A few days ago, 38 information security experts submitted a public letter to Google, asking it to make Gmail more secure. More specifically, they’ve asked Google “[to] protect users’ communications from theft and snooping by enabling industry standard transport encryption technology (HTTPS) for Google Mail, Docs, and Calendar.”

Google responded saying it is “looking into whether it would make sense to turn on HTTPS as the default for all Gmail users”

If you don’t want to wait for Google to take the decision you can change the connection type to the more secure one (HTTPS) by yourself.

Change the connection type to HTTPS

To use always HTTPS connection in Gmail, do as follow:

1. Click ’Settings‘ at the top of any Gmail page.
2. Set ‘Browser Connection‘ to ‘Always use https‘ (see image below)
3. Click ’Save Changes.’

choose ‘always use https‘

Continue reading “Make Gmail More Secure By Setting It to Use HTTPS Connection” »

Bit.ly, the great URL shortening services, has just released an upgrade to its Bookmarklet.

Features of the new version

• Tweet without leaving the page – Tweet directly from the bit.ly sidebar without leaving the page you are 
• Easily share on other platforms – use the direct links to share the page via email, Gmail, or Facebook.
• Clicks Summary - see a summary of the clicks the page has received (both created by you and the total number of clicks).
• Real time conversations report - see what people are Tweeting and Friendfeeding (?) about the page (updates in real time).

Continue reading “New Bit.ly Bookmarklet Released” »

Numerous Collaboration tools and online storage applications offer a variety of collaboration abilities. Online collaborated editing, synchronization across computers, multiple file sharing , and on-the-spot windows and document sharing are just some of them. The following review will help you know and choose the right collaboration tools for your needs.

This is an excerpt of a guest post I wrote on ReadWriteWeb (by now it got more the 210 tweets). To read the full post visit the online collaboration tools guide.

I’ve just run into a tweet by infusecreative with an interesting Google Insights search. It shows that the number of searches for the term “Twitter” has stopped ascending. Since the beginning of 2009, the search for Twitter has been raising constantly. That was true up until March 22, when it plateaued. Has twitter reached its peak?  

Google Insights results for “Twitter”

Update 04/20/2009: Twitter only had a peak (click the image above to see the current graph). 

More and More new web apps enable us to do things that once required installation, registration, expertise and, of course, payments. The following tools will allow you to instantly video capture your screen, Share files, create a chat room, photo album, web meeting environment, or a MindMap – all within a few mouse clicks.

Instant video capture – ScreenCastle

ScreenCastle is a Video screen capture tool that works directly from your browser. To start recording your screen (and microphone) just enter the site, click the start button, choose the region to capture and press “start recording”. Once done, you will be given a link to view the video or a code to embed it into a website.

ScrennCastle – video screen capture
Continue reading “6 Web Apps to Instantly Capture, Share, Display and Meet” »

Once in a while I’m offered by a web service like Facebook, LinkedIn or Digg to give away my email username and password so that it could offer me new friends based on my contacts list. Being the key to all my other accounts and containing a lot of personal information, I’m not that thrilled to give away these details. The solution to that problem is to export your contacts to a file and then import it into the web services. Here is how to do that:

Example – Synchronizing Gmail with Linkedin

As an example, I will demonstrate how to import your contacts into Linkedin from your Gmail account, but the same apply for other web services and other email applications, including Outlook.

Export contacts from Gmail

1. Go to the “Contacts” sections.
2. Click “Export“.
3. Under “What format would you like to export to?” choose “Outlook’s CSV format“.
4. Click “Export” and save the file to your computer.

Continue reading “How to Import Your Contacts to a Web Service without Giving Away Your Email Password” »