Tech news

Microsoft & Facebook Launch Document Sharing Service Docs.com

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With the advent of internet, day-to-day life is becoming much simpler.Would you have ever thought of creating office documents  without even installing a Office software like Microsoft Office or Open Office.Thanks to the wide number of document sharing websites like Scribd, SlideShare and the most popular Google Docs which lets you create documents on the cloud and share them with the world.

Now a similar alternative service is coming up from Microsoft in association with Facebook.

microsoft docs homepage

Microsoft’s new document sharing website docs.com lets you create Office documents and share them with your friends in Facebook, courtesy Office Web Apps and the Facebook Connect.

add document in Microsoft docs

You can upload Word documents, PowerPoint presentation & Excel spreadsheets etc., to Docs.com similar to the way do it in other online documents sharing websites like Google Docs.But Facebook integration helps you to share these documents with your friends.You can also grant viewing and editing rights to your selected Facebook friends so that they can edit your documents online, thus making collaboration easier (such collaboration also exist in Google Docs, if you can remember).

Your friends can discover the documents that you shared in the updates just like they discover your photos or videos that you have shared. You can also discuss with your friends about a doc via comments just like you would do with a status update or photo.

You just need a Facebook account to start with.You don’t need to install Office 2010 or you don’t need a Windows Live ID either.Doc.com service is still in private beta though you can use your Facebook account to get notification as soon it becomes publicly available.

docs for facebook beta

Videos:

Getting Started For Docs

Docs for Facebook – Overview

Drag And Drop Attachments Onto Message In Gmail

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Gmail has announced yet another small but really a time saving feature to its users.Now you can just drag and drop attachments from your PC, onto the message in Gmail while you are composing it, provided you are using either Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox 3.6.

To add attachments to your email, just open the folder, where the target files (attachments) are located and now tile your windows so that you can see both the explorer window and resized browser windows.Now just drag the files on to the browser window and they will automatically be attached to your message.Follow the screenshots given below:

gmail drag drop attachment

gmail drag drop attachment

gmail drag drop attachment

As of now this new functionality is only available in Firefox or Chrome.But Google is planning to extend this to all other browsers as soon as they support this feature.

Via Official Gmail Blog

Google’s New Launches: Google Follow Finder & Twitter Replay

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Google is clearly showing its love for Twitter nowadays.Yesterday (April 14, 2010) Google has made 2 announcements both relating to twitter related features launch in Google.

The first one which was announced earlier was called Google’s Twitter replay that lest you search.Twitter replay will allow you to recall what had happened on anyway in the past courtesy the twitter tweets.To use this feature, click on the “Show Options” when you search for anything in Google.Then choose “Updates” from the sidebar menu.You can see a horizontal graphic chart which represents the volume of the tweets tweeted within a particular period of time, you can always go back to the history by using the backward arrow link just below the chart.You can click on any date/period to see the tweets about that topic in the given period.To see how it actually works, follow this link.

google_twitter_replay

Google Follow Finder:

Google Follow Finder is yet another Twitter related feature that was announced by Google yesterday.Follow finder analyzes public social graph information on twitter to find people that you might want to follow on Twitter.To use this feature, enter Google Follow Finder site and enter your Twitter user name and search for Tweeps.

Google follow finder

Don’t forget to follow Techrena Dot Net at Twitter.

Google.cn Is Over, Redirects To Google.com.hk (Hong Kong)

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This is breaking news coming right from the G-folks : Google has decided to redirect Google’s Chinese web users of Google.cn to its Hong Kong site Google.com.hk starting from today.

This has been posted in Google’s official blog.

earlier today we stopped censoring our search services—Google Search, Google News, and Google Images—on Google.cn. Users visiting Google.cn are now being redirected to Google.com.hk, where we are offering uncensored search in simplified Chinese, specifically designed for users in mainland China and delivered via our servers in Hong Kong.

This is the Google.cn’s cached page as seen from Bing’s cache.

