Twitter May Know Your Friends

A social(read Facebook and Google plus) or a professional(read LinkedIn and ApnaCircle / Viadeo) site will always want you to grow your network for your and their benefit. So you see these sites suggesting friends to connect with. More commonly known as 'People you may know' or 'Members you may know'. So while these are more of the widgets kind that sit on some right, left nav bar, Twitter has decided to offer you suggestions right in to your inbox.

Twitter already has a 'Who to Follow' widget that shows up on the left nav bar and now they announced they would be delivering suggestions about People you may know though an email. The updates would come to you on a weekly basis. The announcement came via a blog post on Twitter blog.

While the 'Who to Follow' has evolved over the time and also contains options that are promoted, Twitter says the suggestions in the 'People you may know' email would be based on signals. So if majority of your contacts already follow certain person, its very likely that you may know that person and would want to follow him/her as well; and thus the suggestion.

You may at anytime however change your preference about this email in your email settings on Twitter account. Do you think the suggestions in email are a good way?

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Apple, Google, Maps and Steve Jobs

We don't worry about what these two big shots are up to, but hey we sure are interested! Launch of iPhone5 has settled now, broke quite a few records; promised quite a lot; disappointed some part of the market. Still made it easy with the Wall Street gain. Makes us think everything is as easy and perfect as it used to. Really ?

With Steve Jobs around there were expectations of innovation and perfection; things that changed Apple from what it was after he rejoined the company 14yrs back. Steve, iPod, iPhone and iPad changed the way Apple was seen prior to them. 
The first iPhone to launch without Steve is the new iPhone5 with iOS6. Did it disappoint the market? Well not really, in fact the sales, prebookings and the happy face of Wall Street for Apple has the story written all over. Everyone is happy. If you are not we would love to listen to your side. What we think may go wrong are a subtle things and missing innovation? if iPhone' newest version is to go by!

With the new version of iOS, Apple decided to bid goodbye to Google Maps. Good decision? We think otherwise. Not because we are a Google fan but with the response and few complaints that we see on web about the people using the Apple made Maps, you could always think they made the decision a bit too early. And no, despite the rumors, Google hasn't provided Apple with a native app for maps on iOS devices. Users of Apple new maps app have reported a bugging web, with mistakes that could frustrate and inconsistency & omissions that would let users think more than once before using possibly the best service a smartphone has for the people on move. What prompted the decision to drop Google maps in-spite of the app being very useful on the previous generation of iPhone(s) and use something that isn't as perfect a product as you expect Apple to put forward; we don't know!!

Google loving it? Sure they would be, considering the size of the horns they are locked with. But what we also know is that they both do think about the users as well. It wont be a surprise to find out they both working on an app that would ultimately fit the best way possible in to one of the perfect smartphone we have seen in the market, an iPhone!! But before that lets hear your views on how you think Apple is doing post Steve.

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Google Buys Nik In War Of Photo Uploads

The news about Facebook acquiring Instagram went berserk in April earlier this year (the deal by the way got closed earlier this month) and then Facebook went ahead with a redesign of photos page on the site. If anything, the steps were clear enough on the dominance the social network giant has as far as the photo upload preference is concerned. The site gets around 300 photo uploads per day, much more than any other website. With these news and stats, its pretty much obvious for the next closest social network, and the best competitor Facebook would have seen, to get a bit serious on the competition.

On Monday, via a post on his Google Plus stream, Vic Gundotra announced one of the best acquisition that Google would have made for Google plus considering the catch up that the search giant' social network is trying to play up with. Nik Software is a 17yr old San Diego based company with offices in Germany as well. But Google' acquisition of Nik has more to it that meets the eye. Why, read on...

Based outside the Silicon valley bubble, Nik has around 9Mn users with a very big following from the professional photographers base. The more interesting part of the acquisition would be Nik's very famous and known product called Snapseed, which is a mobile app currently available only for the iOS devices. The app is used for photo editing & sharing and last year was named the iPad app of the year. Not as popular as Facebook owned Instagram but like other Nik' products, Snapseed is very famous and preferred in between the professional photographers. Shouldn't be much time now for it to come on Android as well.

