Google Chrome OS - First Impressions (or should I say, Disappointments!)

An early prototype of the much awaited Google Chrome OS was released a couple of days back, and as expected of any product announcement from Google, everyone in the tech world was excited, including me. This is a very early version of the Operating System, and the initial demo wasn't that impressive, but I wanted to have a go at it. Following TechCrunch's simple guide to install Chrome OS on a virtual machine, I loaded it up yesterday in VirtualBox.

The boot time of 7 seconds was indeed quite a feat (the intend to halve that by next year!), and I had no problems logging in with a Gmail/Google account (Warning: don't use your primary Gmail address if you intend to try it out yourself. Its a prototype, after all.). Chromium browser (the open-source counterpart of Google Chrome) loaded up, with a few changes to the UI to make it handle some things that traditional OSes have dealt with as a separate affair, like options to turn networks on & off, a rudimentary digital clock and a battery monitor.

Here is what's different (or rather, missing) in ChromeOS, compared to Windows, Linux et al. :

• Cannot install applications; all applications are web services (websites)
• Need Internet connectivity to even login, as ChromeOS uses your Gmail account for login and the app panel (its version of 'Quick-Launch' in Windows, and is like a tab inside the browser - but its not). Furthermore, as all apps are web apps, you can't do zilch without a decent net connection.
• Does not (and will not) support existing desktops/ laptops/ netbooks/ smartphones, and requires specialized hardware designed specifically to run ChromeOS. If you want to run it somewhere other than a virtual machine, you need to wait for year for ChromeOS to be released as pre-installed OS on specialized netbooks with solid state hard drives (SSDs). ChromeOS is free, but the netbooks surely won't be.
• There are no options to log out, shut down or restart, except using the power button. I guess logout is not really needed, all you have to do is logout of your browser session. But come on, a simple shut down button?

On the plus side, you'll never need to update anything - everything is stored online, including your data & customizations/settings, and you can access your data and programs from anywhere in the world, provided you have a stable connection to the net. For example, the app panel required a google.com login when I tried it out yesterday. But when I opened up the OS today, they had switched it to a regular google account, which meant that I could login with my Gmail username and password instead. To update the UI, all they have to do is change it at the server, and all users will instantly be upgraded to the latest version.

Some other things I noticed:

• The file manager, accessible through the browser's open/save dialogues, is a chrome-less window, and reveals the Linux file system, on which it is based.
• No desktop, no icons. Well, there is the app panel. None outside the browser - which is the OS, by the way. Technically, no other OSes have icons or wallpapers outside the OS, so its a moot point. Its a new way to look at it. (Saying 'paradigm shift' is such a cliché :p )
• If you close the last tab (the app panel is not really a tab, so it doesn't count), the whole browser restarts, reopening the closed tab.

Its UI is also very choppy. I had given 1GB RAM to the virtual machine, with 128MB of video memory. But then, my hard disk is not an SSD, and the OS is not even at beta stage.

What I don't understand is, when you have free OSes like Ubuntu which works on every computer (at least every one of the dozen or so I've tried on), and features like hibernate which can reduce the need for a restart/boot to the rare occasions of a kernel/system update, what exactly is the need for such an OS? They are polished (unlike ChromeOS, in its current state), works with a huge number of devices (unlike ChromeOS), can be installed on any computer used today (unlike ChromeOS), and can choose from tens of thousands of applications to be installed on them, taking advantage of the local processing power.

If you can suggest a valid reason why I should use this OS, please, enlighten me in the comments.

New Orkut design copies many of Facebook's features

Orkut has rolled out a new design to some users, and has given the ability to invite others to it, à la Gmail / Google-Wave. There is an entry in the Orkut Support Section which claims that the new interface is faster & simpler, and will make it easier to follow your friends' updates. From the listing of features, it appears that Orkut has copied many of Facebook's features to make the UI more streamlined. And I'm glad they did!

The upgrade adds the ability to comment on friends' updates, and to change the colour scheme of your profile page. But here is the most exciting feature that they are adding to Orkut : with the new version, you will be able to do Audio/Video Chat with your friends! This will probably require the installation of a plugin like the one used in Gmail. There is also the option to do a conference chat.

(Update: The plugin is needed, but if you have it installed and working in Gmail, you don't need to do that again. It just works. No option to set status though. Only the pre-set statuses 'Available', 'Busy' & 'Invisible' and the option to sign out of chat are available.)

