Xoopit with Gmail for facebook status update

Xoopit, a social networking email enhancement that allows users to locate files, images and videos in their inbox, has launched a new feature that lets Gmail users immediately see and set Facebook status messages and view profile photos of their Facebook friends while reading emails off a Gmail account.

Users can also quickly see other information such as birthdays and mobile phone numbers. After downloading the feature, a user can easily update their own status directly from a Gmail account using Facebook Connect. Xoopit’s new feature is pretty neat and gives users the ability to bounce between Facebook and Gmail accounts seamlessly. And Facebook’s status message feature is one that most users check most frequently, so its particularly useful to the average Facebook user.

The marriage of social networking and email is not a new concept. Yahoo and Google are both pretty open to incorporating social networking into their email applications, with Yahoo even potentially creating a social network around its email product (Yahoo mail has around 254 million users worldwide, Gmail has around 80 million users).

It doesn’t appear that the Xoopit-Facebook feature is available to Yahoo Mail users but the Yahoo and Xoopit may not be far away from developing a Gmail-like relationship with Yahoo, as we wrote about late last year.

The plug-in was a bit buggy when I downloaded it but I think its a nifty tool as a whole. It certainly saves me the time in switching back to Facebook to check status updates or update my own status. Now if only we could stream the news feed feature into Gmail.

Cheers,
Vishnu

Image Optimization

Images may be the culprit in making web page slower as images contribute the good amount to page weight. So I dedicated my little time researching about it, and found few things noticeable, which hit the web performance directly if not being followed. Ok. So question is what to do to avoid that?
Wow! You combined the images into sprites. But Is your task over?
Answer is No. The basic Idea is, how are you making the simple images and how are you combining them into one sprite.
I've few basic suggestions which should be there in our mind, while making images or sprites :
1. Avoid white spaces
2. Avoid diagonal gradients
3. Avoid Alpha transparency
4. Avoid filters eg. AlphaImageLoader
5. Limit colors
6. Horizontal is better than vertical
7. First optimize individual images, then sprite
8. Change gradient color every 2-3 pixels
9. Combine like colors
10. Reduce anti-aliased pixels - via size and alignment

The next level optimization, can be done with the help of different tools & by following some best practices.

1. SmushIt images. Do remember that this tool don't remove the meta information (author, date etc.) from the images as of now. and second point that sometimes it suggests the .png image output for some .gif image. Other So beware about the alpha color transparency in your images.
2. Use PNG (Portable Network Graphics) images are better then gifs in size. PNG8 are smaller in size, but it losses the quality of the image. so I prefer png over png8 where quality matters. Otherwise use progressively enhanced PNG8
3. PNGCrush is an open source command line optimizer for PNG files. It reduces the size of the PNG IDAT data stream by trying various compression levels an PNG filter methods
4. Avoid filters as I) Blocks rendering, freezes the browser, II) Increased memory consumption, III) per element, not per image.

These are the basics, but there are many more optimization practices.

An appeal from Wikipedia founder

"Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge."

— Jimmy Wales, Founder of Wikipedia

Wikipedia is very useful source of free information over the net which is being read / added / updated by hundreds of million people like us. I personally feel that If we will doing something like donating ourselves or even inspiring others who are capable & willing, that will be great help for all including me.

Find the link here for info & for donation:
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate/Letter/en

Improve Web Page Performance

There are a lot of articles available over the internet for the same. But I found few handy for me & It will surely help the developers who are not in much of it yet. Few of the points specified over here are based on the assumption that CDN is used for the static contents, while other may work without CDN requirement.

So let me do it point vise:

1. Make fewer HTTP Requests

• Make appropriate Sprites. CSS Sprites are the preferred method for reducing the number of image requests. Combine your background images into a single image and use the CSS background-image and background-position properties to display the desired image segment.
  
• Use combo handlers to reduce the http requests
  
• Use inline code if code is small (JS/CSS)

2. Reduce DNS Lookups.

3. Use a CDN for static components.

4. Add an Expire Header

5. Compress / Gzip appropriate components.

6. Put CSS at Top.

7. Put JS at Bottom.

8. Avoid much JavaScript/CSS code as Inline.

9. Minify Javascript.

10. Avoid Redirects.

11. Optimize the images

• Use optimized favicon (favicon cann't be served from CDN)
  
• Use SmushIt.
  
• Check for unnecessary use of high quality images. eg. 45KB 300x200 dimention.
  
• Remove duplicate images.
  
• Use background-repeat CSS property for the continous images with gradient, by picking up appropriate slice of image.
  
• For the continous images without gradient, use CSS background-color. For the rounded corner use CSS properties or corner images.
  
• Avoid empty space while making sprites.
  

12. Do the Post-loading of the components, which are not in visible area intially. eg. which can be seen only after scrolling down.

13. Use AJAX to fatch the components, which are not visible in page initially. eg. tab like structure

14. Make AJAX cacheable.

Yahoo! is the clear leader in the Research for Performance. That's why I always prefer to give reference from Yahoo! sites. Like for the more performance tips in detail please refer Yahoo! performance rules.

Enjoy improved performance.