Google already boasts of quite a sophisticated tools for its social network and with this acquisition, we are sure the main focus would be on the mobile platform apart from the web version usage. Google has on the other hand stayed quite both on the 'Hows' and 'How Much' of the deal. The plans and execution of the deal would sooner or later surface and so will the future of Snapseed on iOS devices. Just wait and watch!!

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LinkedIn Enhances Career Pages

After an upgrade to the company pages on LinkedIn, which are still rolling out to all the company pages on the site(till end of year), the company has now started looking at their Career pages. The news about the new updates to the Career tool was announced on company' talent blog by Thomas Sexton. "As with many LinkedIn products, our goal is to make both our members and talent acquisition customers more successful. When candidates are more engaged, more connected with companies, and better able to find their dream jobs, everybody wins. This means designing a page that’s simple and laser-focused on capturing candidates’ attention as soon as they hit the page", Sexton wrote on the blog post.

Here is how the page looks:

As per Sexton, the brand new design f the Career pages will help people using them to:

Inspire Candidates: You would be able to show off your the uniqueness of your brand through the much more common banner image, more recognized as the cover photo of a page. Plus you can also add a punchy tagline.
Highlight What Matters Most: The company thinks that the main aspects people care about in a company detail involve the personalized jobs, people who they may know in that company and thus the new design keeps these main elements in the center.
Bring Your Story To Life: The page design has space for content modules that allows you to post feature videos, your employees or other' testimonials etc

Migrate your Career Page anytime over the next couple of months. To achieve the migration navigate to your Career Page click Admin tools, and choose the Upgrade to new version. Then its just the following of the migration guide and that should be all.

See also, LinkedIn New Company Pages.

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LinkedIn Company Pages Gets A MakeOver

LinkedIn has made a major update to their company pages, suggesting that the company is now trying to make a balance for both the individual and the business users. The upgrade was announced on LinkedIn official blog around 10 days back and it is expected that more people should start seeing the changes now after an initial roll-out on a few of the companies like Philips, Citi and Dell.

Social media experts are also of the opinion that its the time business should move on to the platform and start using the company page feature if they already haven't done so. LinkedIn,
apparently, it seems haven't been paying much attention to the feature in the past. Unlike their number one rival Viadeo (ApnaCircle in India) who already launched the feature (in beta yet) a few months back and seems like taking it seriously with all the advertisements that we see. But now that the company has started paying attention and seems to have long term plans for it, going by what Mike G wrote on the announcement in LinkedIn' blog post, it will be a good feature to capitalize on for the businesses that run in the B2B space.

Also see, ApnaCircle Launches Company Pages!

The updates are not great but certainly make the pages design fall in place for a better and useful navigation and making sure that the user gets the required information which should interest them once they start following a particular company page on LinkedIn. As you see the cover photo stands out like it does on the Facebook Timeline as well. Besides this stand out feature the companies will be able to display their logo right at the top besides their names. Otherwise the company news and updates takes all the importance as they should.

The updates may take some time rolling out to all companies. This is confirmed from the blog post as well as Mike says; "We are just getting warmed up and look forward to sharing more news as we continue to improve Company Pages and roll out the experience to all companies later this year." But while it may take some time for the new updates to reach the companies, it is advisable for them to start paying attention to the new changes and get themselves familiarized. Here are our tips on what may be the minimal you need to focus on; for a start:

Cover Pic: as it was the case when Facebook made the introduction to this design, designers in the company will need to pay special attention to this cover photo. This is the first thing a user may notice on landing on the page. So make sure its what reflects your brand and your identity. So far it seems the dimensions are: 646 x 220 pixels.
Metrics: They have changes and businesses will have the ability to look at the metrics on their company' status updates. After 24 hrs of a status update, you could look at the information like impressions of the post, its clicks and so on(shares and engagement percentage).
Target Audience: For the posts and status updates from your company pages, admins will now have the option to choose their target audience. So if you have some news that you want only to be able to share with the employees, go ahead and do it!
Facebook Like Link Sharing: Need to share a link? Just paste the link in the status update box, wait for the preview and ten feel free to remove the link and include introductory text. You will also have the option to remove the featured image on the update.
Products and Services: They get a nice own space in the right bar, making sure that your users get the details in a very easy manner. Make sure you have the details filled in.

