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Google has changed its privacy policy to share data it collects over all the products that Google has to offer. Therefore what you have searched in the past would not affect how Google+, YouTube, Blogger and other services work for you. You are likely to find more content which you have searched for in the past. Somehow this is not a comfortable feeling.

The unification of the data is happening today March 1, 2012 and the Electronic Frontier Foundation has posted a reminder to delete the history stored by Google search and also disable the recording of history. The steps are pretty simple and can be found on the steps can be found on the post page with the screenshots. If you do not have the time to head over the site for instructions here they are for your convenience

Log into your Google account

Head over to https://www.google.com/history/?hl=en&authuser=0

Click “Remove all Web History” and then “OK”. You are done as these steps will also turn of recording of history. Be sure that the history list is empty as it happened when I tried it first. In case it happens click on the “Remove all Web History” link again and you should see the history entries list empty.

Google Chrome - Help with other Google products - Getting Started guide

© 2011 Google - Privacy Policy - Terms of Service

While there are advantages of using Google’s 2 step verification process enabled for signups using Google there are some disadvantages as well, which I realized today.

According to Google the two step verification does not work in some applications and those are

POP and IMAP email clients such as Outlook, Mail and Thunderbird

Gmail and Google Calendar on smartphones

ActiveSync for Windows Mobile and iPhone

YouTube Mobile on Apple devices

Cloud Print

Installed chat clients such as Google Talk and Adium

3D Warehouse, Sketchup, and installed applications

AdWords Editor

Confusing? What it means is that if you sign in to the Google services using any of the above stated applications you will be locked out unless you generate application specific code from this page .

Problem with Google 2 step verification process

I wish Google was more proactive in informing the users. For example I did not realize that I would not be able to use Google services using my mobile phone, my iPod, Thunderbird and Miranda (an IM application I use for multiple chat).

Though there is a way to get access on these applications but you have to generate a password using the application authentication system of Google and it is not clear where to add the code in the specific application - for example where do I add the code in Miranda. It is very confusing for me. What I found amusing was that the password generate after generating the password says “you do not need to remember the password as you will have to enter it once” - are you joking Google? I will have to remember it as I have to input the password in the application, even though it is only once.

I got to know about this when I was creating Profiles in Google Chrome using my Google credentials.

Google Reader had redesigned the interface of Google Reader recently. The new interface on is good and I like the clean look that Google is adapting across Google’s products.

Adding a new folder to Google Reader

Till now everything was fine. Today I wanted to add another RSS feed to my Google Reader and wanted to create a new folder for it. I could not find an option to create a new folder which is usually available as feed settings drop down menu.

After some rigorous searching (10 minutes) I found this discussion on Google support forums about how to add a new folder in the new Google Reader interace.

This is dumb way of adding folders as you would like to create new folders when you are subscribing to new feed which deals with a topic which you were not interested in before. This is the most non intuitive way to add new folder to RSS feeds.

I hope Google realizes fast that the RSS reader users they have are fragile as there is very little competition but as soon as a more intuitve RSS reader is launched all the users of Google Reader will flock to the new service. I hope this is corrected soon and I hope Google does not push me to to use another RSS reader in the near future.

Let me know your thoughts on this.

NB: If someone is interested in developing a web based RSS reader please contact me by adding it to the comments as I would like to explore the possibilities .

Google has been implementing a lot of changes. Google Reader is one of my favorite service, as it helps me to aggregate information from my favorite sites which otherwise would be not imaginable.

New share button on Google Reader

Google Reader launched a new interface a few days back and more functionality was promised in the future.
Given the popularity of Google plus specially amongst the techies; Google Reader has added a share button which allows you to share posts from Google Reader with your circles. To do this you have to click on the share button twice. You can choose to share the post with only some circles. You can use the keyboard shortcut Shift+S to share the posts with circles.

Sharing and liking are two different things while sharing allows you to share a post with the contacts on Google Plus like just shares the post with the persons following you on Google Reader.

Some analysts are betting on Trapit to be a competitor of Google.

How does Trapit work?

Trapit is monitors your browsing habits and the content you read and then personalizes the content according to your behavior. Trapit calls itself Pandora of content . Trapit presents data from 50,000 resources.Gary Griffith who is the co-founder of Trap it believes that users will consume more content by discovery than by searching on search engines.

Others feel that Google has extensive data indexed and more content is added to the database by the minute. Therefore it is difficult to imagine someone looking for specific content using a discovery service like Trip.it.