wonderful site for all your needs for alerts. We often get alerts from the individual service providers about the due date reminders for paying bills and so on. Alerts.com helps you centrally create, manage and deliver the relevant information to you in a timely manner by sending you alerts.

Features

1. Very user friendly interface to configure your alerts.
2. Provides various channels for delivering alerts. Email, SMS, Voice, Home Phone, Office Phone.
3. Lets your specify the days and time durations where you wish to receive the alerts. For instance, you can configure to receive Weather alerts everyday in the morning.
4. You can enable or disable a delivery channel at any time.
5. All your active alerts can be easily accessed in your personal dashboard.
6. Configure the alerts based on Category, Popularity or by recently updated alerts.
7. There are 26 alert types that you can subscribe to and there are several others to be added.

Some Important Alerts that you can subscribe to

1. School Alerts – Lets you know the important updates or reminders from your school
2. Gasoline Prices – Lowest price in your neighborhood
3. Weather Alerts
4. Birthday Reminders
5. Custom Reminders
6. Local News and Press Releases
7. Sports Updates
8. Wake up calls, Job Alerts, Amber Alerts
9. Travel and Entertainment related alerts
10. Price Protection alerts

The above mentioned list are only the popular one’s. There are more than 26 kinds of alerts that you can subscribe to.

Most of the alerts mentioned are currently delivered by email to users across the countries. SMS alerts are to delivered only to users from selected countries like USA. Expect this service in other countries soon.

Technorati Tags: Alerts, Weather Alerts, Stock Market Alerts

Do you work on images frequently? Do you search for Images on various photo sharing websites or image search engines? Do you also search for images from your own computer system? Then you should definitely try out ginipic.

Ginipic is a free desktop application which makes searching on various image hosting sites like Flickr, Picasa, deviantART, photobucket, etc a lot easier. You can search for an image through ginipic from all these sites simultaneously.

Here are some of the features

1. Multiple sources for search – searches from Flickr, Picasa, Photobucket, DeviantArt, Facebook, Google Images Search, Live Search, Yahoo simultaneously.
2. Duplicate images from these sites are filtered automatically.
3. Tag images
4. Copyright information is displayed in the Interface.
5. Post directly to your blog or share it with others.
6. Drag and Drop
7. Re size Images
8. Search images from your local computer system.
9. Intuitive Graphical User Interface

Moreover, this wonderful tool comes free of cost. You may download the software here and have fun with your photographs.

Technorati Tags: Images, Image Search, Photo Sharing

‘I feel Good‘, ‘Check out the new Google Apps Status Dashboard‘ are the tweets posted by Google. Tweets? And Google? Not sounding music to ears? Google, recently signed up for accounts on Twitter. Wednesday evening, the first tweet by Google said ”m 01100110 01100101 01100101 01101100 01101001 01101110 01100111 00100000 01101100 01110101 01100011 01101011 01111001 00001010′ which means ‘I feel good’ in the computer language (the binary form).

The second post said ‘Check out the new Google Apps Status Dashboard’, which may be the real motive in Google joining Twitter. To spread about it’s applications. Since then, Google started tweeting regularly, but unlike others, it only has few tweets a day.

This Twitter account of Google attracted over 31,000 followers in less than 3 days. It has posted over 100 updates together from all it’s accounts. There are tweets about Google Toolbar, Google Friend Connect and Google Translate.

Other Google Accounts on Twitter

1. Google
2. Google Apps
3. Google Reader
4. You Tube
5. Blogger

Other Popular Accounts on Twitter

1. Yahoo
2. Yahoo Movies
3. Live Search
4. Facebook
5. MS Windows
6. Barack Obama

Twitter, a micro-blogging service that allows up to 140 characters to tell people what you’re doing, is surely attracting the attention of the Corporate Biggies and of course, some of the most powerful people as well.

Let me tell you something. I found it very interesting to search the above accounts. It was all the more fun to find who’s following whom! You will be surprised to see the results. Go! Check yourself. Happy Tweeting!!!

On 24 Feb’09 Apple launched the much awaited version of it’s Safari 4 Browser in Beta Version. With this, Apple claims to be the fastest web browser ever.

Here are some of the Key new features

1. Windows Native Look and Feel- When run on Windows Safari makes itself look just like any other Windows application.
2. Top Sites – Safari remembers the last 24 websites that you visited and presents them as a Thumbnail in a single page. You can customize it.
3. Cover Flow – Provides a visual way of reviewing your site history and bookmarked sites. This view is similar to what is available in iTunes.
4. Tabs on Top – Just like in Firefox or Google chrome, provides with Tabs which have Drag and Drop feature.
5. Nitro Engine – This is one of the feature that distinguishes it from the rest of the browsers. Using the Nitro Engine, Safari claims to execute JavaScript up to 30 times faster than Internet Explorer 7, 3 times faster than Firefox 3. It also claims to load web pages 3 times faster than IE 7 and almost 3 times faster than Firefox 3.
6. Provides many other features for Developers. We will have to wait and watch if it can attract more developers to write plugins like in Firefox 3.
7. Acid 3 compliance – Which means this browser has passed the CSS, XML, JavaScript, and SVG Standards.
8. No new feature on Security and Privacy is added in this version.

