When it launched, millions of us grabbed free Gmail addresses, and associated Calendar, Docs, Voice, and other apps followed. But personal domains are cheap, and claiming an @yourname.com address to use with Google Apps is easier than ever. Here’s why you should. More »
Update 2: Google Voice product manager Craig Walker confirms that the Apps transfer is NOT supported right now, and that it was only done for a small group of testers. Sorry, all. The good news? He says there will be a way to transfer your Voice account to Google Apps once the new GApps features that are being tested right now launch. In the meantime, I’m removing the link to the request form from this post. More »
By itself, task manager GQueues is pretty handy—a list-oriented task manager with sub-tasks, due dates, assignments, tagging, and other neat features. But its integration with Google sign-in, Calendar, and Google Apps make it more than just another to-do app. More »
Google – Search – Search Engines – Google Apps – Companies
As the outcry over Google Buzz’s privacy has shown us, it’s smart to explore settings in Gmail, along with other places you’re sharing data with the search giant. Let’s take a look at 10 privacy, convenience, and annoyance fixers you should know.
By default, Gmail hides images embedded into emails from chain letters and unknown sources—and that's a smart move, given spammers' tracking tactics and malware tendencies. But it still shows images from contacts you’ve previously sent mail to, which can be a pain if you’ve got relatives who just love hi-larious forwards. Head to your Settings page, and look for the “external content” setting, which you can switch off to always ask you to confirm showing images in any email. If you’ve got just a handful of offenders, open up one of the egregious emails, hit the “Show details” link near the bottom of the to/from/subject details, and click the “don’t display from now on” link. (Original post)
Google Apps, formerly know as Apps for Your Domain, has a lot of goodies tucked inside it for anyone who owns their own site, runs a family name domain, or operates a small business. Unlike Gmail, however, the new features and disabled offerings aren’t as apparent (or blogged about). Gina gave us a great tour of Google Apps, showing how you can control privacy and access, choose which Labs features make it into your domain’s email, and otherwise set up your site to your liking.
Simple and easy, but also easy to miss: If you’ve got an Android phone and have launched Google Talk from it just once, you might notice that you seem to catch any and all chats throughout the day. That’s because Talk can sit in the background upon launching, ready to pick up messages. That’s fine if that’s what you want, but if you want a choice in the matter, head to the Google Talk app, hit your Menu key, and choose Settings. Un-check the “Automatically sign in” option, hit your back button, and then hit Menu and sign out of Google Talk. You’ll need to sign back in if you’re downloading apps from the Market (odd pairing, indeed), but you’re otherwise free to chat when you want to. (Original post)
Not big on Buzz? Chat more distracting than useful? Gmail Labs making your inbox feel lag-ish? You can kill all of them, if you’d like, and get back just a plain vanilla inbox. Scroll all the way to the bottom of any page inside Gmail, and at the bottom, you’ll see two links to turn Gmail’s chat sidebar and Buzz inbox on or off. Actually, you don’t really “turn off Buzz” so much as remove it from your inbox, so be sure and check your Buzz settings at your Google Profile, if you have a Google Profile. If Labs features seem to be slowing down, or even breaking, your Gmail experience, you can turn them off entirely by loading Gmail from this URL: mail.google.com/mail/?labs=0#. Bookmark it as your main Gmail link, or title it “Gmail (Safe Mode)” if you’d like to still venture into all the goodies on occasion.
Google’s SafeSearch isn’t an entirely comprehensive solution to preventing impressionable eyes from the worst realms of the internet. It is, however, a good stopgap until they learn to grow up and install other browsers, wipe out cookies, and customize user scripts. Whether you don’t have any young ones in the house and want to turn SafeSearch off altogether or you want a complete SafeSearch lockdown on your computer, head to your search preferences, scroll down to the SafeSearch section, and find the setting that fits you. (In Google Image Search, they've helpfully placed the control right under the search box on your first result.) If you want to permanently enable SafeSearch, click the "Lock SafeSearch" link—and repeat for any browsers the little ones use. Now when they're performing a Google search, you should see some giant Google-colored balls in the upper-right corner—or else they've gotten too smart.
For those without web-connected smartphones, or at least a decent data connection, Google’s SMS service is seriously helpful—it's how I (used to) get by with just an iPod touch and a standard phone. To make it even more helpful, text set location, followed by the city and state or ZIP code where you spend the most time. Now you can just text “weather” or “pet store” to get the skinny on what’s happening. (Original post)
Taking off the privacy and preference hat for a moment, Google’s apps have a lot of neat settings just beneath their surface that make using them all together a tight experience. You can turn emails into tasks, and then map those tasks on your calendar. You can send voice messages and SMS from Google Voice to Gmail, and mark them as read when you open them there. Gina previously ran down seven easy ways to integrate your Google apps, and even more seem to come along every week.
