Technology and Money

Friendfeed’s URL shortening service ff.im

FriendFeed recently added a post to Twitter feature meaning they now have to obey the 140 character limit of Twitter.

Instead of relying on a external URL shortening service like TinyURL, they’ve come up with their own service called ff.im. The domain ff.im redirects to Friendfeed, and there is no way to use ff.im directly. Still the service has become pretty popular, judging by the twitter activity.

Friendfeed’s URL shortening service ff.im - Digital Inspiration

Find and Remove Duplicate Rows in Google Docs

Unlike Microsoft Excel, there aren’t any Filter functions available in Google Docs spreadsheets but you can easily emulate them with simple formulae. Let’s see how:

Filter Unique Records in Google Docs

If you like to remove duplicate rows from a table in Google Docs, use the UNIQUE formula as shown in this screencast.

Click an empty cell, type =UNIQUE(, select the range of cells you want to filter and then close the parenthesis. Simple.

Find Duplicate Rows in Google Docs

This is a reverse case where you want to display rows in a spreadsheet that have duplicates.

This requires a couple of steps:

Step 1: Assuming that our original data is in columns A, B & C, go to cell D1 and write a formula to concatenate the data in three columns. We’ll use a pipe separator to distinguish between a row like "a1, b, c" and "a, 1b, c".

=CONCATENATE(A1, "|", B1, "|", C1) – drag the cell handle to fill the formula in other cells.

Step 2: Sort the D column by clicking the header as shown in the screencast.

Step 3: We now need a function to compare two adjacent values in column D. If the values are same, one of them is a duplicate for sure. Type this in E2:

=IF(D2=D1, "Duplicate", "") – drag to fill all cells until E5.

That’s it. All rows in column E that have value "Duplicate" are duplicate rows.

Related: Google Docs Guide

Related posts:

1. Rename Multiple Files Efficiently Using Excel or Google Docs
2. Turn Google Docs Into an RSS Reader and Feed Aggregator
3. Google Apps, Google Docs and Gmail - New Features

Find and Remove Duplicate Rows in Google Docs - Digital Inspiration

Google Blog Search Now Reads Links on Web Pages

If your search query resembles a web address (URL), Google Blog Search automatically uses the link: operator and shows list of blogs that have earlier linked to the web address mentioned in your query.

Confused? Let’s see a simple example. If I search for labnol.org, Google Blog Search will auto-convert this query to link:labnol.org and show this resultset which is nothing but a list of web articles that are linking to labnol.org.

Today Google introduced some changes in the way they index content from blogs / RSS feeds.

Earlier they were only using links from RSS feeds to determine the resultset for link: operator but now they consider links that are mentioned on web pages as well very similar to Technorati.

This means that if another blog (abc.com) has linked to your own blog (my.com) from his sidebar, Google will now show abc.com in the results as well when you query for link:my.com.

If there were a Technorati Rank like parameter for Google Blogs Search, almost every blog may have seen major fluctuations in their rank due to this simple change.

Related: Difference Between Blog Search and Web Search

Google Blog Search Now Reads Links on Web Pages - Digital Inspiration

Create Quick Polls through Email, SMS or IM Clients with Notifu

You know how to use Gmail for Email Polls but here’s an even better solution for conducting polls among a group.

Called Notifu, this new service lets you create polls online and users can cast their votes via email messages, SMS, voice mail or IM clients including Google Talk, Yahoo! Messenger, Windows Live and AOL.

Problem: Say you are planning a movie this weekend with friends and like to know about their availability.

The problem is that some friends are active on IM, some use only email while the rest stay offline and prefer the good old phone for communication.

Solution: With Notifu, you can create a unified poll on the web and send it all your friends in one go irrespective of the medium they use for communication. So if someone prefers Yahoo! Messenger over email, you can send him the question directly on his Yahoo! IM.

Poll Question inside Google Talk

Poll Question inside Email

People can simply reply to the email or IM message and cast their vote. Notifu collects all the responses and will create a simple report of responses as as well as a list of people who haven’t replied yet. Simple yet awesome tool.

Related: Conduct Live Polls via Text Messages

Create Quick Polls through Email, SMS or IM Clients with Notifu - Digital Inspiration

Convert Scanned PDF Documents to Text with Google OCR

There are two types of PDF documents – those created by sending Office files, images, etc. to an Acrobat like PDF printer and those created by scanning physical paper like pages of a book, legal documents, etc.

Google could always index PDF documents created by conversion but now they also recognize text from PDFs that are generated by scanning paper documents using OCR software.

This is a scanned document and this is the html text view of that same document converted by Google.

Since scanned PDFs are nothing but images, don’t be surprised if Google adds a "search by text" function to their Image Search engine similar to OneNote or EverNote. That will surely be huge.

Convert Scanned PDFs to Text

Now if you have bunch of scanned PDF files on your hard drive and no OCR software, here’s what you can do to convert them into recognizable text.

Create a folder in your website (say abc.com/pdf) and upload all the PDF images to that folder. Now create a public web page that links to all the PDF files. Wait for the Google bots to spider your stuff.

Once done, type the query "site:abc.com/pdf filetype:pdf" to see the PDF documents as HTML.

Convert Scanned PDF Documents to Text with Google OCR - Digital Inspiration

Send SMS Text Messages from your GMail Account

You can now send SMS text messages to anyone in your Gmail address book right from the Gmail website.

Go to your Gmail Labs settings and enable the "Text Messaging (SMS) in Chat" feature. The facility is currently available only for US phone numbers.

You can send (and receive) text messages via the embedded chat in Gmail website but not from the standalone Google Talk client. Yahoo! Mail, Windows Live Messenger and AOL AIM service have had the SMS messaging feature for quite some time now. Thanks Steve.

Send SMS Text Messages from your GMail Account - Digital Inspiration