Download Safari 4 Beta

With all the above features in place one still need to wait and watch to see if it can take over Firefox. Is Safari poised to become the favorite Browser for the blogging community? Will it survive in the competition of the Browser Wars?

Technorati Tags: Browsers, Safari

Microsoft Outlook is one of the prominent Email Clients people use. Outlook can be configured for Yahoo!Mail, MSN, Gmail and of course, exchange server. MSN was the first provider of POP/SMTP settings to the users so that Desktop Email clients can be configured. Gmail is one of the biggest email providers now. It could be because of it’s features, the brand name, or even because of it’s size.

Yes, in my view size does matter. I should say, Gmail has revolutionized the way people use Emails. Earlier, we used to have email storage capacities with 10 MB, they went to 100 MB, to 1 GB and now it’s unlimited. The size of my Gmail is more than 2 GB and I’m sure same is the case with many others. It’s easy to search for emails in Gmail as it comes with state of the art, Google Search.

What if you use Outlook as Desktop Email Client for Gmail? You might have noticed the difficulty in searching your email content while in Outlook. At least, I find it difficult. But, not any longer. Thanks to Xobni. A state of the art tool to that offers a way to organize and search your outlook, easily.

What is Xobni?

Xobni is an Outlook plug-in that saves you time finding email conversations, contacts and attachments.
After a click install, the sender’s full communication history appears in the Xobni sidebar, including past conversations, attachments and contact details. Xobni also includes a blazing fast email search tool.

How does it work?

Xobni offers a new way to organize and search your Outlook email. Xobni creates profiles for each person that emails you. These profiles contain relationship statistics, contact information, social connections, threaded conversations, and shared attachments.

Why Xobni?

Because people spend too much time searching for conversations, attachments, and other important information in their inbox. This is the perfect way to reduce it. Moreover, it provides lot of other features.

Features

1. Lightning fast email search – searches for the content as you type the keywords.
2. Just like Google Analytics, it provides Email Analytics. Rankings, graphs, and statistics detailing how you and your contacts use email.
3. Scheduling appointments made easy. Xobni automatically finds open slots in your busy schedule.
4. Threaded conversations.
5. Quick Attachment discovery – Historical attachments available even without searching.
6. Phone numbers extracted from emails automatically.
7. Web services integration – Integrates your LinkedIn, Facebook, Yahoo! Mail, Skype & Hoovers accounts easily.

Download Xobni

If you are among those using Outlook Desktop client to access your Gmail, for that matter any other email, then Xobni is a must have plugin. Let me know your feedback once you install and experience it.
Did you also notice that ‘Xobni’ is the word ‘Inbox’ spelled in reverse?

Recently, I published an article on how to enhance your emails and blog posts with Zemanta. Today, I introduce a similar kind of tool called Tagaroo. Tagaroo uses Semantic Tagging and automatically retrieves Intelligent tags based on the content and makes your blog content SEO friendly. In other words, it generates Rich Semantic Meta Data for your blog content.

What is Tagaroo?
Owned by Thomson Reuters, which owns the World famous News Reporting service Reuters, Tagaroo helps make blogging better by automatically suggesting relevant tags and images from Flickr for each of your posts.

Why Tagaroo?

1. We need Tags for each and every post on our blogs. Tagaroo analyzes the text in your post and suggests intelligent tags automatically which you can include. So, reduces your effort in finding Key Words.
2. We also need images for our posts. Tagaroo, automatically searches great images from Flickr which can be included in the post easily.
3. It also makes your post visually compelling and helps search engines find your content in a better way.

Currently, Tagaroo only supports WordPress blogs.

Technology behind Tagaroo

Tagaroo is based on Calais, a web service that uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology to semantically tag text that is input to the service. This service generates Intelligent Tags which can be incorporated by the users into their applications – for search, news aggregation, blogs, catalogs, etc.

Most important thing about Calais is it’s machine language algorithms which generate tags based on categories like People, Organizations, Companies, Geographies and Events hidden within the content of our posts or articles. In this case, this is better than Zemanta.

Check the Document Viewer to test the functionality of Calais. Just paste a chunk of text in the window, submit it and see the resulting Calais Tags.

How to implement Tagaroo on your WordPress blog?

1. Download the Tagaroo WordPress plugin and install it on your WordPress blog just as you do it for other plugins.
2. Like Akismet, you first need to register to get an API Key for Tagaroo plugin. Register here.
3. You will receive an email with API Key once you complete the registration. Key in the API Key in the Tagaroo WordPress settings page and save it. You are done.

How does it Work?