If you’re logged into Google for Gmail or any other service, there’s a good chance Google’s keeping tabs on all your searches, months after you made them. If you aren’t logged in, Google’s probably still tracking and personalizing your searches based on what you previously typed in. This one-stop solution should work for most users, but if it doesn’t, log into Google and head to google.com/history. A notice at the top will tell you if you’ve “paused” or otherwise stopped your search history, or else you’ll see your recent searches listed with dates and times. You can clear out this history by hitting the “Remove items” link on the left. If you aren’t logged in, look for the “Web History” link in the upper-right corner. From there, you can choose whether Google tracks your searches via cookie and IP address and customizes your results.
For all you’ve heard about Buzz, privacy, and Google this week, you still can’t fault them too much for their efforts to let you take your data with you if you decide to leave their app ecosystem. The Data Liberation Front site, a pet project from Google’s engineers, explains how you can pull your information, documents, and other data out of nearly any Google product. Gina’s also covered some of Google’s apps in a cloud backup feature, and Adam tackled the best-at-that-time tools for Google backups in 2007. (Original Data Liberation Front post)
Google’s new social service Buzz showed up suddenly in everyone’s Gmail accounts this week, and right away it wanted to get you connected with the people you contact over email and chat the most. Before you let it turn you loose, though, consider whether you want the world to see exactly who you “follow.” Google has since improved the on/off visibility, but if you want to make sure you’re not broadcasting your inbox to the web at large, we suggest visiting your profile and checking your follower counts. If you don’t see a profile at all, or don’t see the followed/following numbers, you’re likely in the clear, but as with many aspects of Buzz in this early stage, you can’t be too careful. And when you actually start using the thing, be careful not to broadcast private email addresses yourself. (Original posts: Buzz update, private emails).
Lifehacker copy consigliere Dustin Luck mentions yet another reason to hit up your search preferences from time to time. With a single click, you can choose to open the results you click on in new windows. If you’ve set up your browser the right way, those new windows become new tabs, and little research projects on Google just became far more convenient.
There’s always lots of interest in posts about Google Apps, a lesser-known way to put Google services behind your domain name. This morning at Lifehacker I ran down some of the most important Google Apps settings, and how to do things like map multiple domains to one account, create users and groups, and configure your catch-all domain email address. Here’s more on how to Trick Out Google Apps for Your Domain.
Google appears to be testing a new tool called Cloudboard, a service designed to act as a clipboard that shares data between Gmail, Google Docs, and other Google applications.
Google-focused weblog Google Operating System discovered an internal feedback form (it’s currently disabled) asking users to share their experience with Cloudboard, which the form describes as a “server-side clipboard for Google Apps.” From Google Operating System:
Google provides an example of copying data from Google Spreadsheets to Google Docs: “if you copy a formatted cell range in Trix (cell border, colors, etc.) and then paste into Writely, it’s transformed into a comparably-styled HTML table.”
Sounds handy enough. In internal Google-speak, Trix is Google Spreadsheets, while Writely is Google Docs. (Writely was the service Google acquired and turned into Docs.)
If you want to glean more details of the service from the feedback form, you can check a screenshot of the full form here. What do you think? Does a Google-based clipboard from moving rich data between Google applications seems like something you’d use? Let’s hear your thoughts in the comments.
The information you keep in Google apps like Gmail, GCal, Reader, and Voice doesn’t just live in one place. There are a few easy but non-obvious ways to plug different Google apps together and share their data and features.
Thanks to things like Labs and gadgets, you can get your Calendar in Gmail (and vice versa), Docs in Calendar and Gmail, Profile info in Google Reader, Google Voice SMS in your Gmail, and just about everything on iGoogle. Here’s how.
The information you keep in Google apps like Gmail, GCal, Reader, and Voice doesn’t just live in one place. Check out a few easy but non-obvious ways to plug different Google apps together and share their data and features.
One of the most useful integrations available for Gmail and GCal users, the Google Calendar gadget puts upcoming events on your email sidebar. To turn it on, just enable the Google Calendar gadget in Gmail Labs. Click on the Options link to configure which calendars you want to display events from, and schedule events directly from Gmail using the gadget’s Add link. (Gmail Labs offers lots of other app integrations, like YouTube previews in Gmail, the ability to create a Google Doc from an email conversation, Picasa image previews, Google Docs as well as a Google web search gadget.)
