I use GTalk as my primary instant messenger service. Having recently opened an account on twitter, I wanted a service that would allow me to tweet from GTalk itself rather than going all the way to the twitter home page or installing other services like twihrl or  tweetdeck.

I searched a lot on web, there was one blog entry which said you can use twitter@twitter.com to tweet using Gtalk. Tried. There was no response from the mail id and finally it ended up in error saying “No such Id exists”

Finally, today I got the solution from search.twitter.com itself!

Use Tweet.IM to send and receive tweets from Gtalk.

Process to set up is fairly simple and it won’t take more than 2 mins. Type in your Twitter username, password and the Gmail id through which you want to tweet and click on register. You will receive an instant friend request on your Gtalk. Accept it and start sending and receiving tweets.

Also, I use Twitter Feed to send my newly published blog post automatically to twitter. You can follow me on twitter here.

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Till now the notification was limited to desktop based email services like Microsoft Outlook and Mozilla Thunderbird. SpyPig has taken it a step further and has extended the service to include web based email services like Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail etc. Here is how it works-

In the form provided on their homepage:

1. You enter your email address.
2. Enter the message title.
3. Select the Pig Image. [Basically this image is the way how this service tracks your message.]
4. Select # of notifications to receive.
5. Activate your profile.
6. Copy-Paste the image in your email and send the email as usual.
7. You will now be notified as soon as the receiver opens the email.

There are other services like ReadNotify.com but they are limited to 10 emails for free usage. SpyPig is completely free. Probably they make money from the ads shown on their home page.

The prerequisite is that the receiver should have open image option enabled in his mail settings.

Link

Gmail labs have come out with a interesting new feature, you can now directly get your Gmail signatures before the quoted text in a reply.

Earlier when we use to click on ‘Reply’ , our Gmail signatures used to get appended on the end of mail and not where you expected.

Follow this path to set it up:

1. Go To Gmail > Settings(on top right)
2. Click on ‘Labs’.
3. 
4. Scroll down to Enable ‘signature tweaks’
5. 
6. Done! To test, just reply to any message …you will now find that the your signature has been appended before the quoted text.

I am quite fond of Google, its philosophy towards work and the way this company has made our life easier. They try to automate most tasks which we used to do manually earlier. As an example if you receive any email in your Gmail account containing address or a date, what it does is extract the address or date and simply show a link asking you to “Map this” or “Add to calendar” respectively, on the right hand side bar.

But this time something funny happened. I received a mail from myBB for a new security release. For the uninitiated, myBB is a forum software like VBulletin, SMF. This mail had a version number on the subject 1.2.13. Now what our intelligent Gmail script did was, it took the version no from subject and converted into Wed Jan 2, 2013 and at the same time created a link to “add to calendar”. LOL

Too much of automation can be risky sometimes.