RT @goowaveinvites we got some google wave invites… you need one? RT this !! #googlewave #wave

However there is no guarantee that you will be sent an invitation but there is no harm in trying this out.

Below is the screen shot of @goowaveinvites twitter timeline (taken from my iPhone – Twitter application – Echofon)

Best of luck!

If you are still using Internet Explorer 6 then here is your chance to eliminate hunger by upgrading IE8. Microsoft has extended it “Browse for Better” program. In a recent tweet update by Microsoft’s IE (@ie) it said “If you’re still using IE6 and upgrade to IE8 this month, we’ll donate 16 meals to Feeding America: http://bit.ly/BIMXN.”

Even though the IE hater may say that this is just another gimmick but in my view if just by downloading IE8 I can feed 16 meals to hungry kids, I will definitely do it.

Well there two clear advantages of this promotion/program:

1. Hungry kid gets the meal.
2. IE6 which is holding the whole World Wide Web community from moving forwards towards HTML5 and other newer technologies.

About Feeding America:
Feeding America is the nation’s leading domestic hunger-relief charity in the United States. Each year, the Feeding America network provides food assistance to more than 25 million low-income people facing hunger in the United States, including more than 9 million children and nearly 3 million seniors. Our network of more than 200 food banks serves all 50 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. The Feeding America network secures and distributes more than 2 billion pounds of donated food and grocery products annually. The Feeding America network supports approximately 63,000 local charitable agencies that distribute food directly to Americans in need. To learn more, please visit www.feedingamerica.org.

Highlights and screen-shots of the new release:

• Main screen ( I call it Home Screen) of the app is like the iPhone screens i.e. icons aligned a grid with multiple sliding screens.
• The home screen come with icons such as News Feed, Profile, Friends, Inbox, Chat, Requests, Events, Photos, Notes (as shown in the pic below).

The Home Screen (note the “Notifications” bar)

• Notifications: The bottom bar (footer) of the main screen is notification, just tap on it to see all the notifications.
• Add a Favorite: Click the (+) sign in top left corner in main screen to add customs icons for friend’s profile you frequent or for Facebook pages you like or are a fan of.

My 2nd screen. See the first icon as "Bawaal" page on Facebook and then icons represents friend's profile.

• Supports landscape mode.
• Default Screen: This screen come every time you open the app. Initially the default screen is “News Feed” but it can be changed to Family, Pages, Status Updates, Photos, Links, Video, Notes & Gifts (as shown in the pic below).

Customize your default screen

• You can rearrange the icons and the process is similar to iPhone mechanism i.e. keep pressing the icons for few seconds and the icons will start shaking. You can now rearrange icons and even delete the custom icons you created. Remember to press the done button on screen instead of the home button of iPhone.
• When you go on a profile page you have three tab in the bottom “Wall”, “Info” and “Photos”.

The profile, I hope the profile person doesn't mind

• Built-in browser to open the shared links.
• Push Notifications – Joe Hewitt, the official Facebook app for iPhone developer, noted on his twitter account that the most deserved feature – Push Notifications – will be available when Apple releases the iPhone OS 3.1 update.

Final Verdict: Though its late but not too late, the much needed app is now available. I was hardly using Facebook on iPhone since I never liked the older Facebook app. Definitely, a move in right direction by Facebook. This move can help Facebook counter the exponential growth of Twitter. If you like facebook then this app is a must!

My personal opinion- “I like this app even better than the web page itself.”

Screen-shot of home Page of Google Today (07/23/2009)

Check the page (screen-shot below) where you can customize your personalized Google home page i.e. iGoogle page.

Check out more details on Comic Con here : http://www.comic-con.org/

Gmail now helps you auto-unsubscribe from mailing lists. This is on the top of the one of the best spam filter for a free online email service providers.

From Google’s Official announcement:

We don’t think you should be burdened with managing messages you don’t want to receive. We do our best to put messages in Spam when we’re pretty sure you won’t want or need them. But everyone has different preferences about the mail they want to see. You may not want to read any messages sent by a certain company or mailing list, while another Gmail user finds these same messages to be valuable.