This by no means is an exhaustible list of what you may need to pay attention to, but should be a start. We wait on your comments on how the pages match up to your expectations in case you now have the new changes available to you!

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Should You Buy iPhone5?

The wait was finally over a couple days back when the iPhone5 (the first iPhone after Steve Jobs)was formally launched at the Apple event on 12th of this month. Butterflies finally settled down and people started caring about the other routine work they are normally busy with when they are not listening to the launch events. This all happens, Yes! Irrespective of the part of the world you are in. The story is same. People go crazy and that's understandable. Apple has been able to surprise everyone all over the world, all the time. Was this the case this time? Read on...

As is usual whenever Apple is to launch a new iPhone, there are rumors on the new features and more interesting, as is the case with the smartphone giant (arguably the 'tag'), the 'whats new' or 'innovation' that they may bring with the new product. Surprisingly it seems Apple failed in its usual doing this time around. Don't trust us. We do love the company and what they are doing with each of the new products and innovations they bring to the market and the users, but its also true that we never found so many results about why the new iPhone disappoints. People are complaining on the miss of anything new. It has surprised the majority that the rumors already captured what was "official" announced at the launch event. And while iPhone5 may end up being the fastest product in terms of sales and that you may already be finding a out of stock sign (or rather preorder-ing) on the sites selling the phone and Apple may have been out of initial inventory in the record time; the question many have in their minds is if at all should you buy iPhone5?

We give you a preview of the features that you need to know in order tot decide if you should go for the new iPhone5. Here they are:

The Thinner, the Better: Size Does Matter
Yes it does, always. Size does matter and that's why we all keep arguing if Samsung is right to be giving its new phones the size that they have, especially when it becomes increasingly difficult as far as the single hand operation/usage is concerned. Apple finally thought about the 4inch screen size which means another row of icons, making it a 5 row screen space apart from the default row that you see. Still sporting the Retina display making it that much more clear with a 1136 x 640 resolution. And with 7.6 mm thickness, 112gm. weight; there is a slight improvement here with respect to stuffing more in less space and still making it lighter.

New OS: iOS6
Boasting of more than 200 updates and improvements over its predecessor iOS5, apple unveils the new iOS6. The new OS has some features that were pending for some while, like Facebook integration. The services (with Twitter in previous version) are now well integrated into this iPhone. Just login once to your Facebook account and you will have instant access to Facebook in apps, browser and even Siri. Possibility to post to Facebook from anywhere within the phone, and in fact your events and birthdays also sync up with your calendar. So this was a big improvement for Apple users.
Siri gets smart and can now launch apps and could also Tweet for you.
Maps come to iPhone as a replacement of Google Maps and have a turn by turn voice navigation guided by Siri. As compared to Google Maps, however Apple will have some catch up to do.
Do Not Disturb mode will let your phone receive the messages without a screen light up or making that usual noise.
Like Facebook and Twitter, iCloud too is now well built in and integrated in to the phone.
iSight the new rear camera is termed to be with a new lens and receiving some light enhancements but we expected the camera to be more than just 8MP. The word is that the comparison would heat up once you have Nokia Lumia 920 out in the market.
AirPlay lets you stream content to your HDTV and with the use of AirPlay mirroring what you do on your iPhone can be monitored on HDTV too.

Hardware Changes/Upgrades
New Processor, the A6 quad core processor is twice as fast as its predecessor A5 chip. But isn't it true that the quad-core processors chips have found their way to a host of Android-based devices already?
With 3 microphones at the front, back and bottom, the new earplugs called the EarPods are here to make your listening experience better. They have the ability to be clear even in loud atmosphere due to the design they sport. And we are sure Apple will (or already have) file for a patent for this new hardware accessory.
Lightning Connector is a 9 in connector as opposed to 30 pin on older phones and is dubbed to be faster, and with $29USD (price of the converter to use this one with 30 pin adapter) will be compatible with earlier versions of iPhone. This new connector can be plugged both ways, the normal and reversible.

The phone has been currently launched in Canada, UK, Australia, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Japan and Singapore only. It will be coming to India and 21 other countries a week later (next weekend).

