Technology and Money

Useful Google Talk Bots That You Must Add as Friends

You can do lot of interesting stuff with Google Talk like get alert notifications, save bookmarks to delicious, manage web calendars, set reminders, write blogs, and so much more.

Such features can be easily integrated into Google Talk through ‘bots’ which, in simple English, are like virtual friends who are online 24×7 and will always respond with a smile to your questions or requests.

Here are some of the most useful ‘bots’ that transform Google Talk into a more useful program:

1. imfeeds@gmail.com - Add this IM Feeds bot as your Google Talk buddy and you’ll be able to read any blog or website that syndicates content via RSS feeds.

To subscribe to a website in GTalk, simply send a new IM message that says "sub abc.com" where abc.com is the address of the website / blog you want to read inside Google Talk.

2. friendfeed@imified.com - This secret bot lets you post to FriendFeed from Google Talk. You may submit either hyperlinks or text messages.

3. imified@imified.com - This imified bot turns Google Talk into a real powerhouse.

You can post bookmarks to delicious, send messages to Twitter, submit blog entries to WordPress, Tumblr or Blogger, manage events in Google Calendar, shorten long URLs, run whois and so on.

4. inezhabot@gmail.com - Like IM Feeds, iNezha bot helps you read feeds inside Google Talk but this is slightly more versatile. For instance, you can simply say "digg" and it will show a list of all feeds that match that search term so you don’t have to type (or copy-paste) feed addresses.

5. Translation - This is a free service from Google that helps you translate words from a foreign language into your native language. Just add the relevant bot (e.g. hi2en@bot.talk.google.com for Hindi to English or en2hi@bot.talk.google.com for English to Hindi) as your buddy, send him a message and it will get translated instantly.

6. Set Task Reminders - If you need to remember something important, Google Talk can send you reminders for that event.

Just add timer to your Twitter friend’s list and then add twitter@twitter.com to your buddy list in Gtalk. Now if you want to get a reminder after 50 minutes, send a direct message to twitter  like "d timer 50 pick kids from school" and a reminder will automatically pop up in your Google Talk after 50 minutes.

7. Transliteration - If you want to chat in your mother tongue (like Hindi or Tamil) but feel more comfortable using the English keyboard, Google Transliteration bot will come in handy.

For instance, add en2hi.translit@bot.talk.google.com to you friend’s list in GTalk and all messages you type in English will get transliterated in the language of your choice.  Available only for a few Indian languages.

Also see:
» Add Google Talk Badge to your Site
» Play Live Music via Google Talk
» Put Google Talk in Firefox Sidebar

Useful Google Talk Bots That You Must Add as Friends - Digital Inspiration

Windows Live Search Tricks You May Not Know About

When it comes to web search, Windows Live stands a distant third behind Google and Yahoo!.

There are however are some lesser-known features in Live Search that aren’t just useful, you won’t find them in any of the other popular search engines. Let’s take a look:

1. Watch Video Preview in Search Results

When you hover the mouse over any of the thumbnail images appearing in Live Video Search, it will automatically play a short preview of the video so you have a good idea about the clip without visiting the target website where that video is hosted.

As you may have noticed in the screencast above, this video preview feature is available for all clip indexed by Live Search whether they are on YouTube, MySpace, CNN or ABC News.

2. Find Web Pages That Link to Documents, MP3s, Videos, ZIPs ..

The contains: operator is Live Search lets you find web pages that link to other online documents and multimedia files like music and video. This is very different from Google’s filetype: search operator (also available in Live Search) which looks for content inside PDF and Office documents.

For example, if you are looking to download a Microsoft Word report from Gartner site that is about elearning, just type: "elearning site:gartner.com contains:doc"

Similarly, if you like to find all pages on Wikipedia that link to MP3 files, type "site:wikipedia.org contains:mp3"

Another example - to learn about software that you can download from the Google website, use "site:google.com contains:zip OR contains:exe"

3. Save Images & Pictures As Your Search the Web

Live Image Search includes something called a scratch pad that lets you save collection of images with a simple drag-n-drop. This comes very handy if you are searching for images using different keywords and need to shortlist only a few from that large collection.