Orkuteers will be able to select multiple photos for uploading at once, and also rotate them if needed. All your contacts' activity notifications will be available through a unified what's new section, which will also have the ability to play the videos added by your contacts - exactly how Facebook's 'News Feed' works.

The new version also adds a link header on top like the ones on top of Gmail & Google Docs, allowing users to navigate to other Google properties.

It also looks like they are integrating the scrapbook into the home page, thus making it more like Facebook's wall posts, but I'm not sure about this. The help page says that "The 'scrap' feature lets you post directly to their profile pages". What exactly that means is yours to figure out; your guess would be as good as mine. (See Update below)

As a web developer, I'm happy to hear that in the new version, Orkut has also joined the growing list of large sites which have stopped supporting the IE6 (Internet Explorer 6) browser. They suggest that users should "upgrade to a supported browser" by "download[ing] the latest versions of Google Chrome, Firefox or Internet Explorer 8".

Update: I'm in! Using the new design now. They have 'Ajax'-ified the interface, so all sections (scraps, photo albums, fav. videos, testimonials etc.) appear in the home page itself. The friends list and communities list are now scrollable, and shows all your friends/communities. You can also narrow-down the list with search-as-you-type. Aesthetics could have been better though.. I miss the old Orkut already.

Update 2: Apparently, this isn't news. The orkut blog had announced it last week. Can't believe I missed that... :p

Blog Upgrade!

Hi all,

Upgraded to New Blogger Template (Finally!), added a few widgets. Still have the same design, so yes, I was converting for the last few hours..

Has Google FriendConnect enabled, so signup here if you like my posts..

I've been on Twitter for a while now, so smaller updates are going up there instead of a full-blown blog post.

Follow me on Twitter! @lifenstein

P.S.: Will add more posts here soon.

[Video] Data Portability - An Introduction

• An excellent article at PC World about Data Portability

Read more at DataPortability.org

Doing Your bit to reduce Spam - Using BCC

In 2001, spam accounted for an estimated 5% of our email. In 2007, it clogs our inboxes* to the tune of 90-95% of all email sent, according to a new report released recently by Barracuda Networks. Barracuda, a leading vendor of spam filtering technology, based their analysis on the over 1 billion emails that the company's software scans each day.

Spammers need email IDs to send the spam to, and there are many sneaky sites out there who collect addresses from visitors and sell them to the spammers. Email addresses are also collected by spambots, which crawl the web just like regular search engine crawlers (like Google's Googlebot) , but looking for email IDs in webpages (say, in comments) instead of keywords.

Another source of valid email addresses are, believe it or not, your own forwarded emails. Whether sending jokes, amaaaaaazing pictures, inspiring presentations, friendship quotes or, the worst of them all - Chain Mails, the way you send it could very well be helping spammers send more unwanted messages to your own friends, relatives & colleagues...

As I mentioned in the last post, when you put all the addresses in the 'to' or 'cc' boxes while forwarding an email, the email IDs of all the recipients are visible to each other!. The actual use of 'cc' is for intimating persons other than those whom the message is meant for about the email. For example, you want to let Archie know that you have sent the mail to Jughead, while the letter isn't actually meant for Archie himself. If you didn't want Jughead to know that, then you'd put Archie's email ID into the 'BCC' box instead. Since email IDs in 'BCC' aren't visible to any of the recipients, the addresses remain safely within your contact list, away from prying eyes.

Another responsible thing you can do is to clean up the mail being forwarded before sending it across - remove the huge list of previous forwarders & forwardees from the mail. That isn't what you want your friends to read, right? You want them to see the contents of the mail itself. I have seen forwards with three to four PAGES of

"Forwarded Message: Fwd:Fw:Fwd: Subject
From: xx32, To: yy1, yy2..... yy56, yy 57...
---------
Forwarded Message: Subject
From: zz20, To: xx1, xx2, xx3.... xx71
...
.....
...
......."

... followed by a One-Liner Joke. What gives?!

Once I even got a mail with just the list; no content - it had been clipped due to the mail being too long.. ( In Gmail, you can view the full content through the 'Show Original' link in the Reply button drop-down. )

Same thing with the Subject line as well - whatz with the 'Fwd: Fw: Re: [Groupkkk] Fwd [MailingList DingDong]....' ?? In Gmail, you should just click 'Edit Subject' link, clean it up so that just one 'Fwd:' & the Subject itself remains before sending it.

---

Inspired by a post at Yahoo! Mail's blog, where they explain the use of BCC through a screencast. The video itself isn't that impressive, so I'll just link to it rather than embed it here in the blog. > Using BCC Feature (Yahoo! Video)

* The part about 'Clogging your Inboxes' assumes that you aren't using Gmail :D

Its now easier to locate your Gmail contacts in Orkut. But...

