Just about when I thought I got everything out of Gmail, I discovered my top favorite feature. Let’s say that your email address is ‘GeorgeBush@gmail.com’, basically everything sent to any of the following email addresses will be forwarded to your primary email.

GeorgeBush@gmail.com
G.eorgeBush@gmail.com
Ge.orgeBush@gmail.com
…
…
GeorgeBus.h@gmail.com

GeorgeBush@googlemail.com
G.eorgeBush@googlemail.com
Ge.orgeBush@googlemail.com
…
…
GeorgeBus.h@googlemail.com

And that’s not all, you can place as many dots as you want, it can be even something like ‘G.e.o.r.g.e.B.u.s.h@gmail.com’ and you’ll still get it on ‘GeorgeBush@gmail.com’Additionally, I just also found out that you can embed random text to your email ID using ‘+’ sign. That is to say ‘GeorgeBush+anythingyouwant@gmail.com’ can be used as your email address, as well.

Ok I got it. Now what ?

1. One email for every purposeInstead of using different email addresses for various purposes (work, school, friends, etc.) you can use different variations of your Gmail and filter incoming mails by ’sent to’ address. For instance, all incoming mail sent to ‘Name.Surname@gmail.com’ can be put to folder ‘work’, messages sent to ‘NameSurname@gmail.com’ can be put to ‘friends’, ‘N.ameSurname@gmail.com’ can be used for newsletters, and so on.

2. Track/Block spammersWhen signing up for some website, say thatwebsite.com, you can add thatwebsite to your Gmail user ID (eg. GeorgeBush+thatwebsite@gmail.com). This way you can block your subscription whenever you want and even identify those websites that distribute your email address to spammers.

-Lakki

SnappyFingers is a new startup out of Bangalore and calls itself a search engine for Question and Answers. Their crawler crawls and indexes Question and Answers and FAQ’s from across the Internet and provides a convenient, single point of search from their website.

The site is currently in beta and as per Chirayu, the founder, they have a database of 3 million questions in their search index.

The concept is really nice and has some pretty good potential but in its current form, there are a few shortcomings. For example, a search for “Miami weather” shows some a few good results and also few bad results. Check this out..

-Ramesh

According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, a beta is “a nearly complete prototype of a product.” In other words, a not-yet-finished product.

Google is known for keeping their products in beta (much) longer than most other companies. But exactly how many of their products are in beta? When we here at Pingdom investigated this, it turned out that out of the 49 Google products we could find, 22 are in beta. That’s 45%!

Note that we didn’t include any Google Labs products since they can be considered to be a “playground” for future products. If we had included those, the percent of beta products would have been much higher (57%).

Notable Google beta products

PickyDomains.Com is a perfect example of how to turn one’s talent into a profitable business. With ever expanding Internet and tens of millions existing websites, finding an available domain name that’s not already taken by cybersquatters can be a real nightmare.

But one man’s problem is another man’s solution. Rather than to shell out hundreds or thousands of dollars for a domain name on the aftermarket, an increasing number of web entrepreneurs turn to professional “domain namers”.

While most naming agencies charge a non-refundable fee that can be as high as $1500 for a corporate domain, one service that unites 17 professional domain namers from countries like United States, Russia, Australia and New Zealand, decided to offer a risk-free service that costs only 50 dollars per domain.

More...

A guy lost his girlfriend in a train accident.... 

But the gal's name nowhere appeared in the dead list. 

This guy grew up and became IT technical architect in his late 20's, achievement in itself!!  He hired developers from the whole globe and plan to make a software where he could search for his gf through the web.. 

Things went as planned... 

And he found her, after losing millions of dollars and 3 long years!! 

It was time to shut down the search operation, when the CEO of Google had a word with this guy n took over this application, This Software made a whopping 1 billion dollars profit in its first year, which we today know as ORKUT. 

Some facts about orkut: More...