Survey Finds Privacy an Increasing Concern to Consumers

Most Trusted Companies; Survey Finds Privacy an Increasing Concern to Consumers; Google No Longer Among Top 20

(Extracted from The San Francisco Chronicle, December 15, 2008) Facebook, Apple, Yahoo!, Verizon and FedEx for the first time have made an annual ranking of the top 20 most trusted companies in the United States. Google, however, dropped off the list, released today by the Ponemon Institute and TRUSTe in San Francisco, as did Countrywide Financial, Bank of America (which acquired Countrywide) and Weight Watchers. At No. 1, for the fourth year in a row, was American Express, followed by eBay, IBM, Amazon and Johnson & Johnson. This the fifth year the survey has been conducted.

2008 Ranking	2008 Ranking
1 American Express (remained number one)	12 Intuit (+7)
2 eBay (+6)	13 WebMD (-1)
3 IBM (no change)	14 Yahoo! (new to the top 20)
4 Amazon (+1)	15 Facebook (new to the top 20)
5 Johnson & Johnson (+1)	16 Disney (-1)
6 Hewlett Packard (+10)	16 AOL (-12)
6 U.S. Postal Service (+1)	17 Verizon (new to the top 20)
7 Procter & Gamble (+2)	18 FedEx (new to the top 20)
8 Apple (new to the top 20)	19 US Bank (-2)
9 Nationwide (remained the same)	20 Dell (-7)
10 Charles Schwab (-8)	20 eLoan (-9)
11 USAA (+4)

more info...

Call Ezee Receives Strategic Investment from Yahoo!

Bangalore, December 18, 2008: Info Network Management Company Pvt. Ltd. (INMAC) today announced a strategic investment from Yahoo!, a global internet leader. Chennai based INMAC is more popularly known by its consumer brand, Call Ezee. With this investment, Yahoo!’s Dutch subsidiary acquired approximately 30% stake in INMAC, along with representation on INMAC’s Board.

Call Ezee is a telephone directory search service currently covering 14 cites across India, including the 6 largest cities – Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai, Bangalore, Hyderabad and Kolkata. Consumers can call the local Call Ezee number from any mobile or fixed line phone and request contact details of any business, or a list of businesses that offer the product or service they are looking for. INMAC expects the funding provided by Yahoo! to enable it to continue to develop its team and technology as it seeks to triple its reach across India over the next two years.

Since its inception in 2006, Call Ezee has gained the loyalty of both businesses and consumers by fulfilling their advertising and directory needs. Small businesses focused on Return on Investment (ROI) find Call Ezee to be efficient in generating new sales leads, while consumers appreciate the ability to receive instant information on businesses in their local area, free of cost. Indian businesses can also contact Call Ezee to be listed on the directory without any charge, although sales leads are charged on a premium listing or ‘pay for performance’ basis.

INMAC plans to continue to differentiate itself from competitors with its in-depth knowledge of local markets, advanced data collection abilities and new product launches aimed at increasing advertisers’ ROI.

About INMAC

INMAC is a large tele-information services provider present in 14 cities across India with another 6 cities expected to be added in the near term. With unique access numbers, detailed database of listings and a large sales force across most major cities in India, INMAC is today poised to transition to the next stage of growth. Within 2 years of launch, INMAC has garnered strong market share in Chennai, Bangalore and Hyderabad, and has demonstrated excellent growth in newer markets such as Mumbai and Delhi. INMAC aims to replicate its success across more cities inIndia and become a nationally recognized brand for directory services. INMAC has been promoted by Mr. TS Narayanaswamy who has nearly two decades of experience as a leading sales associate for large multinational banks.

About Yahoo! Inc.

Yahoo! Inc. is a leading global Internet brand and one of the most trafficked Internet destinations worldwide. Yahoo! is focused on powering its communities of users, advertisers, publishers, and developers by creating indispensable experiences built on trust. Yahoo! is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California. For more information, visit pressroom.yahoo.com (http://pressroom.yahoo.com/) or the company's blog, Yodel Anecdotal (http://yodel.yahoo.com/).

Back-Button to the Future : Adobe - Zoetrope

A new tool makes it easier to see the Web changing over time.

Huge quantities of information are never more than a few clicks away on the Web, but it's not always easy to see what things were like yesterday. News stories and blog posts might be archived, but other information often gets lost. For instance, while it's trivial to find a book's sales ranking on Amazon today, it's less simple to see what it was last week. And for anyone curious about how news evolves, it might not be obvious how a story's prominence has changed--did it get top billing on news sites the day it broke, or was it buried at the bottom of the page? A new tool called Zoetrope is designed to help track such information by letting users browse backward through time.

A user can peer back in time through Zoetrope in several ways. Simply pulling a scrollbar at the bottom of the browser winds a Web page back to show what it looked like hours, days, or months ago. Or, if the user is interested in one specific piece of information, like the price of a certain product, he or she can draw a "lens" over that area of the page to see how it changes.

An experienced user can perform even more-advanced analysis. For example, configured correctly, Zoetrope will recognize a price as it goes up or down and will show the results as a graph. It's also possible to draw lenses on different websites and sync them in order to carry out a historical comparison. For example, a user could use one lens to track weather information and another lens to track movie-attendance figures. Looking at how both lenses change over time might reveal a correlation between bad weather and high movie turnout. Zoetrope can also track some pieces of data as they move about a page over time.

For the video check here.