Rapportive Replaces Gmail Ads with Contact Info

Cambridge UK-based startup Rapportive has released a Firefox and Chrome extension that will replace the ads in your Gmail with a photo, bio and social networking links. Then whenever you open an email, it cross-references the email of the sender and does some local caching for performance optimization, the service would ask you to login via secure Google Federated Login. You have to give it access to a minimum of information to get started. Some users may be wary to trust a third-party add-on with their inbox and feeling a little bit nervous. Don't worry, it doesn't have any access to your password, but it does access the contents of your email. So I don't think that concern is warranted enough to justify missing out on this really awesome service, just go install it. Check out the screenshot:

The service pulls contact information from the Rapleaf database, so the amount of biographical information and links to social media accounts that are returned will depend on how well Rapleaf has managed to tie that contact’s email address to the various social media services. For some of my contacts it works very well, for others it returns little or no info, because some people don’t use their work email address for social media accounts.

Rapportive is developing a platform for the development of custom applets that other companies can integrate within their local data stores so you can look up an email sender on your own system as part of the Rapportive display. Co-founder Rahul Vohra says such integration takes minutes to set up and in the long term the company hopes to create a marketplace for those applets. Team collaboration so notes left on contacts can be shared is also in the works, as is integration with popular paid CRM and customer service systems.

No doubt Google will definitely not be happy a service is replacing its ads with any content. Sure it's all that we get Gmail for free, but those ads to the right of open messages are not really all that helpful. I have never once clicked on a Gmail ad. If Google can provide services like GTalk, Voice and private-branded Gmail without ads now, I think plain Gmail context ads might be on the way out soon as well. Many users see no value in the text ads or already block them with extensions like Adblock, Better Gmail, or various Greasemonkey scripts. I'd say I've been hoping to find something like this for a long time, having a simple note field I can use to remind me where things are in the relationship is great. People desperately need tools to be able to cope with hundreds&thousands of online relationships.

This plug-in is currently available for Firefox and Chrome only and only works with Gmail (If you're using the Better Gmail extension, make sure to uncheck the following option "Remove Ads. Fix Page width. Reposition print button."). If you have any questions, follow @rapportive

How to Protect Your Gmail & Google Accounts

Log-in to your Gmail / Google Account and associate a phone number. You’ll then receive an SMS text message whenever someone tries to recover your Google password.

Create a new email address (on say Yahoo! Mail or Gmail itself) and set this as the secondary email address for your existing Gmail and Google Accounts. Check for emails on this new account manually or through a desktop client via POP3 / IMAP but do not enable auto-forward for the new email address as the original purpose will be defeated.

Take a paper and write down the following information about your Google Account. You will need this to verify your identify to Google in case someone else takes over your Google Account and the secondary email address associated with your account.

• The month and year when your created your Gmail / Google Account. You can look at the last page of your Gmail Inbox (or go to Sent Items) to get an approximate idea of the date when you created the account.
• If you created a Gmail account by invitation, write the email address of the person who first sent you that invite for Gmail. Use a search query like “in:all has invited you to open a free Gmail account” to find that invitation email.
• The email addresses of your most frequently emailed contacts (the top 5).
• The names of any custom labels that you may have created in your Gmail account.
• The day/month/year when you started using various other Google services (like AdSense, Orkut, Blogger, etc.) that are associated with the Google account that you are trying to recover. If you’re not certain about some of the dates, provide your closest estimate.

Do a test run. Log-out of all your Gmail / Google Accounts and initiate the password recovery process for each one of them using this form. This will help you make sure that your SMS settings and secondary email addresses are configured correctly.

Once in a while, do refer to that little line in the footer section of your Gmail Inbox that shows the different IP addresses from where your account is being accessed. If you find an unknown IP address, change your Google password immediately.

- Thanks Amit ,very useful. I'm glad that you got your account back.

The Unofficial Google Text-To-Speech API

Last month Google announced the ability to hear translations into English spoken via text-to-speech, no official API for the text-to-speech service. Where this TTS data was coming from? people found that the speech audio is in MP3 format and is queried via a simple HTTP GET (REST) request:

So, replace it with "text" and change the URL to whatever you want it to say and you’ll get back a MP3 file.

