If you are a new Gmail user who just switched from Yahoo or another web-based email service and are having trouble logging in to your Gmail account, here’s a simple thing to check: Make sure that you are entering just the first part (before the @) of your Gmail address in the “username” box, NOT the whole address (including “gmail.com”). (more…)
Leave a Comment August 29, 2010
Google announced this week that it is phasing out Google Wave, the web-based collaboration tool that the company unveiled to great acclaim a little less than a year ago. According to Google, “Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked.” This is a disappointment to those of us who thought that Wave was a potentially useful way for people in different places to work together online– but, in truth, the service still needed tweaking: it was not easy for many people to learn and its uses were difficult to explain to collaborators. However, Google will likely use what it learned from the Wave experiment in future products, and some of Wave’s best features –such as drag-and-drop content addition and the ability to see collaborator’s document edits in real time– are already appearing in Gmail and Google docs and will likely be much more widely available in next-generation browsers. I suspect my own Wave story is pretty typical, one example that explains why the Wave wave never crested. . . (more…)
Leave a Comment August 6, 2010
Google has just added a new “server clipboard” function to Google Docs. This isn’t just one-shot cut-and-paste; click on the new “clipboard” icon in the edit menu and you can copy a number of excerpts from one Google doc and paste them in any order into a different Google doc– or store them on your clipboard “in the cloud”, for, Google says, up to thirty days.
Leave a Comment February 17, 2010
Yesterday Google tweaked a few more settings in its new Buzz social networking service (more…)
Leave a Comment February 14, 2010
Reports yesterday afternoon that, as GigaOm’s Mathew Ingram put it, Google Listens to Critics and Tweaks Buzz. Just “tweaks,” they are though: the main change is that it’s easier to turn off the settings that make your contacts appear in your public Google profile. But these settings should be OFF by default (more…)
Leave a Comment February 12, 2010
Creeped out. That’s how I felt as soon as I clicked on the button in my Gmail that asked if I wanted to try out Buzz, Google’s new social networking program. I really didn’t like seeing my most frequently-used Gmail contacts automatically displayed there, and I was especially disturbed to see that I already had “followers.” And it gets worse: turns out the information about your contacts is displayed by default in your public Google profile when you first turn on Buzz. And your Picasa photos might get “Buzzed” to your “followers” even if you didn’t mean them to– ’cause Buzz shares public Picasa albums by default also. Turns out I’m far from alone in thinking all of this is a big, big problem. (more…)
Leave a Comment February 11, 2010
