Pinoy Trends » Google

RIP Google Wave

karlaredor — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 05:33:51 +0000

When Google Wave was announced, I was eager to try it out since I see its potential of a great collaboration tool. I gave out invites to friends who are interested to try it out. Anyway, Google will stop the developments of Google Wave as a standalone product. However, Google Wave will be still available until the year ends. Even if it Google Wave is still accessible, Google Wave will just die a slow death. Read more about this announcement from Google.

YouTube’s Upload Limit has been Increased to 15 minutes

karlaredor — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 17:49:24 +0000

YouTube, a popular video-sharing website, has just increased its upload limit to 15 minutes for all users. Prior to this increase, YouTube’s upload limit was only 10 minutes.

With this, YouTube users around the world are asked to upload a 15-minute video and tag it with “yt15minutes”. The video should be uploaded on August 4, 2010 (Wednesday). Some of those videos will be featured on the homepage giving them their own 15 minutes of fame.

I guess you’re wondering why is the upload limit increased only now. This is because they’ve spent a lot of time with the creation of the Content ID.

This Content ID will actually address the copyright infringement issues that have been plaguing YouTube. The Content ID is comprised of the Audio ID and the Video ID. This will let the content owners identify the uploaded videos that are comprised entirely or partially of their content. Then, the content owners will have the option to either make money from them, get statistics on those videos or have them blocked on YouTube.

[via the YouTube Blog]

URL Shortener for Google Maps

karlaredor — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 04:23:25 +0000

Finally, Google Maps already has an option for you to share shortened URLs instead of the typical long Google Maps URLs. Anyway, this is not set by default. You need to click on the Labs icon and then enable Short URL as shown in the above screenshot.

After enabling it, please refresh the page so that you will see the short URL every time you click on “Link”.

Here’s the actual link: http://goo.gl/maps/RdWK

View Real-Time Statistics in Blogger

karlaredor — Sat, 03 Jul 2010 18:48:54 +0000

One of the most popular blogging platform used in the Philippines is Blogger.com. This is great for bloggers who are using the said platform so that they would not have the need to login to their respective Google Analytics account to see how many pageviews they have.

What Stats Will I See?

The Stats section is divided into 4 sections:

1. Overview

You’ll see there a graph of pageviews of a specific blog. I’m quite impressed because the stats displayed are almost real-time. Aside from the graph, you will see there a summary of the other 4 sections.

2. Posts

This is where you’ll learn which of your blog posts are popular.

3. Traffic Sources

In this section, you will see the referring sites, referring URLs and the search keywords used by the visitors of your blog.

4. Audience

In this section, you will see where your visitors come from (which country), what operating systems they are using and what browsers they are using.

As for me, I’d still prefer looking at my blog’s stats in Google Analytics because of the kind of data I can analyze from it.

Do you like to try it? Access Blogger in Draft.

Find your Precinct for the May 2010 Elections

karlaredor — Sat, 01 May 2010 18:33:46 +0000

Find your Precinct is a great web application to search for the location of your respective precincts. In order to find your precinct, Enter the name of the city on the text box provided and as well as your precinct number. You can get your precinct number from your voter’s ID.

You can also help by geo-tagging the precincts that you are familiar with.

How to do it? On the website, click the link with the text “Help others find precincts”. Then, enter the name of the city. Choose the precinct you are familiar with. Just click on it’s location on the map to geo-tag it.

Friendster’s New Look

HTC Tattoo: affordable Android-based phone

karlaredor — Sat, 01 May 2010 18:22:30 +0000

HTC Tattoo is the most affordable Android-based phone that HTC came up with. HTC Tattoo runs on Android 1.6. It has a 2.8″ TFT LCD touch screen and as well as a 4-way navigation control with an Enter button.

HTC Tattoo contains the features that a tech savvy would look for in a phone. These features are:
- Bluetooth 2.0
- Wi-Fi IEEE 802.11 b/g
- GPS
- HSDPA/WCDMA
- micro-SD card slot

In spite of these features, the 240×320 QVGA resolution would be a turn-off. In addition, its touch screen is not capable of multi-touch. You have to press the plus and minus keys in order to zoom in and zoom out.

For music lovers, it has an FM radio and it supports audio formats such as MP3, AAC(AAC, AAC+, AAC-LC), AMR-NB, WAV, MIDI and Windows Media Audio 9. A 3.5 mm audio jack is also included so that you can easily find a replacement just in case you lose the headphones that’s bundled with it.

The built-in 3.2 megapixel camera would be a disappointment for those who would love to take photos using their mobile phone. It does not have auto-focus and there’s no macro.

Pricing and Availability
It’s suggested retail price is 14,990 pesos (available in all authorized resellers). It is also available in Globe Telecoms (Plan 1,800 pesos which includes one month free of unlimited mobile internet).

Conclusion
The price maybe relatively cheaper than the other HTC Android-based phones but there are features that were compensated.

New GMail Feature: Drag and Drop Messages to Labels

karlaredor — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 02:54:15 +0000

This morning, I was surprised to see a better GMail. This would definitely increase user’s productivity. You can drag a message directly to a label (which is now in it’s new place). You can also select several messages and then drag it to the label. Perhaps, a lot of GMail users were took by surprise this morning.

No related posts.

Blogger: Turning 10 on August 10

karlaredor — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 17:50:17 +0000

Blogger.com is turning 10 this coming August 10. Blogger is actually the first blogging platform that I’ve used (in 2001). I used it for a couple of years before switching to WordPress. So, if you are currently using Blogger.com, Google wants to hear your say on “What has your blog meant to you?”. You can answer the question by posting first to your blog on Blogger.com and fill out a form here to send the link to your blog post. You will also be asked if it’s okay to share your story with the press.

HTC Magic: Powered by Google Android

karlaredor — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 17:30:53 +0000

Will the HTC Magic be able to conquer the Philippine market? Globe Telecoms announced that it will be free if you get the 7,000-peso postpaid plan (GFlex or GPlan) which I find a bit pricey. It will be available exclusively under SMART Gold subscription plans by the end of June. It would be interesting to see if other popular mobile phone manufacturers would come out an Android version of their mobile phone models.

For now, I don’t think we’ll see any Nokia mobile phone in the near future sporting a Google Android OS since Symbian is part of the Nokia group.

Those who would like to take advantage of the sync features of the phone should be a Windows user. I wonder if they’ll be coming up with a sync software that’s compatible with the other operating systems. If they do, they could win the hearts of Google fanboys and fangirls that are not into Windows.

What I don’t like about the device control is that it uses a trackball which I think is hard to control. I’d rather see a four-key navigation with an enter button on the center. A design for a device control like that would probably make senior managers/executives switch from Blackberry to HTC Magic.

Check out the Google search trend between iPhone and HTC Magic.

The all-new Google BlogSearch

karlaredor — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 04:12:19 +0000

Google BlogSearch is now showing popular blog posts around the web. It also categorizes the posts if it’s under Technology, Entertainment, Politics, etc. Related topics are grouped in the Top Stories page and contains the number of blogs as illustrated above in the screenshot.

Graph showing the number of blogs covering the story

I hope a similar interface will appear in the Google BlogSearch Philippines. This should be a great tool to add.

In addition, there are still some things that could be improved on Google BlogSearch. Trend Spotting suggested: “clustering and popularity results over any search query”. Anyway, there’s Google Trends to answer their suggestion as of the moment.