Google.cn china bing cached version

This is the new Google.com.hk site where the Google.cn users being redirected:

Google.com.hk hong kong site

Also Google is predicting that at any moment, the Chinese government may stop access to its services.

We very much hope that the Chinese government respects our decision, though we are well aware that it could at any time block access to our services.

Hence to keep its users notified about any blockage of Google’s services, it has set up a new web page (China service availability), where one can see the status report of various Google’s app services.

Google china service availability

Google is also worrying about the safety of its employees in China, which is clear fro this statement:

Finally, we would like to make clear that all these decisions have been driven and implemented by our executives in the United States, and that none of our employees in China can, or should, be held responsible for them.

Blogger Service Interruptions Update on Blogger Status Blog

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Blogger team today has posted a blog post saying that the the Blogger users, from now on will be communicated for the likes of interruptions like for instance that occurred on last Saturday on Blogger Status.If somehow even if the Blogger Status blog doesn’t work for you, check Blogger Twitter update on Blogger’s twitter account

Blogger team also clarifies that in case of any significant service interruptions, they plan to publish a post mortem on the Blogger status blog within 3 business days to provide details about the cause for the interruptions and what they are doing to sort it out and to avoid similar problems in future.

Excerpt from the Blog post:

“We don’t like it when our users experience problems like what we saw on Saturday, but we hope the combination of transparency around these issues and our commitment to learn from our mistakes will help assure you that we’re doing everything we can to keep Blogger a robust and reliable service for you.”

Blogger Buzz

BTW, Check out the first “Postmortem on recent issues affecting users in Europe” published on Blogger Status blog.

Orkut’s Cool New Version Launched

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Facebook has been gaining a lot of ground among the users in recent times outplaying Google’s Orkut. The Google has finally gets up to the challenge by launching more faster, lighter and much more safer version of their social networking site.

This new version has been developed using Google Web Toolkit (GWT).

What’s new ?

  • Simpler and faster loading
  • Easy navigation to other Google properties [You can find links to other Google tools like Gmail, right at the top]
  • One-stop notifications[friend requests, testimonials, community requests or birthday announcements, all at one place]
  • Fast photo uploads and photo sharing
  • Video Chat Integration
  • Inline comments for status messages, photos and videos
orkut new homepage

New Inline comments feature

More Customization:

Picking up favorite color in orkut

You can now customize your own profile page like never before.The new version claims to have added features like picking your favourite color from a list of 5 available default colors.

But this new version has been allotted to selected few users and you can identify them with thisOrkut favicon symbol next to their profile name.You can ask them for an invite to get started with this new version.

find out more at this page.

The Pirate Bay Founders Jailed and Fined for Copyright breaking

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Pirate_Bay_logo

In what could be a one of the rare cases of Copy-right violation, today a court in Sweden has jailed the four main people behind the Internet’s most popular BitTorrent File-Sharing site (With an estimated 22 million users),  The Pirate Bay.

Each of the four defendants behind the Pirate Bay Site, Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg and Carl Lundstrom were each sentenced to a year in jail.They were also ordered to pay a huge amount of $3.6 million as a penalty for damage to major entertainment companies, including Warner Bros, Sony Music Entertainment, EMI and Columbia Pictures.

But the Pirate Bay founders however denied the charges against them citing that they didn’t actually hosted any files.And also posted a notice and a video in response to the court’s verdict in the Pirate Bay site

So, the dice courts judgement is here. It was lol to read and hear, crazy verdict.But as in all good movies, the heroes lose in the beginning but have an epic victory in the end anyhow. That’s the only thing Hollywood ever taught us.

And talking about the large penalty that the court has ordered, This is what one the 4 founders of Pirate Bay had to say:

“We can’t pay and we wouldn’t pay. Even if I had the money I would rather burn everything I owned, and I wouldn’t even give them the ashes.”

While Many Copyright holders around the world are cheering this Pirate Bay verdict, others feel that it may not affect the popular file-sharing over the internet.But it certainly a alarming notice to the other famous file-sharing sites like Rapidshare and other Bit-Torrent sites.