As an Apple fan disappointment still remains on why Near Field Communication (NFC) was left out and why there is no wireless charging option in the phone. This is despite the fact that the close competitors like the Samsung Galaxy SIII and the Nokia Lumia 920 both have these features. LTE Long-Term Evolution) service is also not new! Bottom line is that although with the new OS there are some nice little features that came out, the innovative features that are so characteristic of the team at Apple, were no where to be seen. iPhone 4S users may be in dilemma right now, but if you are an Apple fan; there is no stopping you from iPhone5. For others, you know the options!!

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Google Drive Updated For Android & iOS

Google has been pretty serious on the updates it currently is providing our on the smartphone apps. We saw the new standalone YouTube app for iOS devices carry more or less the same features as on the Android version of the app. With these updates, Google is making sure its not leaving out the large section of users which are on the iOS platform and side by side making sure to keep itself in the run as far as the Apple vs Google war for dominance is concerned. The recent updates to Google drive app for iOS suggests the same and supports our thoughts here.

Google announced on its official blog a couple of days earlier about the updates the app would be receiving both on the Android as well as iOS platforms. While the update brings new and cool features on the Android smartphones, thus trying its best to make the app more favorable in competition to other cloud based services (read Dropbox and SkyDrive etc), on the iOS the search giant is pretty much focused to provide the Apple users with the same features as their Android counterparts.

Let's start with the updates for the Apple users. The new updates brings to the Drive app on iOS, the features to edit Google doc, just as the Android users could already with the previous version. The cloud feature could now be experienced on iPhone on iPad as users will now be able to create a new document, edit an existing doc or format text just as they do on their computers. Besides, just like the Macs (read computers), they will be able to see the changes done by their fellows on the same doc, instantly. The other features on the iOS devices include:

• view Google presentations on iPhone or iPad
• see speaker notes and toggle to full screen mode
• ability to swipe between slides
• creating new folders
• moving files in to folders and upload files including photos and videos

As far as the updates on the Android devices (smartphones and tablets)is concerned, the above detailed features are all in there. Apart from these android users will also be able to:

• add comments
• reply to existing comments and 
• view tables in your Google documents

There are a few things that are in pipeline, like native editing and real time collaboration for Google spreadsheets. And here is the video for you to enjoy:

 
We don't know how long and how far the Google vs Apple will go, however with the last 2 updates its pretty sure that Google is making sure not to leave the Apple users behind in the smartphone experience. Which is obviously a sign of healthy competition and good news for the users, no matter which side you are on!!

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Standalone YouTube App for iPhone & iPad

A new iPhone(iPhone5) is expected to be released tomorrow and thus the timing couldn't be better for Google to announce (and make available) a new standalone YouTube app for iOS platform.

This new standalone app will be able to replace the native YouTube app that till now was available for Apple users and was initially build by Apple only. The native app is also rumored to be left out of the new version of the iOS (i.e. iOS6) as well as this new and further iPhone(s) that will and may be released in future. The native app is said to be add free but didn't offer as much to please the user, so any user wanting to get the full features of YouTube had to rely on m.youtube.com with a browser available on his/her iPhone. This however will be changed now as the new standalone app is to offer the full experience and will benefit Google as well as they should be able to play the Ads before the YouTube videos as is case on the Android version of the app.

The announcement was made today morning on the official YouTube blog and the new YouTube app for iPhone and iPad is available to be downloaded from the app store. The app as per the post is built by YouTube engineers for a best experience for the iPhone and iPad users. You will now be able to experience:

• Tens of thousands more videos
• New YouTube channel guide: Swipe your finger from the left edge of the screen to reveal a guide with your subscribed channels on YouTube
• Find awesome videos faster:
• More ways to share with the people you love

The posts also says that the guys are "working on an optimized version of the YouTube app for iPad in the coming months, and stay tuned for more details."

Enjoy the video uploaded by iPodUplink:

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Wishfree Tech Blog Award 2012

There isn't a need for a "prize" all the time. Is it? We leave it to you to decide that but we tend to agree with the lot who decides to do things for fun instead, most of the time ;). FYI however that Wishfree is currently among the other contests, running a Tech Blog Award 2012 contest on their site.

The contest is open for all to join. In fact, you could either participate in it for your own blog or you may also nominate others that are already there in the contest. There are currently quite a few famous blogs there, although we are not sure if they were nominated by some of the fans or the blog owners themselves created the entry in there. We however were contacted by the Wishfree PR contact person for the participation and we were very glad to accept the request ;). The contest runs thru till 12th of Oct 2012. 

