Google Reader made a small but significant improvement to their user interface.

You can now drag-and-drop feeds into different user-defined folders. Prior to this enhancement, one had to change settings for each feed by selecting which folder it belonged to.

This small enhancement will make it that much easier to manage your feeds now.

Thanks Google!

[via Google Reader Blog]

Do you use Gmail? Do you use the plain-vanilla version provided by Google, or have you powered it up using some cool enhancements & hacks available for it? This post tries to get together a list of cool tools for Gmail. Some of the links below are links to other posts which cover the same topic as this.

This list is in no way comprehensive. I’m sure there are plenty of other add-ons available. For now, sit back and enjoy the tools…

Firefox Add-ons:

• Gspace: Use Gmail as a file storage server.
• Gmail Manager: Manage multiple accounts and receive email notifications.
• Conversation Preview Bubbles: Email preview without having to load the email page.
• Gmail Notifier: Monitor multiple Gmail accounts right inside your browser’s UI.
• Better Gmail 2: Visual Enhancements to Gmail.
• GTD Inbox: Integrates the methodology of “Getting Things Done” into Gmail.
• FireGPG: Brings an interface to encrypt, decrypt, sign or verify the signature of text in any web page using GnuPG.
• Gmail Skins: Tries to make your Gmail experience a little better!

Similar Articles:

• Mark Lyon’s Gmail Loader:  A list of 20+ tools for Gmail
• Robs Blog has a collection of 30+ Gmail Tools & Plugins
• Mashable has an article that covers 60+ tools and resources for Gmail

Google is turning on the focus on its Andriod Mobile Platform by announcing a $10 million developer challenge.

The award money will be distributed equally between two Android Developer Challenges:

• Android Developer Challenge I: We will accept submissions from January 2 through March 3, 2008
• Android Developer Challenge II: This part will launch after the first handsets built on the platform become available in the second half of 2008

In the Android Developer Challenge I, the 50 most promising entries received by March 3 will each receive a $25,000 award to fund further development. Those selected will then be eligible for even greater recognition via ten $275,000 awards and ten $100,000 awards.

The YouTube video below provides a preview of the platform and details of the developer challenge:

Read more reports on this at Mashable, and WebWare.

Do you see this as a direct threat to Sun’s Java Platform (J2ME) for handsets?

Google put to rest all the rumors about the so called GPhone, but saying that there is no such GPhone coming from Google. But they did come up with the next big thing — An Open Handset Alliance for a standardized cell phone platform. The platform is called Andriod.

The announcement was made in the Google Blog and was titled Where’s my Gphone!

You can read numerous reports on this at Mashable, GigaOM, WSJ and many other sites. Infact, WSJ has a comprehensive list of companies that are a part of this alliance. Google has managed to get many of the mobile biggies to join this alliance.

For one thing, this is just an announcement. No mobile phone will be launched on this platform till mid next year.

Lets hope this makes things better for us consumers in the long run!

I had used Google Pack a year ago and had a re-look at it today and was pleasantly surprised. The selection of software that is now offered has increased to a significant lot.

Not only do you get a set of Google Tools like Google Desktop, Google Talk, and Google Toolbar, but you also get software like Skype, Norton Security Scan, and Spyware Doctor, besides a host of other software tools.

Infact, if you download the entire set, you’ve got a lot of useful free tools to power up your Windows system.

I’m just downloading their Norton Security Scan and Spyware Doctor solutions. Nothing like free protection on Windows!

Gmail has increased its storage space for all free accounts to 3GB and the counter is still ticking upwards!!

This is great news for all Gmail users like me

Thanks Google!

I had written a few days back on the rumour from TechCrunch that Google might be acquiring FeedBurner. Well…TechCrunch has confirmed today that the deal is thru. For a whopping $100million dollars.

FeedBurner started 4yrs back and had raised only $10million. This is a huge pay day for them.

There can be some interesting fallouts from this — Maybe AdSense ads on your FeedBurner feeds. Lets wait and watch.

There is a strong rumor going around that Google might be acquiring Feedburner. If this is true, the acquisition will enable Google to entire the growing RSS Feed Advertisement market. Feedburner is a leading player in the RSS market and it places them nicely for an acquisition of this sort.

Read more about this at VecoSys.

I came across an interesting Article on Digg on how to remove AdSense advertisements from Google Search pages. All it takes is to append output=googleabout to the search result. As simple as that.

The comments on the post talks about another Google Project called SearchMash. Quite interesting to see where this one lands up heading. Its using Ajax and shows not only the regular search results, but shows images, videos, blog and Wikipedia results on the same page on the right hand side. A snapshot is shown below.