Gmail Tasks’ killer feature is how it can act as a bridge between your email inbox and your calendar. If you add a Gmail message to your Tasks list (just choose “Add to Tasks” from the “More Actions” drop-down) and add a due date, that task shows up on your Google Calendar on that date. Even if Gmail’s Tasks module isn’t your primary to-do list app, this is an easy way to “schedule” email you don’t need to deal with right now but does have a deadline in the future.
Courtesy of Google Calendar Labs, you can easily attach Google Docs to any event—like the batting lineup for the company softball game next week. In GCal's Labs area (in Settings), just enable the "Attach Google Docs" feature.
Gmail has had built-in integration with GDocs since back in 2006; any time you have a Word document or spreadsheet email attachment in a message, Gmail gives you an “Open as a Google Document” link next to it. You can also convert an entire Gmail conversation to a Google Doc by enabling the Gmail Labs’ “Create a Document” feature.
Google’s newish Profiles tool offers an interesting integration into Google Reader: the ability to associate people with the feeds they create. When you configure your Google Profile and enter the web sites where you've set up shop, the feeds available for those sites appear on your profile—as well as in Google Reader. When you're following someone in Google Reader, you can easily see their blog and social network feeds alongside their photo and bio thanks to Google Profiles. From the ever-so-specifically-labeled "Browse for Stuff" section in Google Reader, click on the "People You Follow" tab to browse the folks you care about and subscribe to feeds they're creating.
Just this morning the Google Voice team added email integration with your text messages. As Kevin reported, you can now get your GV text messages forwarded to your email (Gmail or not) and respond to them from there, without ever touching your Google Voice tab or your phone.
You can't mention integrating Google apps without giving iGoogle a nod. GApps addicts' homepage of choice, iGoogle offers Gmail, Google Talk, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Gmail Tasks, and Google Voice gadgets for the ultimate, all-in-one, Google apps jumping-off spot. (In fact, last week during the Gmail outage, iGoogle's Gmail gadget was still working—even when the proper Gmail webapp was down.)
Beyond in-webapp ways to access Google apps data across products, you can also hook up browser extensions like Integrated Gmail or iGoogleBar for Firefox. Alternately, for easy Google apps access no matter what web site you’re on, put your browser’s sidebar to good use.
What other ways do you use one Google app’s data in another? Shout it out in the comments.
Gina Trapani, Lifehacker’s founding editor, likes finding new ways Google Apps inform one another. Her weekly feature, Smarterware, appears every Wednesday on Lifehacker. Subscribe to the Smarterware tag feed to get new installments in your newsreader.
Windows only: Google Apps Sync is a new free utility from Google that syncs your Google Apps (Premier or Education edition) email, contacts, and calendar directly with Microsoft Outlook.
With this move, Google’s looking to compete more directly with Microsoft Exchange, the business standard for syncing Outlook’s email, calendar, and contacts via the web. Features include:
- Email, calendar, and contacts synchronization. For email, the plug-in uses the offline Gmail protocol, which is much faster than IMAP or other methods.
- Free/Busy lookup and Global Address List functionality, which makes it easy to schedule meetings with your colleagues, regardless of whether they use Outlook’s calendar or Google Calendar.
- A simple, two-click data migration tool which allows employees to easily copy existing data from Exchange or Outlook into Google Apps.
The plug-in isn’t yet available for download, but the download page claims it will be soon. Update: It’s now available at the link below. Whether you’re the person in charge or not, could you see your workplace using Google Apps over Exchange? Let’s hear your thoughts in the comments.
Having your own hosted web domain has never been cheaper, or easier, with the vast array of free resources out there. Here are our ten favorite tools to help anyone launch and maintain their internet presence.
Photo by Jamison_Judd.
You're working on a project you want to show a few friends, but not the whole world—and that includes Google's curious crawlies. Drafting an .htaccess file to password-protect files can be laborious text work, but webapps like .htaccess Editor make short work of your privacy needs. It's not the only one of its kind out there, but we like its step-by-step approach to shielding what you've got and setting up who can get at it—and it can also help you set up multiple subdomains.
You might blog about the latest Linux kernel developments, but an increasing number of the web’s readers are getting their blog reads done on mobile Safari. Make it easier for them to read, and you to publish, with tools like the previously mentioned Intersquash, which, while not perfect by any means, does take most of the code-hacking work out of an iPhone-friendly site. If that really slimmed-down, feed-only look isn’t your thing, your blogging platform might have a handy plug-in, like WPtouch for WordPress users.
