One website which is making quick rounds on Twitter this weekend is Tweetwasters, a site that gives you an idea of how much time you’re wasting posting messages and status updates to the popular micro-sharing service. Users are calculating away and tweeting about it, ironically spending even more time on Twitter (not that there’s anything wrong with that).

There’s even a WordPress plugin that lets you show off your Twitter usage stats to your blog visitors, and if you try hard you might just make the Tweetwasters Hall Of Fame.

Tweetwasters estimates that a user spends about 30 seconds on creating a Tweet on average. They multiply that by the number of Twitter messages you have produced and they provide you with the approximate number of seconds, minutes, hours or days of your life you have spent on Twitter. Of course, most people spend more time reading tweets than writing them, so it’s probably way more than Tweetwasters will ever be able to tell you.

The service was built for fun by Sugarrae, but there’s an application called Wakoopa that tracks your software usage continuously and provides you with details of what you use the most (both for desktop and web applications) and tells you what other software you might find useful.

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Google has removed the beta tag from its Chrome browser - just 100 days after the software was first launched, which claims more than 10 millions active users in just over 3 months.

Since launching, Google has gathered tons of customer feedback and performance reports, and they kept rolling out new features and bug fixes. Chrome is fast, stable and secure without a doubt, but it still doesn’t support Mac and Linux. Also, an extension platform (Firefox’s add-ons style) is strongly required by a substantial amount of users.

As you may know, many google products are in beta for years, including Gmail, Google Calendar, etc. So, why google took Chrome out of beta so quick?

One of the reasons could be that Google is not happy to pay Firefox millions every year. Google paid Firefox $66 million this year for the default search box in the Firefox browser, and the bill would go up if Firefox gets more online search market share. So, Google desperately wants to reduce that bill by encouraging people to use their own browser, Chrome, and it gives users more confidence by simply removing the magic beta label.

Second reason could be that many computer manufactures (OEMs) agreed to pre-install Chrome on their new computers if Google takes Chrome out of beta. It always makes sense to keep the key customers and partners happy, especially when they offer to help you.

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Gmail has released a nice upgrade to view PDF document attachments without having to download them. This is great news for those who are sick of their computers slowing down from having to open the Adobe PDF reader software and bad news for Adobe themselves.

In order to view the document, Gmail users just have to click “View” next to the attachment description. A new Google Docs window or tab will open the document.


There are two other benefits to this, the first being the updated page view which lets you hop around the document a whole lot faster. The other is the built-in zoom, which scales the text to fit your monitor with a higher degree of detail than the text resizer found in your browser.

To view the document in HTML. The link for HTML format is at the top of the new PDF viewer. PDFs can still be saved and viewed with Adobe’s software by clicking “Download.”

The exisiting link to open up PDFs as HTML pages straight from the message, has been removed but still the document can be viewed in HTML format in the new PDF viewer and in search results from Google.com.

Presumably Google.com results will get the updated viewer next. This would be a huge benefit to Google Search users because Google's current HTML conversion wipes out much of the formatting that can keep fonts and image placement intact, which can make things like brochures and newsletters unreadable.

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People tend to leave their Gmail open all day, every day. Whether they’re at their computer or not their email sits there, ever checking.
One problem with this is that Google Talk tends to stay active too. If someone needs to get a hold of you they’ll try, and try, and try your Google Talk and get no response because you’re not there!

Well, now you can send a message straight to your friend's phone from your Gtalk chat window.

You can activate this handy feature by visiting the Labs page in Gmail settings.

According to the Gmail blog post, the site is currently testing out the service with US phones only for now (messages can be sent from abroad, they just need to be directed at a US phone).

This isn’t by any means the first chat service to offer free SMS messaging - major chat networks like AIM have been doing this for years. But it’s a handy feature, especially for the many people who use Gmail all day long.

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Few months back, Google India introduced a new product called Google SMS Channels that lets you subscribe to news alerts, blog updates and other kinds of information like horoscopes, jokes, stocks or even cricket scores via SMS text messages.

SMS Channels allows you to create your own channel(s) to publish content that other users can subscribe to. You can also create groups over SMS to communicate with your friends, family, and co-workers all without paying any fees to your mobile carrier.


Other than receiving blog RSS feeds via SMS, you may also use the Google SMS service to get news alerts and weather information on your phone.

Another interesting part – you don’t really need a mobile phone to send an SMS to your group as there’s an option in Google SMS channels that lets you can compose and send SMS messages via the web itself. It supports English, Hindi, Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam and Kannada.

Google SMS channels currently works only with with phone numbers of India but they are “working towards making this service available to international numbers.”

If you are based in India and like to subscribe to this site on your mobile phone via SMS, please join the Techno Mirror SMS channel on Google.

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Google is teaming up with dozens of publishers to index old magazines and make them available online, according to a blog posting by the company.

The move is another facet of Google's ambition to organize the world's information and comes two years after the tech search giant embarked on a scheme to scan and index millions of books.

In September, the company launched a project to digitize newspaper archives, making millions of old newspaper articles searchable online.


The new offering allows users to browse magazine covers and to delve into individual issues, which will be presented in exactly the same way as they first appeared in print, including all the ads. The magazine pages will be shown alongside contemporary Google ads and links to publishers' web sites.

Dozens of publishers have already signed on for the project. Among the magazines already available are New York Magazine, Popular Mechanics, Popular Science and Ebony.

'Over time, as we scan more articles, you'll see more and more magazines appear in Google book search results,' wrote Dave Foulser, the software engineer in charge of the project.

'Eventually, we'll also begin blending magazine results into our main Google.com search results, so you may begin finding magazines you didn't even know you were looking for,' he said.

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According to a report published on BBC News, Microsoft is preparing to launch online versions of Word, Excel and other programs in the Microsoft Office suite plus Exchange and Sharepoint in 2009.

Users will be able to use these programs via a web browser rather than installing them on a PC.

Some versions of the programs are expected to be free to use provided users are happy to view adverts alongside the software.

"We expect fully that the full range of Office utilities, from the most advanced to simpler lightweight versions, will be available with a range of options: ad-funded, subscriptions-based, traditional licensing fees, and so forth," Stephen Elop, head of Microsoft's business division told the Reuters newswire.

The move to web-based versions is also seen as a belated move by Microsoft to bolster its credentials in the move to so-called "cloud computing" in which applications only live online.

So far no date has been given for when the web-based versions will be available - though they are expected to be put online in 2009.

Mr Elop said Microsoft had seen strong interest from many existing customers in the web versions. Using such software would free many from maintaining their own hardware and software to support locally-installed versions.

"What we think is in five years, 50% of the use of Exchange and Sharepoint could be serviced from the cloud," he said.

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