Orkut has just announced the ability to check whether people in your Gmail Address book are already in your orkut friends list. If they aren't, you are given the option to either add them (if they are already orkut members) or invite them to orkut.

Original Post : orkut Blog: I'm feeling serendipitous!

This would've worked out better, If only Gmail didn't add each and every contact you ever emailed - even just for once - to your address book! When I tried out the feature, I had to spend hours cleaning up my Gmail address book. Why? The sequence of mistakes are as follows:

1. A friend of mine gets a forward. He is compelled by the warning in the email to send it to all his contacts, because otherwise, he could die within a few hours!! (Have been receiving mails which ask you to forward them? They are called 'Chain Mails' - click here if you have a minute to spare.)
   
   
2. He puts his entire address book into the 'To' field when sending the forward. By doing so, he has just exposed all the email addresses in his contact list to the entire world - even company emails, private addresses which other people trusted him with.. each and every one. If only he had put them in the 'bcc' field - the email ids of his contacts would've remained hidden from all recipients.
   
   
3. When I got the email, I couldn't resist telling him the errors of his ways, so I told him the stuff I just explained in the last two steps through the 'Reply' button - but alas! I had used the 'Reply to all' button instead; my advice is now being sent to more than a hundred people - my friend's entire address book..
   
   
4. The last mistake wouldn't have been so bad as it was, if it wasn't for the Gmail feature I mentioned at first - all of the addresses which I (accidentally) just sent the email to were now in my address book as well! People I don't even know, haven't even heard of - were now in my Address book. Great. Just Great.

So when I tried to use the new orkut feature, many of those contacts appeared in the list of prospective orkutians who aren't already in my friends list. Suffice to say, hours had to be spent cleaning up my address book before I could bring down the number to below 100.

One of the features I really wish Gmail had is the ability to combine contacts - I don't want to manually merge multiple entries into single contacts. But since I had to, I've already done that - just took me about three days... :(

I've also noticed another mistake some orkutians are making. They have multiple email addresses, like most of us do, say, tom@gmail.com & tom@yahoo.com. Lets say Tom created his orkut account using the gmail id (It was possible with any email id until Google integrated orkut into the Google Account). So when a friend searches for Tom with his yahoo ID, they may not find him.. Tom thinks, "Oh no! I don't want to keep my friends from finding me!"

So Tom figures out a workaround - he makes a dummy profile in orkut with his yahoo ID, and adds himself as a friend to that profile. Now when anyone searches for him in orkut with his yahoo id, they'll come to this profile, notices his real profile in the friends list, and sends the friend request to that profile instead. Simple, right?

No, its not, and there are two reasons: One, when we search for an email id in orkut, and if a profile with that address already exists, the orkut interface just gives us the option to add the friend; it doesn't show us the friends list of that profile. So, your friend won't even know that it was just a dummy profile. And Two, you could just add the second, third or even fourth email id to orkut's Contacts section in 'Edit Profile'. If you are signed-in to orkut, just click here to get there. All searches for any of the added addresses would lead the searcher to your profile.

BREAKING : Get your @live.in email address right now!

Microsoft enabled public signups to their live.com email addresses exactly 1 month ago, but Indians couldn't sign up because it was only available from US locations. I tried a few URL hacks, but those didn't work. Kept trying for weeks, but it wasn't working at all... until now!

Okay, it isn't @live.com - but @live.in is even kewler!! (As in, you know - LIVE IN, like the Jeans Brand?) All you have to do is go to the signup page and click on the 'Get It' button to signup. The best thing is, since this hasn't been announced officially (well, I haven't heard :D ), virtually all email usernames are available for the taking - I just got ashley[at]live.in!!! No need to add numbers & random junk to get an address you really want!

Note: You have to access it from India to get the live.in address. Otherwise, it will be the country-specific TLD that shows up. It is also possible that you get only a hotmail.com address as the option..


EDIT: Forgot to mention, Microsoft already provides lots of custom domains for their 'Windows Live Hotmail' email services at CoolHotmail.com, exclusively for Indians (Anyone can get it, but the domains are mostly India-specific: such as bangalorerocks.in, bornleader.co.in, chennairocks.in, clubaishwarya.com, clubasin.in, clubdravid.com, clubsachin.com, clubsrk.com, ilovebhavans.in & ilovekabbadi.com, to mention just a few.)