For a nomination process, all you need to do is create an entry for your favorite blog via the contest page, if they are not already there contesting. For an existing blog entry, all you have to do is log in to the site with either of your Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn credentials and then just hit nominate as you see on the screen capture below:

 Don't forget to vote for your favorite blog at this year's Tech Blog awards. See you on 12th then ;)

[Update 09/11/2012: To our confusion "although we are not sure if they were nominated by some of the fans or the blog owners themselves created the entry in there", our good friend from the Wishfree PR team tells us and confirms thru an email this morning that:

"none of the blog has been entered by the admin, all the blogs visible at the contest are either invited or suggested by the fans of the blogs".

We thank her for the correction :) and also for dropping by to check the post!]

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NewsPaper on Smartphone with PressReader

How often does your newspaper lay in the same state the delivery boy left it in during early morning hours? Or how often you feel the lack of time that prevents you from spending some minutes to catch up on the news on that online news site? If you are also like us who keep blaming the business of life then we just got the right app for you.

PressReader is an online newspaper reader app that your smartphone is missing even if you 

are able to get some time right up in the morning to skim the pages. With most people preferring the "on the move" trend now a days, the app will help you keep up to date with the happenings around the place you are in. PressReader is available for both your smartphone as well as tablets. Just to let you know before we dive in to reveal the features of the very famous news app, the app which offers around 2K digital newspapers on your palm devices, is available for smartphones running any of the Android, iOS devices, Windows or BlackBerry Os(es). It also has news from over 95 countries and is available in around 54 languages. The news is available to you on the go and in a very convenient and and replica form of the real newspaper copy of yours. Lets see a few of the features that impressed us while we tried the app on our smartphone.

 

The app is available for a free trial for a day only, which should suffice the trial that you would like to have on this app. You will need to buy it if you like it and the above screen captures from our Nexus devices will help you on how to do it. The authorization would be only after you buy the app where by you will be able to create your authorization credentials.

Once you are in, you could choose the county for which you would want to read the news about (rather the publications). The filters apart from the country will include languages, favorites and the recent ones that may have read or referred to. The left side screen capture in the above image shows you the different publications available when we had our county set to India. As you can see you can either download the paper by clicking anywhere along the row area for that paper (as we did here for 'The Hindu' and 'Times of India' ), or you may also get the app to read the news for you.

This is a very nice feature as you just need tot click on the speaker icon on the right of the screen and the ePaper will load to provide you with the replica of the actual hard copy. The news items will be read out to you by the app and you can swipe your fingers left, right, up or down to change the news items or the pages that you need to be on. You may also like or dislike the particular publication that you are reading with the thumbs up and thumbs down icons on each side of the below part of screen. Feel free to pinch a particular news item to be able to listen to it.

While you are on a particular publication, just tab the options icon on the top right to view more options like the shifting to 'Sports News' as seen on the above screen capture. Or for that matter to the 'International News'. The app as you would expect is very handy for all you out there who are on the move every now and then and don't get time to get in to the hard copy of the news papers. The best part is that there are so many publications that are available and quite a few countries that you may not feel like left out. With the app speaking so many languages, you would be rest assured to have a ePaper in at least your second if not the first language. Also, since we did mention it a couple para before, you could always download a ePaper to be able to read it while you are not in a WiFi zone or don't want to turn on your mobile data packets. Just make sure to download the paper before you leave home in the morning and you should be good and in nice company on your way to the office. Since the version 4.0 in Google play store, they also offer a SmartFlow which is a  "stream of articles where visual clues will not only enhance your reading experience, they will reveal new gems of content you’ll be delighted to discover".

We finally leave you with a video we found on the play store while looking up the app. Enjoy your time with the app and do tell us how you found your new office going companion to be!

It sure is a killer app for your smartphone!

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LinkedIn Smartphone App Updated With Real Time Notifications

The smartphone apps are getting popular as a way of access-on-the-move within the business of our lives. LinkedIn understands the nature of people using the smartphone app and that is why you see their mobile population grow more than 2 folds in the last year since they provided a completely new LinkedIn app for the Android(s) and the iPhone(s). The reported figure grew from 10% to 23% since 16th August 2011. Not surprising, as the new app launched last year was a nice way to keep user interested. This year just after the anniversary of the new app version launched last year, LinkedIn has provided an update (both launched and coming soon) that people were expecting to see in the app and ones that are highly anticipated and expected.