1. Once you install and activate the Tagaroo WordPress plugin and save it with API Key, you will see a new section beneath the Post section in WordPress called ‘Tagaroo Tags’.
2. When you finish writing the content of your article, Tagaroo will automatically generate the Tags based on the content. Again, this is based on People, Organizations, Companies, Geographies and Events. You may include the tags that you feel are relevant or you can even add additional tags.
3. By the time you finish writing the content for the article, Tagaroo would have generated images from Flickr based on the content. You select an image and it will show an Image insertion toolkit to adjust the image in the post.

Technorati Tags: Semantic Tagging, SEO Friendly Blogs, Natural Language Processing, WordPress, Plugins

Are you obsessed with Gmail? Do you like Gmail because of it’s look and feel. Want to access Gmail even when you are offline? Do you like Gmail because of it’s User Interface? Then, GeeMail is the solution.

GeeMail is a desktop client that can be installed in your system. Once you are connected to the Internet, all your emails will be synchronized with the application.

Features

1. Runs on Adobe AIR Platform.
2. You don’t have to configure the SMTP/POP or IMAP settings for it to work. Just install and use it.
3. The UI (User Interface) is almost similar to Gmail. It has all the features that you expect in Gmail.
4. It’s Cross Platform. You can use this on Windows, MAC & Linux.
5. Of course, provides you with offline access.

Drawbacks

1. Google recently introduced Offline Access for Gmail through Gears. No additional clients are needed to access Gmail when offline.
2. Gmails most important feature – Mail Search is not available in GeeMail.
3. It only downloads smaller portion of your Gmail initially to make the application faster. In other words, it downloads the data parts by parts. For instance, emails first and labels later (when the CPU/application is idle)

I do not want to install and additional piece of software only for accessing Gmail offline. I would either use Gmail in offline access mode or I use Outlook mail client. You may download the software here.

What do you think? Do you prefer this software over official Gmail offline? Will you install it?

Technorati Tags: Gmail, Google, Gmail Offline Access, Email Client

Double Vision Mode

Don’t like doing work while at work? Would not like to get your Boss’s attention while browsing or watching movies at work? Double Vision is the latest tool for people who don’t like to work while at work. This completely free Software lets you Watch Video and surf the web inside other programs like Excel through a transparent browser and hide the window with a single click.

What is Double Vision?

Double Vision is a tiny web browser (re worked version of IE) that lets you browse and watch videos online without interfering with other programs already running and without impacting available space on your computer.

Features

Video in Normal Mode

1. Watch tutorials while you perform the steps being mentioned in the tutorials.
2. Browser based video conferencing while you work.
3. Watch videos without being obvious to those in your workspace.
4. Keep articles and web pages visible to read while you work on other applications and while you wait for other items to load etc.
5. You can cut out a specific part of a page just to get at the content.

How to use it?

1. Download Double Vision and Install it.
2. Open the Double Vision application and simply navigate to any website where you normally watch an online video or any other web page.
3. Once in the page, click on the ‘Double Vision’ mode and the browser will be transparent. You can now ‘click-through’ the browser and interact with programs that are running underneath them. It’s just like the video is embedded in your application.
4. While in Double Vision mode, you can use the Ctrl & Alt keys to bring the browser back to 100% transparent.
5. There are many other short cut keys which lets you minimize the browser within the application and lets you perform many other actions.

Technorati Tags: Double Vision, Watch Videos in Transparent mode, Transparent Browser

Xoopit, a wonderful social networking email enhancement utility that allows you to locate images, videos and email attachments from your Gmail inbox, has added a new feature which lets you view status messages and profile photos of your Facebook account without leaving your Gmail. Xoopit is also available with Yahoo! Mail smarter Inbox.

Facebook Connect not only lets you view status messages and profile photos of your Facebook account, you can also reply to the status messages right from your Gmail account.

Activating Facebook inside Xoopit for Gmail

1. Download Xoopit FireFox plugin first. You cannot use this feature without installing this plugin.
2. Lookout for the new Facebook ‘F’ icon in the upper right hand corner of Gmail. Click on the icon to login to your Facebook account.
3. Now set your status on Facebook using the same ‘F’ icon in your Gmail.
4. Your Gmail messages with people who are also on Facebook will contain their Facebook profile photos, status messages.
5. You can view the Facebook status messages and profile photos to the right of your Gmail messages in the ‘Conversation box’. You can click on More info to get more details.

Note: You can use this feature without signing up for the Xoopit indexing service for Gmail. In this case, you will have to sign in via Facebook Connect.

Looks like Yahoo and Gmail are racing with each other to Incorporate Social Networking into their email applications. Check out the all new Yahoo! Mail Beta which has more lot more features including Integration of Photos by Xoopit, Flicker, Flickster, Yahoo Greeting and even WordPress.

Technorati Tags: Gmail, Xoopit, Facebook, Yahoo Mail, Social Networking