Whatever you do, don’t do a web search for “SEO solutions,” unless you like the net equivalent of getting bum-rushed by 9,000 car salesmen at once. For bloggers and personal sites that don’t need a whole team of suits and engineers working to improve their relevance, there are straight-forward, if not exactly quick, lessons on how to get in Google’s good graces. We’ve previously written up a guide to SEO Made Easy, which covers a more diverse range of search engines. Matt Cutts, the search quality manager at the Big G, has posted his own “Whitehat SEO tips for bloggers that cover a whole lot of ground. And if it’s just your good name you’re looking to get out there with your site, check out Gina’s step-by-step on having a say in what Google says about you.
One reason so many new-fangled webapps have such crazy, vowel-deficient names is because the net seems almost completely picked over for .com addresses. Don't sacrifice your clever idea or give up on your name, though—head to Domai.nr. See how it uses another country’s web code for its last letters? The little web utility can do the same for your own phrases and names, as well as tell you which standard .com/.net/.org versions are free or taken. It gets creative with the arrangment of words and forward slashes to find a good fit for whatever you want to get on the net. Hurry now, though, before all you John Smiths of the world have to actually take something like smithjo.hn.
Your site should say something about you and your interests, not your skill at creating JavaScript roll-down menus and sidebar graphics (unless you’re a web developer, of course). Skip the programming and Photoshop books and run through our six ways to find reusable media, all of them legally sound and not requiring too much heavy lifting. If code’s your thing, sites like AjaxDaddy provide scripts that make your site a bit more fluid and flashy. Or you can simply hit up Google Code Search to plow through open-source apps and grab what you need to get going.
Few web phenomenon come close to the sight of seeing an inspired post you write near the top of a Google search—but it's on someone else's site, plagiarized completely. Keep track of who's stealing from you with a search at Copyscape, or subscribe to an RSS feed of your site’s leechers at CopyGator. Edit your blog’s own RSS feeds to include link-backs that boost your own Google ranking and show the reading world exactly who wrote what when lazy spam-bloggers re-publish your feeds. And, when all else fails, take a multi-step formal and legal approach to getting the copycat stuff knocked down. It isn’t fun writing to domain hosts, advertisers, or site admins with your copyright gripes, but it’s reassuring when your work is reclaimed as your own. Thanks and credit to Digital Inspiration for the last two links.
Back when “YouTube” was just a funny way of describing your television, anyone who wanted a web site pretty much had to pay for the domain name and the remote storage space to host it. Not so in these modern times, when any number of services are begging to give you the free space and tools you need to put yourself, or your project, on the web. As we’ve pointed out, the best of those free apps—like Google Apps, Tumblr, the no-fee hosts like Freewebs and Google Page Creator—can help even the most novice (yet cheap) would-be site owner up and running with a decent web presence. Heck, in some cases, they wouldn’t even pay for a domain name.
It might just be the smartest marketing move Microsoft has made in years—creating a free software tool that most any blogger the Lifehacker editors have chatted with think is just great. It works with WordPress, Blogger, MovableType, and lots of other blog platforms. It takes the HTML and grunt work out of drafting, editing, and posting your work. And it supports plug-ins that empower it to grab photos from Flickr, start writing from Firefox, and do much more. Check out our feature on tips and tweaks for Windows Live Writer to get familiar with why this surprisingly open-ended tool is so neat.
This free, cross-platform Adobe Air app puts a fast-moving, attractive-looking face on the raw visitor data Google Analytics can dish out. Tabbed and profiled reports let you skim through all the data you want to know, rather than have to hunt it down. Multiple profiles helps anyone with a handful or more sites and blogs keep up on all their sites' traffic, no login required. It just works, and, for most personal site owners, it's more convenient than the site—not something one can always say about a Google product, either. For more on getting good with Analytics, scan our feature on improving your website with google analytics.
Lifehacker reader Stephanie asked, you responded, and we compiled the feedback from more than 200 comment threads, offered up by readers who definitely don’t pay a ransom for good service. So, excuse us for busting out the brag horn, but our list of reliable and affordable web hosts is a good place to anyone looking to get going with a real, hosted, totally controllable site to start shopping. Each person’s love of their host might be for a different reason, but you know at least some of Lifehacker’s web-savvy readers found a reliable home in this list.
The Lifehacker editors have their own sites and favorite tools to manage them, but we’re just a small sampling of geeks. We want to hear from you on what sites, software, or strategies helped you get a web site up and running, or makes it easier to update. Trade your web admin wisdom in the comments.