As announced by Joff Redfern on the official LinkedIn blog post, the new updates bring the features for both the Android and iOS users. There is also a special update only for the iPad. Lets first see the features available on both the platforms: 

Get notified
The smartphone app will now get real-time notifications for the activities like someone liking your shares on LinkedIn, commenting on them. And also when someone views your profile or accepts your invitation. This is not the exhaustive list of course, but it gets interesting already! 

Company pages goes mobile
A massive feature update and one that should boost the number of people looking to follow one or the other update from a particular company they may be interested in. With the Company Pages making their appearance on the mobile version, LinkedIn users can now see and follow all details about a company like who from your network work at a particular company, the job postings from that company and any update that the company makes available via their news updates. 

Job Listings
Access to job listings and openings that you are interested in are directly available within your mobile news stream.

As for the iPad, the app now is available in 6 new languages. These include French, German, Italian, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Korean. A big push for the majority of the user base that are outside US (60% is what Joff reports it to be). The company says it has plans to include more soon. These are good and very handy features and with the ability to edit your profile on smartphone "coming soon" the app will be a very interesting point to keep yourself updated on the professional site. What are your views on the app? Share with us in the comments section below.

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Google Maps Brings Voice Navigation To India

Google Maps gave the Android users searching the transit routes a sigh of relief last month when they enabled the schedule tracking of quite a few form of transits like train, metro etc. And now they make it easier for people on Android to use the navigation feature inside Google Maps from yesterday onwards. Gogle Maps android app received an important update thereby enabling the voice navigation on Indian roads, something that was anticipated for long and one that should please Indian people as well as thousands of tourists visiting the country. We will come back to the voice navigation feature after a couple of paragraphs, first lets look at some brief details on the transit and schedule information update. For people who still aren't aware, Google Maps on Android now has schedules for Delhi Metro Rail, Chennai MRTS, Bangalore MTC and Kolkata Metro. This update to Google Maps was done mid August, not even a month old that is. Not only schedule tracking but users will be able to get correct information about the a particular form of transit like the Delhi Metro for example. You may also tap any station name to see a detailed and an updated layout of the station.

And this is not all, there is more to the details you could be getting out of the app. Searches for a zip/postal code or for that matter a city will have the respective region highlighted for your better look. All the information about the places are now at a single place and your location history will let you get the details on what places you have visited before.

Let's dive in to voice navigation which would be much of a concern to companies like TomTom or MapMyIndia and even Nokia which offers this service already. More so since the earlier two companies mentioned have the feature as premium version. Users wouldn't worry about this though as this brings a lot of comfort for people going to places with an uncertainty as far as the route/directions are concerned. Google India uploaded a video on YouTube introducing the feature in India. Here is a look at that:

We leave it to you to decide which place would be your first choice for the voice navigation and hey just to let the TomTom or MapMyIndia premium user know, there is no price to pay for it. The feature is absolutely free. Although one thing you may miss here in Google Maps is the non availability of this feature in offline mode, TomTom and MapMyIndia users will have a point up here!

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Create ShortCuts in Google Analytics

Having to deal with multiple clicks, especially while you are to draw out a report, is always frustrating, tiring and annoying to say the least. It would be a dream come true to be able to get to a report in a single click thus saving time for that extra coffee break in the day. Google agrees with you and thus now provides a way to create and use shortcuts in Google Analytic to be at ease with your reports extraction.

Google announced the feature last week on their official analytic blog, stating that "Shortcuts help you get to the exact view you want of your data in GA in record time. Rather than having to go through the "find report, add segment, change, sort process daily, with Shortcuts you can do it once, save it, and come back to it in a single click."

Creating a Shortcut is as easy as a couple of clicks and then save. Once you are on the screen of a custom or a standard report in Google Analytic, start by creating the 'Shortcut' button that you will be now able to see on the report's utility bar. On the resulting screen just create a shortcut name to this report shortcut and you are done.