Example: http://translate.google.com/translate_tts?q=hello+world

You have to copy/paste or click it, and then click refresh, because Google is returning a 404 if there is a referring URL in the request.

For now, only available for short translations to English, limited to 100 characters. Maybe we'll see it get official support soon.

via Ajaxian

How to Try Out Google Real-time Search

Today, Google launched real-time search integrated into search results pages. It updates as stuff is happening around the web, live tweets, news articles and blog posts, it works on mobile,too (at least iPhone and Android for now). That’s not all, they’ve inked partnerships with both Facebook and MySpace to pull in data in real-time.

The new features will be rolling out in the next few days and will be available globally in English. You can try them out today by visiting Google Trends and clicking on a "hot topic," which in most cases will bring you to a search results page with the new real-time feature.

Google says the features aren’t available to everyone yet. But, all users can see it now via a "Hot Topics", the most popular 10 keywords are available at Google Trends and they trigger a real-time search OneBox.

Well, it won’t yet show up by default when you search. However, this trick will help you trigger it easily: If you add &esrch=RTSearch to your the URL after you've done a google search, you get the feature.

Example: http://www.google.com/search?q=copenhagen&hl=en&sa=G&esrch=RTSearch&tbo=1&output=search&tbs=rltm:1

Pretty cool, huh?

How to Test Out Google's New Search Look

Google is testing it's new look, but you can't see it directly. Here's a JavaScript tweak that gets anyone into Google's new look test.

Copy the code, paste it into the address bar of your browser when on google.com and hit return, If things work out and reload Google, you should find yourself as new participant of Google's latest and more all-encompassing prototype test. a new look to Google’s Search Options feature with a new logo, buttons, and always-visible left-hand pane in results.

The search options appear in the left-hand column. The former “All results” area that allowed you to switch between different types of searches (images, news, maps and so on) has been replaced with new tabs for these services. How do you like this? go Leave a comment on Blogoscoped.

If all goes well, the cleaner display may be launched across Google after the New Year.

Google's New Programming Language: GO

Google has just announced the release of a new, open sourced programming language called Go. Google promote it as: … simple … fast … safe … fun … open source

Go attempts to combine the development speed of working in a dynamic language like Python with the performance and safety of a compiled language like C or C++. In our experiments with Go to date, typical builds feel instantaneous; even large binaries compile in just a few seconds. And the compiled code runs close to the speed of C. Go is designed to let you move fast.

We’re hoping Go turns out to be a great language for systems programming with support for multi-processing and a fresh and lightweight take on object-oriented design, with some cool features like true closures and reflection.

Here is an example code:

package main
import "fmt"

func main() {
  fmt.Printf("Hello, 世界\n")
}

For more details check out Golang.org

The Google Timeline Story Video

This interesting video animation from Google UK captures some of the important milestones in Google’s 14 year old history. From Stanford to Mountain View and around the world, featuring many different products, starting with BackRub (Search) up to Google Wave, StreetView and Chrome. Hopefully it'll grow continuously.

Simple Google

Customized Version of Google by Infinise Design.

Simple and nice! I think Google should consider it!

Google Announces Chrome Operating System

Google has announced the development of an operating system (totally separate from Android) called Chrome OS, designed to be a fast, lightweight, kinda web-based system for mobile computing that we should see showing up netbooks in the second half of 2010.

Details from Google:

Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010. Because we're already talking to partners about the project, and we'll soon be working with the open source community, we wanted to share our vision now so everyone understands what we are trying to achieve.

Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS. We're designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds. The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the web. And as we did for the Google Chrome browser, we are going back to the basics and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don't have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It should just work.

Google Chrome OS will run on both x86 as well as ARM chips and we are working with multiple OEMs to bring a number of netbooks to market next year. The software architecture is simple -- Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel. For application developers, the web is the platform. All web-based applications will automatically work and new applications can be written using your favorite web technologies. And of course, these apps will run not only on Google Chrome OS, but on any standards-based browser on Windows, Mac and Linux thereby giving developers the largest user base of any platform.

Google Chrome OS is a new project, separate from Android.

Google plans to release the open source code for Chrome OS later this year ahead of the launch next year. Don’t be surprised if this code drops around the same time as Windows 7. Google vs. Microsoft, it's on. Let us wait&see. ;)

Read more details from Google

QOTD: What Larry Page thinks about Twitter?