Posts Tagged ‘Buzz’
2. Prevent your boring chat status messages from being posted to Buzz. By default, your chat status messages are posted to Buzz and shared with your chat contacts. Don’t want a boring message like “be right back” to turn into a Buzz post? Just put parentheses around it. If you don’t want any of your chat status messages to get posted, you can always disconnect chat from the connected sites menu.
3. Look for the yellow line to see what’s new. Can’t figure out what’s new on the Buzz tab? Posts and comments new since your last visit have a light yellow line along the left hand edge (if you’re using a different theme the color may vary).
4. Link to a post. Each Buzz post has a permalink, so you can link to it. Click the down-arrow in the upper right-hand corner of a post, and select “Link to this post.” Of course, you’lll only be able to see the posts you have access to.
5. Follow the Buzz team in Google Buzz. Visit buzz.google.com/googlebuzz and click “Follow Google Buzz” to get updates about what we’re working on and send us your feedback.
We lifted this from the Google Gmailblog :]
Now that people have been playing with Google Buzz in Gmail for a week and Google have rolled out the improvements they announced in their blog over the weekend, Google wanted to let you know about some tips and tricks to help you get the most out of Buzz. Here are five tips to get you started:
1. Format your posts. When posting in Buzz, you can format text just as you can in Gmail chat: *bold*, _italics_, or -strikethrough- all work.
2. View a summary of your own Buzz activity at www.google.com/dashboard. TheGoogle Dashboard provides a private, consolidated summary of the data associated with your Google account, as well as direct links to control your personal settings. As of today, Buzz has its own section on the Dashboard, so you can see how many people you’re following, how many people are following you, and information about your recent posts, comments, and likes. You can also access your Buzz settings right there on the page.
3. Use an @reply to send a post directly to someone’s inbox. If you want to make sure one of your friends sees a certain Buzz post, you can direct it to their inbox with an @reply. Type the “@” symbol followed by the first few letters of their name, and select their email address from the list. Only you’ll see their Gmail address — other people will just see their name.
4. Try keyboard shortcuts to fly through buzz. Turn on keyboard shortcuts from Settings, and use “j” or “n” to scroll down the buzz tab, “k” or “p” to go back up, “r” to comment (same shortcut as reply in Gmail), and “shift + l” to like.
5. Mute posts so they don’t get sent to your inbox. Comments on your posts and comments after your comments send buzz directly to your inbox. If you don’t want a lively conversation to keep appearing in your inbox as people reply to it, you can mute it. Click the arrow in the corner of a buzz post and select “Mute this post.”
If you have keyboard shortcuts turned on, you can also mute buzz that appears in your inbox by hitting the “m” key while you’re reading it.
Check out Google’s Help Center for more tips and answers to your common questions, and stay tuned for more here as well.
[source:gmailblog]
Last week, a British man announced he’d found the lost city of Atlantis using Google Ocean-the latest add-on to Google Earth that features 3D bathymetry, which lets you explore the ocean floor. The supposed ‘Atlantis’ image is about 620 miles off the northwestern coast of Africa and south of Portugal. It shows a rectangular grid with what looks like roadways leading away from it at the coordinates 31 15’15.53N 24 15’30.53W. According to The Telegraph, the newspaper that first reported the “discovery,” the pattern is roughly the size of Wales (around 8,000 sq. mi.).
Friday’s find sparked intense interest online despite the farfetched claim. Many scratched their heads wondering, what if? After all, this underwater discovery seemed to match the location Plato had described in his writings. Plato said Atlantis was a massive island that was “larger than Libya and Asia together,” and located at a “distant point in the Atlantic Ocean…in front of the mouth of the pillars of Hercules” (the Straits of Gibraltar).
Google Quashes Atlantis Buzz
Alas, the Atlantis discovery was not meant to be. Google quashed the idea a day later in a statement, “what users are seeing is an artifact of the data collection process,” Google said. “Bathymetric (or seafloor terrain) data is often collected from boats using sonar to take measurements of the seafloor. The lines reflect the path of the boat as it gathers the data.”
Google Earth has been responsible for several amazing discoveries in the past as the company pointed out: “It’s true that many amazing discoveries have been made in Google Earth — a pristine forest in Mozambique that is home to previously unknown species, a fringing coral reef off the coast of Australia, and the remains of an Ancient Roman villa, to name just a few.” Unfortunately, Atlantis will not be added to this list.
Atlantis X-File?
Despite Google’s denial, some conspiracy theorists reject the company’s explanation and say the search giant might be participating in a cover up. Now c’mon folks, the boat-with-sonar explanation is just as plausible as the Atlantis theory. Not to mention the fact that Plato was describing a city that perished 9000 years before his birth, so who knows if it was ever real in the first place!
In other news, Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, and Google CEO Eric Schmidt embarked on an impromptu fact-finding mission to Portugal and Morocco this week. Just kidding!
Wondering what else might be “out there” on Google Earth? Check out PCWorld’s “Getting Your Feet Wet With Google Ocean: First Look in Images” or “Strangest Sights in Google Earth.”