 

Once you give a name to your report shortcut you will land on the new Shortcuts section On the Home tab, with your report configuration saved and your report being viewable on the left of the screen. You will have the below information saved as part of this shortcut (note that the date range and sample size are not saved as part of this creation) ;

• Standard or custom report for context
• Currently viewed tab on the report
• Sort order
• Advanced segments
• Graphed metric

Using the Shortcuts are simple. The Shortcuts that you created are accessible from the Shortcuts section on the Home tab. All your Shortcuts are under this section, clicking any one that you created will take you to the same configuration that you saved. This means that all the segments will be reset once you click on a Shortcut and you will always see the same customization that you saved last time you made changes to the Shortcut configurations. Want to change the configurations of the Shortcut that you are viewing? Just click on the Save button the Shortcut menu after you are done making the changes.

Managing your Shortcuts is done via the 'Overview' option in the Shortcuts navigation drop. The Overview page will present to you all of your Shortcuts and you may view or delete any one from here.

A couple of points that Andrew Seguin from the Google Analytic Team mentions on his post for you to make note:

• Shortcuts can be emailed and exported like any other standard report.
• Deleting a Shortcut will remove that report from any scheduled emails, as with deleting a custom report.
• Shortcuts apply at the profile level, like the rest of reports in Google Analytic.

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Google Closing Feedburner?

Google continues to make acquisitions and further continues to make changes to its services and then sometimes it also decides to retire a few of its services. This time its the FeedBurner! No official announcement yet but to what you and we see and read it seems it will be pretty soon.

The Google Adsense for Feeds blog has announced that its closed. The last post, by Emily Wood from the Google blog team, around end of July this year said "we recognize that we're just not generating enough content here to warrant your time, so we won't be posting here any longer. Thanks again for being an enthusiastic FeedBurner user". So is the case with their Twitter account. And, the already deprecated FeedBurner API is due to be closed October this year.

If anything to go by the closing and deprecation of the accounts and services associated with FeedBurner, it seems like clear indications of the RSS service from search giant being done away with and (may be) for good, considering their expansion and not so great deal coming out of this service. But if that is the case its going to be a shocker for quite a few people (including us) who use their service to serve the new blog posts to hundreds and thousands of the subscribers. Or there may be a case of Google integrating the service somewhere in to another of its products, going by the nature of integrations that the search giant is on for past few months since the introduction of its social network since September last year. Which ever way it may be, the search giant hasn't opened up on which way the tide may turn. We keep an eye on it for sure!

Dan Thornton of 'The Way Of The Web.Net' discusses on the alternatives of FeedBurner here. Turn to his post if you are like us who may be wondering what to next? There is also Jim Connolly from 'Jim's Marketing Blog' who discusses about the alternative that he chose, MailChimp. You may read his post here. And if you want to read what the father of RSS, Dave Winer, has to say and suggest on the status of FeedBurner, head over here.

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Biking Navigation in Google Maps Gets Half a Gig Meter Boost

If you are a rider who loves to jump on the bike and get ready for a trip, chances are you either already know the route or already tucked a paper map in your back pack. If that's event partly true, you are in for a good surprise or rather a gift from Google' Android team. Its time you forget the paper maps and not worry about getting lost on a trip to an unknown path. Its time you pull out your android device and plant it right in front of you on the bike. Your android device is turning itself to your route guide now as Google Maps for Android pushes out an update to the app that is supposed to add around half a giga meter of biking navigation and that too in 12 countries.

Google announced on Thursday that they are "bringing mobile biking directions and navigation" in the 10 countries that already had the option for desktop biking directions. These countries include Australia, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK.

Apart from this the Google Maps Navigation (beta) gets a turn by turn voice guided biking navigation in all the countries that already have biking navigation. "Mount your device on your handlebars to see the turn-by-turn directions and navigation, or use speaker-mode to hear voice-guided directions" is what Larry Powelson(Software Engineer, Google Maps) posted on official Google blog. It was a couple of years back when Google added biking directions to Google maps in US and Canada. With this update there is now around 530K KMs of green biking lines in Google Maps.

Here is how the bike route reads:

• dark green lines on the map show dedicated bike trails and paths with no motor vehicles
• light green lines show streets with bike lanes
• dashed green lines show other streets recommended for cycling

So the next time you plan some time out with your bike, don't forget your android device and do share with us how it went !

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