Locate Your Friends using Google Latitude!

Google Latitude is now live, a new service from Google that allows you to locate you and your friends on Google Maps and share it with others (not available on iPhone yet, but its coming soon).


For now, you can explore it directly yourself via your mobile phone or from your computer. Instead you can also use this direct link to login, and then you’ll be prompted to install the gadget. I found that, as it claimed, the feature was unable able to detect my location automatically from my PC and I had to set it out manually.

Google’s features are pretty simple. Along with a person’s location, the person’s picture will show up on the map (if it’s being set during account creation). The service uses cell-phone tower triangulation, GPS or Wi-Fi to find your current location. As of now, it works on RIM’s Blackberrys, Symbian devices and Windows Mobile, and the T-Mobile G1. About iPhone it will be supported soon. The service goes live in the U.S. and 26 other countries.

Here is a quick video to make you understand about Google Latitude:

Link: Google Latitude

Google SMS Channels: Send SMS Text Messages to your Group for Free

This time, Google come up with a new and innovative service for mobile phone subscribes. After SMS based search, Google have recently announced the launch of Google SMS Channels, which is a platform to send group SMS free of cost. It can be called the improved version of existing group messaging services like SMSgupshup and Mytoday.

The service “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,” adding that Google SMS Channels are “free both for content publishers as well as mobile phone users who subscribe to text updates via SMS.”
http://labs.google.co.in/smschannels/browse




features:
Unlike other group SMS providers, Google’s SMS channel does not add any advertisements on the message footer, so group publishers get full 160 character messages to post.
Compared to other group messaging providers, Google gets its message published faster and FREE.
Supports Blogger blogs, Google groups, Google Alerts, RSS feed URL and custom messages.
For subscriber point of view, option to set the maximum number of Incoming messages.

Google Adds Voice And Video Chat to Gmail

Watch out Skype (and Meebo and TokBox), Google is adding voice and video chat to Gmail today, all in one fell swoop. When you are having an instant message conversation with someone over Gtalk, a video and voice option will appear (after you download this plugin).

From the Google Blog:

Just click on the new “Video & more” menu in a Gmail chat window and select “Start video chat” or “Start voice chat.” You can switch to a full screen view or pop out the chat window and change the size and positioning as you wish. Of course, not everyone has a webcam, but even if you don’t, you can still have voice conversations alongside your email and regular chat

Bringing video chat into the Gmail page, just as it does with regular IM, is in step with Google’s efforts to connect its disparate services together in a more seamless fashion. It is also a better experience. If you use Gmail as your primary email, you always have it open. That means you don’t have to open up a separate application just to conduct an impromptu text, voice, or video chat (as you do with other IM clients). These are all just different modes of communication, available to you as appropriate. Life just got a lot harder for startups pushing point solutions around video chat.

The new feature was developed out of Google’s engineering group in Sweden, where it acquired e-meeting startup Marratech in April, 2007. Serge Lachapelle, the Swedish Google product manager in the video below, used to be the VP of product management at Marratech.

How to become a hacker

by : Eric S. Raymond
What Is a Hacker?

The Jargon File contains a bunch of definitions of the term ‘hacker’, most having to do with technical adeptness and a delight in solving problems and overcoming limits. If you want to know how to become a hacker, though, only two are really relevant.

There is a community, a shared culture, of expert programmers and networking wizards that traces its history back through decades to the first time-sharing minicomputers and the earliest ARPAnet experiments. The members of this culture originated the term ‘hacker’. Hackers built the Internet. Hackers made the Unix operating system what it is today. Hackers run Usenet. Hackers make the World Wide Web work. If you are part of this culture, if you have contributed to it and other people in it know who you are and call you a hacker, you're a hacker. ..
More Details

Send free SMS to any mobile in India.

Now get paid by sending and receiving SMS on your mobile
Increase your earning potential by inviting your friends.
Here is the link to send free SMS to any mobile in India.

http://www.youmint.com/network-zaqmax

Google maps in orkut

Google maps within orkut:
http://www.orkut.com/Map.aspx
Upon clicking on the link you will be able to see where your friends are located around the world( provided they filled out their details correctly).
Upon clicking on a group or a person, you will be able to see your friends address, profile link, photo (provided they filled out their details correctly)

More Benefit from your Gmail address

More Benefit from your Gmail address
I recently discovered some little-known ways to use your Gmail address that can give you greater control over your inbox and save you some time and headache. When you choose a Gmail address, you actually get more than just "yourusername@gmail.com." Here are two different ways you can modify your Gmail address and still get your mail:

Append a plus ("+") sign and any combination of words or numbers after your email address. For example, if your name was hikingfan@gmail.com, you could send mail to hikingfan+friends@gmail.com or hikingfan+mailinglists@gmail.com.

Insert one or several dots (".") anywhere in your email address. Gmail doesn't recognize periods as characters in addresses -- we just ignore them. For example, you could tell people your address was hikingfan@gmail.com, hiking.fan@gmail.com or hi.kin.g.fan@gmail.com. (We understand that there has been some confusion about this in the past, but to settle it once and for all, you can indeed receive mail at all the variations with dots.)

For me, the real value in being able to manipulate your email address is that it makes it really easy to filter on those variants. For example you could use hikingfan+bank@gmail.com when you sign up for online banking and then set up a filter to automatically star, archive or label emails addressed to hikingfan+bank. You can also use this when you register for a service and think they might share your information. For example, I added "+donation" when I gave money to a political organization once, and now when I see emails from other groups to that address, I know how they got it. Solution: filtered to auto-delete.