To help solve this problem, we’re providing you with an unsubscribe tool for some messages. You’ll see the unsubscribe tool when you mark a message from particular types of mailing lists as spam. If the particular message is a misuse of a mailing list you like to receive, you can Report spam as usual. But if you never want to receive another message or newsletter from that list again, click Unsubscribe instead. We’ll send a request to the sender that your email address be removed from the list. It’s that simple!

Keep in mind that mailing lists may take up to three days to process your unsubscription request, so it may take a few days for you to stop receiving mail from the list. Also, please note that we are unable to provide the Unsubscribe option for all mailing lists. For your protection, Gmail won’t display Unsubscribe for lists that are known to be owned by spammers. When you don’t see the unsubscribe tool for a particular newsletter or mailing list that you trust, check the actual message for unsubscribe options, or try contacting the list owner about removal (you should only do this if the list owner is trustworthy and not a spammer).

Last few weeks have been very interesting in the technology industry. It seems like the whole industry is at war. Now, the latest has come from Microsoft’s arsenal.

The events in chronological order:

1. Microsoft surprised Google with it’s search(decision) engine Bing.
2. Google retaliates with announcement of Chrome OS.
3. Now, Microsoft is planning to provide online version of its highest selling software (MS Office) for free. Oops! Did I said free? Yes I did, it will be available online for free!

I think this move from Microsoft has the potential to kill Google Docs/Zoho which were getting popular because of Microsoft’s inability to offer online document service. Lets see how Google is going to counter this move. I have never seen Microsoft this aggressive to counter each and every move of Google. Lets see what future has in for us the consumers.

Read the detailed article on CNN/Fortune here.

Gmail Footer

Things you can do using the details screen:

• Check the IP addresses from where your gmail account was last accessed. Put in the IP address here to know the location.
• You have the options to sign-out all other sessions (if you think you have any sessions open anywhere). Better be safe than sorry!
• It also gives the details about date and time when the account was accessed.

I find these options very useful for people who access their Gmail account regularly using public computers (such as cyber-cafes, shared desktops, etc). If you ever think that your account is compromised first of all sign out all the sessions immediately and change your password immediately.

Activity Information

You can monitor the downloads of Firefox 3.5 real time here. Check the below screen-shot at the time of writing this post (more than a million download in just few hours of release).

Seems like Firefox is taking Google’s challenge very seriously and to counter Chrome’s advances it has released the latest version “Firefox 3.5″. It offers many changes over the previous version, supporting new web technologies, improving performance and ease of use.

Some of the notable features are:

• Available in more than 70 languages.
• Support for the HTML5 <video> and <audio> elements. [Read our post on HTML5]
• Improved tools for controlling your private data, including a Private Browsing Mode.
• Better web application performance using the new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine.
• The ability to share your location with websites using Location Aware Browsing.
• Support for native JSON, and web worker threads.
• Speculative parsing for faster content rendering.
• Support for new web technologies such as: downloadable fonts, CSS media queries, new transformations and properties, JavaScript query selectors, HTML5 local storage and offline application storage, <canvas> text, ICC profiles, and SVG transforms.

For more details check here:

UPDATE: As of now 7th July 2009 12:19 AM the total downloads of Firefox 3.5 is fast approaching 17 million.

Disclosure: Currently, I use both Chrome and Firefox but Chrome is my default browser. I will update the post if Firefox 3.5 actually delivers on its promises and make me switch my default browser from Chrome to Firefox again.

HTML5 (HyperText Markup Language Version 5) is a new specification being developed to move HTML forward in the realm of Web applications. The current version of HTML is designated 4.01 used since 1999. HTML5 is the main focus of the WHATWG [Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group]. HTML5 is intended to replace HTML4, XHTML1 and DOM2 HTML specifications.