Hello all,

I'm using a site to make free calls currently, U too can also try and enjoy :) Yeah, FREE Local, STD, ISD (Long Distance) calls as well! You can make calls from India to USA, Canada, UK, France, etc. Actually,  the site claims that you can make calls from anywhere to anywhere in the world. Infact, you can even make calls within a country.. all this for FREE!! Can you believe this?

The site is www.parrot-media.com.They say they get revinue from advertisements. The call duration is limited to 5 minutes in case of land line and it is 2 minutes in case of domestic calls. I used it to make calls to USA and the service is good. Not sure about the service to other locations, if you happen to try this service, please post your experiences in the comments section.

The other day, I had to convert a microsoft word (.doc) format file to adobe acrobat reader (.pdf) file. In ideal world, we should be able to do it easily.. but I had terrible experience. Neither Microsoft nor Adobe provide easy ways to acheive this. I had to download number of software applications (inculding some viruses), also downloaded some driver-plugins for word to print it to pdf. Tried so manythings but nothing seems to work. Some converted the file, but had their ads on it.. I got frustrated and tired with this.. just then I landed on www.zamzar.com.. which was a life saver for me.

As you could guess by now, this website offers a tool to convert files from nearly any format to nearly any format. For example, you could convert a .rm (real media) file to 3gp, 3g3, ac3, aac, avi, flac, flv, gif, iphone, mov, mp3, mp4, mpg, wmv, ogg and wav formats. As you explore their service, it gets more exciting, you could even convert a You Tube video to wmv and store it on your PC! Amazing Idea!!

The best thing is you don't need to install any softwrare. You just upload your file.. zamzar does its job and e-mails you when the conversion is done with a link to the converted file. With this free service, you could conert files upto 100MB size and zamzar holds your converted file for 24 hours. If you need to convert a file over 100 MB or looking for perminant online storage, they provide those services for a fee. By signing up, you could convert files as big as 1 GB and have upto 100GB online storage.

And if you are thinking what all things you can convert.. You could convert documents (html - Hypertext Markup Language, odt - OpenDocument Text Document, pcx - Paintbrush Bitmap Image, pdf - Portable Document Format, png - Portable Network Graphic, ps - Postscript document, txt - Text document mdb - Microsoft Access Database, ods - OpenDocument spreadsheet, rtf - Rich text format, ppt,pptx - Power Point, doc, docx - Word Document, xls,xlsx - Excel Spread Sheet, swf, flv - Macromedia Flash files, etc.), you could convert images (gif - Compuserve graphics interchange, ico - Windows Icon, jpg - JPEG compliant image, pcx - PC Paintbrush Bitmap Graphic, ps - Postscript document, png - Portable Network Graphic, tga - Truevision Targa Graphic, thumbnail - Thumbnail image, tiff - Tagged image file format, wbmp - Wireless Bitmap File Format, etc. ), you can convert  music formats (as mentioned above), video formats (3g2 - 3GPP2 Multimedia File, 3gp - 3GPP Multimedia File, aac - Advanced Audio Coding File, ac3 - AC3 Audio File, avi - Windows video file, flac - Free Lossless Audio Codec, flv - Flash Video, ipod - MPEG-4 Video File, mov - Apple QuickTime Movie, mp3 - Compressed audio file, mp4 - MPEG-4 Video File, mpg - Moving Picture Experts Group File, ogg - Ogg Vorbis Compressed Audio File, wav - Windows audio file, wmv - Windows Media File, etc.), and even the compressed formats (7z - 7-Zip Compressed File, tar.bz2 - Bzip 2 UNIX, Compressed File, cab - Cabinet File, lzh - Compressed Archive File, tar - Tape Archive File, tar.gzh - Gzip Compressed Archive, yz1 - DeepFreezer Compressed Archive, zip - Compressed Archive File).

For a complete list of supported formats, you could visit this link. I used it few times to convert simple files and it worked well for me. If you use this tool, do post your experience here for people to understand zamzar service.

-Rakesh