4. Get Live Search Results as RSS Feeds

While there are external services that let you subscribe to search results via RSS feeds, neither Yahoo! nor Google provide RSS feeds of their search results.

You can however subscribe to search pages from Windows Live as RSS feed via this undocumented hack. Open Live Search, type your query and then on the results page, appened "&format=rss" to the URL. See example:

Search Page: http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=iphone

RSS Feed: http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=iphone&format=rss

This parameter converts the Live Search page into an RSS feed that you can add to your news reader. Thanks Abhishek.

5. Limit Your Search to Website that offer RSS Feeds

Another interesting search operator in Live Search is "hasfeed" - it lets you find only those web pages that link to RSS feeds. For instance, you could say "micheal phelps hasfeed:" to find web pages that are about "michael phelps" and also syndicate content as RSS feeds.

You can group hasfeed: with other search operators so if want to know about all pages related to movies on ABC website that have feeds, just type "movies site:abc.com hasfeed:"

6. Specify Weight (Preference) in the Search Query

Say you are planning for an upcoming vacation and need some advice related to holiday destinations. Now rather than searching for "holiday destinations" that will return very broad results, you could add the prefer: operator and specify places that you’re really keen to visit though you don’t mind other suggestions.

For e.g., says "holiday destinations prefer:japan"

Also see:Things That Yahoo! Can Do But Not Google

Windows Live Search Tricks You May Not Know About - Digital Inspiration

LinkedIn Profiles - Now See Changes Since Your Last Visit

This is probably new. Open the profile page of any of your LinkedIn contacts and it will highlight sections in yellow that have recently been added or updated since you last viewed that profile.

To try this, open your LinkedIn updates page and check the profile of some connection that has changed recently. A minor feature but useful nevertheless.

Related: Things to do with your LinkedIn Account

LinkedIn Profiles - Now See Changes Since Your Last Visit - Digital Inspiration

Introducing Digital Inspiration v2.0

The new design of Digital Inspiration is now live after a gap of several light years. Please spend a few minutes at the new site and leave your feedback, good or bad, in the comments. 

You may also want to check out the following new sections:

1. Tech River of News - Our favorites stories of the day from around the web in river of news format.

2. Sites we Like - A map of websites that we read everyday.

3. Tools & Widgets - A roundup of widgets / gadgets that enable you to read Digital Inspiration anywhere, anytime.

4. The share, print and translation options have been completely redesigned and are more user-friendly than ever before.

Finally, here’s how the site should ideally look on your computer screen. If you discover broken links or features that don’t work in your web browser, please do let me know via the comments.

Introducing Digital Inspiration v2.0 - Digital Inspiration

Find Files in Large Folders More Easily with Windows Vista Explorer

Windows Explorer in Vista makes it very easy for you to manage large folders that have hundreds of files and sub-folders (e.g. Program Files or the Windows installation folder).

Earlier, if you were to hunt for files that end with a .log extension or are larger than 2 MB, Windows search was the only option but things get much simple in Vista Explorer.

Just navigate to the relevant folder in Windows Explorer, click the drop-down next to the name tab and choose "Stack by Name".

This will immediately group the files by name and it will become relatively easy for you to reach the relevant files.

You can apply similar search filters to group files by size or by file type (extension).

Internally, this is also using the built-in desktop search of Windows Vista but the implement is more user-friendly and very efficient.

Find Files in Large Folders More Easily with Windows Vista Explorer - Digital Inspiration

Search the Web in Horizontal Mode with Wide Explorer

If you like to perform the same search on multiple search engines, one option is to use meta search tools like Dogpile that aggregate results from different place into one page.

Now Widexplorer tackles the same problem but with a different approach. Rather than aggregating results, Wide Explorer takes all the different search pages and arranges all of them on one page in a horizontal direction - see this example for ‘canon 50d.’

This may sound a bit strange but once you try this ‘unique’ layout, you may actually like it. That’s because the information you are looking for is often available among the top 5 or 6 search results so a vertical scroll is unnecessary in most cases.

Other than searching the web, Wide Explorer also provides alternate reading layouts for other popular sites in News, Magazines, Tech and other categories. Thanks Gabe.

Related: Joongel Makes Web Search More Convenient

Search the Web in Horizontal Mode with Wide Explorer - Digital Inspiration