Twitter has already consumed a major portion of the online population and is still consuming at record speed. If you dont know what twitter is, dont be concerned. Just create an account with twitter and go around you will get hooked to it immediately. The original purpose of twitter is to simply tell the world what you are doing. An idea which seemed a bit boring to me. Telling the world things like, “came from school/college/office”, “watching this movie”, “going to that place” seemed like an irritant. This was the reason, why I completely forgot twitter after creating an account a year and a half ago. I have recently re-discovered it and now I’m completely into it.

I’m still not cool with the idea of telling the world what I’m doing now, but I found that twitter was more than I thought. The idea of sharing anything and everythin in 140 characters is why its called a microblogging platform.

I can share a site or news I find interesting. Tell the world what I think about the match I saw lastnight. Ask questions and answer others questions. And when everyone I’m connected to does that it is like constantly being bombarded with information and views. The other commercial advantage about twitter is that it can help spread your blog/site or any service you offer.

The more I start using Twitter the more things I can now do with twitter, setting reminders from twitter, saving and sending notes from twitter and more. I would love to discuss those applications I have come across and more that you can do with twitter in my coming posts.

When it comes to software it’s not always the best software that is the most famous and the most used. This I learnt after using Firefox and how superior it is compared to the almost everywhere Internet explorer. Well, this philosophy applies to other software’s as well. Adobe acrobat reader is one software,  I found in almost every computer I have used and most websites that offer a PDF file also have a link to download Adobe reader. I’m sure this is all because of the money Adobe puts in marketing its product. So like everyone else, I used to think that, the size of Adobe acrobat reader and the time it takes to load was just normal for a PDF reader.  Now comes another philosophy: Until you try something new you never realise that the software you were using all this time is not the best one.

I found the best alternative to Adobe reader in the form of Foxit reader. The Foxit PDF reader is just about 3.6 MB in size and opens PDF files at speeds incomparable to Adobe reader. The foxit reader is very customisable and is packed with a lot of features. It did not take me long to dump Adobe reader, once I started using it.

Another notable PDF reader is the Sumatra PDF viewer which is even lighter than Foxit reader. But, I would say Sumatra is too simple for a PDF reader. Just as their site says “Simplicity has a higher priority than a lot of features”. This makes Sumatra far less efficient than Foxit reader.

The File sizes of these PDF readers are compared in the table below.

I have wondered why some email addresses end with @googlemail.com and for some time thought they were email addresses of Google employees. But when I found it was not, I immediately wanted to get one for myself.

Googlemail was born out of a trademark dispute regarding the name gmail in the UK and Germany  and this was more of a workaround solution for gmail users in those countries. But now, people in other countries also want to get their hands on a googlemail address.

Though googlemail is a longer name, for some reason it sounds cool, may be because it has the name google in it.

Now that we know of the existance of a googlemail address, how to get one?.

If you have an email abc@gmail.com, you also have an email abc@googlemail.com, all email messages sent to both email addresses will be delivered to the same inbox. But @gmail.com will be the default address and your inbox will still greet you as abc@gmail.com.

However, if you are creating a new email address, you can make @googlemail.com as your default address.

Click on the “Sign up for Google Mail“  link on the login page. Once the sign up page loads, just add “&gd=1″ at the end of the lengthy url and press enter. Now you will see @googlemail.com instead of @gmail.com at
the ‘Desired Login Name’ field in the sign up page.

Complete the signup page and you now have a @googlemail.com email
address.

Go get your own @googlemail.com email.

You log into your Gmail account from a browsing center or a public terminal and forget to sign out.????? That is a serious problem. Now, what to do?. You run back to where you signed in? Or you just sign out your open sessions from any computer you could access immediately.

While a few might know, many may not have noticed the “Last account activity” service offered by Google for your Gmail account. Once you are signed in to your gmail account you will notice at the end of your browser page a line that starts with “Last account activity: — minutes ago on this computer.  Details”.

Click on details and you will find your recent account activity, your login time, the ip address and how you accessed your account.

Gmail account activity image

You will also see a button “Sign out all other sessions”, click it and any other open sessions of your account will be closed. That’s quite easy, isn’t it.

Another important advantage of this service is that it will let you know if anyone else is accessing your account. From the date/time and ip address and the access type of your sessions you can find if someone else is accessing your account or if someone with whom you share your password is misusing it.

I have compiled below my list of must have Firefox extensions. While there are a lot of extensions depending on the person’s preference and profession, these below are the must have’s for everyone, because they improve the browsing experience not just for the regular but also the advanced users.

Mcafee SiteAdvisor:

SiteAdvisor is one of my favourite extensions. Knowing about the site you are visiting is safe browsing. McAfee has recognized the importance of this extension before they bought it. Though there are extensions like ‘Web of trust’ which rate a site based on user feedback, McAfee siteAdvisor backed by McAfee’s database is more reliable.

Tab Mix Plus:

Tabbed browsing was an important feature in Firefox that distinguished it from the rest of the pack before everyone started adapting it. Tab Mix Plus enhances the tabbed browsing experience. It gives full control over tabs and also gave the important session manager which now comes built within Firefox.

DownThemAll:

A must have download manager which comes with a lot of advanced downloading features.

PDF Download:

The best tool to control downloading and saving of PDF files.

Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer:

This extension is very important for those like me who have a large bookmark collections. It saves me the trouble of creating the bookmarks again in another PC. Wherever you are, your bookmarks follow.

Dictionary tooltip:

This one’s proved very useful to me. Even though I have an installed a dictionary like wordweb, copying the word and pasting it in the dictionary to find its meaning it too complex. Using this extension, I can just double click or Ctrl click a word and see its meaning in the tab which opens within the browser, plus it is very customizable.

Fast Video Download:

Download the videos from many hosting sites which are otherwise only viewable online. There are many extensions that serve this purpose, but I prefer to use this one.

IETab:

There are still a lot of sites which may not work properly in firefox and still stick to the traditional internet explorer. BSNL dataone is one site where I have to open firefox separately to check my bandwidth usage. But using this extension, I can open a internet explorer tab within firefox in a single click.

No Script:

Now the most important extension for a secure browser, most rogue websites infect your computer by running scripts that may install a spyware or malware. Noscript blocks all the scripts in the website you are visiting. This way if you are visiting an unknown site for the first time, all scripts will be blocked and once you are sure that the site is safe you can enable scripts in your browser. The downside of Noscript is that you will have to manually enable scripts for every website considering the fact most of the websites today run on scripts.

ps: since google toolbar and google notebook now come bundled with Firefox, I have not mentioned them separately.

Firefox is undoubtedly eating away internet explorer and though they there is some competition in the form of Google chrome, I dont see Firefox slowing in any way. And everyone knows that, there are a large number of internet explorer users because, it comes bundled with the OS. Most people just don’t realise that there exists another browser far superior than others. I installed Firefox out of curiosity and have now completely embraced it. The friends to whom I introduced Firefox are now into it as well. Though Firefox may not  receive the kind of investment it received from Google earlier, Firefox has become too large to be dependent anymore. The more people start knowing about Firefox, the more will prefer to use it.

The reason firefox is so powerful has to be that its opensource. Being opensource it is taken care by a large number of developers and there by firefox is able to improve itself faster. So what else makes firefox fantastic other than the browser itself. Firefox was the first to offer tabbed browsing, eventhough internet explorer offers it now, the experience is no where closer to firefox. But personally I think its the extensions which make firefox the ultimate browser. Every extension arising out of someone’s imagination is making browsing the best experience. I will compile some of the must have extensions in the next post.