WHATWG: Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group – is a growing community of people interested in evolving the Web founded by individuals of Apple, the Mozilla Foundation, and Opera Software in 2004, after a W3C workshop. It focuses primarily on the development of HTML and APIs needed for Web applications.

Structure of HTML5

Now a quick overview of new features in HTML5

New structural elements include

• section: A part or chapter in a book, a section in a chapter, or essentially anything that has its own heading in HTML 4
• header: The page header shown on the page; not the same as the head element
• footer: The page footer where the fine print goes; the signature in an e-mail message
• nav: A collection of links to other pages
• article: An independent entry in a blog, magazine, compendium, and so forth

New Block Elements include

• aside: it represents a note, a tip, a sidebar, a pullquote, a parenthetical remark, or something that’s just outside the main flow of the narrative.
• figure: it represents a block-level image, along with a caption
• dialog: represents a conversation between several people

New inline elements include

• time: it indicates a specific moment in history
• meter: it represents a numeric value in a specified range
• progress: it represents the state of an ongoing process, like the progress bar in a graphical user interface (GUI) application.

New embedding elements include video and audio.

• The src, autobuffer, autoplay, loop, and controls attributes are the attributes common to all media elements.

New interactive elements include details, datagrid, menu and command.

New types of form controls such as dates and times, email, url, search.

Autocomplete & Field Validation: It has control over autocomplete values in text fields, as well as field validation so that you can say which fields are required.
HTML 5 is much more precise about many things than HTML 4, so the HTML 5 validators will be more useful in catching real errors. The embed element is no longer invalid.

New attributes – ping (on a and area), charset (on meta), async (on script)

Availability of APIs such as canvas tag for immediate mode 2D drawing, offline storage database, drag-and-drop, cross-document messaging, browser history management, MIME type and protocol handler registration, document editing etc will change the way we consider a website.

HTML5 will enhance and make HTML more powerful. A more powerful HTML means more powerful Web applications. Just like XMLHttpRequest (read AJAX) created a revolution in the web based applications and showed the world what can be done with more interactive apps, HTML 5 with the support for elements like video, audio will result in more richer and reliable experience for the end-users.

Desktop applications are at peril! Why do I need a desktop application (other than browsers) when I can access all my data and applications on web. Days are not very far off when everyone will use browsers to edit documents, music, videos etc. HTML5 is a next big step towards whole new browsing experience.

Browsers (Safari, Firefox and Opera) have already begun implementing HTML5 features. Some of the sites using HTML5 can be found on http://html5gallery.com/. The demonstrations at the Google’s I/O conference also showed that Google is very serious about bringing HTML 5 to the masses.

Mark my words: “HTML5 will be one of the biggest driving forces behind the next inevitable TECH BOOM.”

#FAIL

The History: StrongWebmail offered $10,000 reward to the person who breaks into their CEO’s email. To show their strength and belief in their product, the CEO even provided his user name and password (CEO at StrongWebmail.com; password= Mustang85).

Official words: “StrongWebmail.com is offering $10,000 to the first person that breaks into our CEO’s email account…and to make things easier, we’re giving you his username and password.  There’s just one catch: to access a StrongWebmail.com email account, the account’s owner must receive a verification call on his pre-registered phone number. So even though you have our CEO’s username and password, you still have some work to do because you don’t have access to his telephone.”

Check out the contest rules here.

As of Today: [StrongWebmail CEO's mail account hacked via XSS]

A trio of hackers successfully compromised the e-mail using persistent cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability and are now claiming the bounty.

The hacking team of Aviv Raff, Lance James and Mike Bailey set up the attack by sending an e-mail to the company’s CEO Darren Berkovitz.   When he opened the e-mail, the team exploited an XSS flaw to take control of the account.

The screenshot of the hack are available in TwitPic : Screen Shot 1, Screen Shot 2.

Result: Whether the hack was good or not for the company’s business that for the future to tell. On the positive side the StrongWebmail got some media coverage/publicity. I can bet most of the readers would have never heard about StrongWebmail before but now you do! (Read FREE Publicity)