If you have not logged into your Facebook account for some time, I suggest that you do so now. Once you are logged-in, click the "Photos" tab on your Facebook profile and what you see there might surprise you.

It’s your own personal photo album on Facebook but none of these pictures of odd-looking cartoon characters, horoscope charts, photo collages, friend graphs, etc. have been uploaded by you.

What photo tagging applications can do to your Facebook profile

The culprit, as you may have guessed, are these Facebook applications that tag random images with your name and the tagged image therefore shows up in your Facebook profile page without you doing anything.

What’s the problem?
These "collages" not only make your Facebook profile look very unprofessional but there’s something else to worry about as well.

Some photo tagging applications on Facebook (as the one below) add links to bad sites in "your" photos and your innocent Facebook friends, who are just randomly browsing your pictures, might fall in the trap.

What can you do?
The simple way is that you remove your name tag from the tagged photo and it will be instantly removed from your Facebook photo album as well.

Next you should find the Facebook application that you friend used to create that photo collage in the first place and block that application forever so that your other friends are unable to use that application to spam your Facebook profile page.

Also make sure that you get notifications each time someone tags you in a photo. You can control this setting from the "Notifications" tab on the Account Settings page.

Photo tagging is the one of the most popular features on Facebook and, probably for this reason, Facebook doesn’t offer a simple setting that will prevent other users and applications from tagging you in photographs. You can however hide "photos tagged of you" from the privacy page so that the images don’t appear in your public photo albums and are visible only to you.

And as a precautionary measure, visit the authorized apps pages to make sure that you haven’t authorized any Facebook app to tag images of other people on your behalf. If you find one, just click the cross to remove that Facebook app from your profile permanently.

What can Facebook do?
When you are tagged in a photo by your friends (or a Facebook application), the tag is automatically approved and the picture appears in your profile. All we therefore need is an extra privacy setting that would let us to approve tags before a tagged photo appears on our profile page.

Facebook won’t let developers add apps to your profile without permission then why do they allow them to add pictures to your profile without asking.

The holiday season is near and you want to send personalized email greetings to all your fr iends, family members and customers using the standard Gmail (or Google Apps with Gmail) s ervice.

How to Send Bulk Emails using Gmail

Since the web interface of Gmail doesn’t support personalized emails, you should connect your Gmail account with Microsoft Outlook (via POP3 or IMAP) and also import the Gmail address book into your Outlook Contacts.

Now you can use the mail merge feature of Outlook to send personalized messages to every single Gmail contact from the desktop.

This may sound like an easy plan but there’re strict sending limits and, if you aren’t careful, Google may even block your Gmail account temporarily for up to 24 hours and you’ll neither be able to send nor receive any emails during that lock-out period.

Email Sending Limits in Google Apps

If you are using Gmail with Google Apps, you cannot send messages to more than 500 unique email addresses per day.

For instance, if you send one email to Person A and another one is addressed to Person B and C, you have already exhausted three slots (out of 500) even though only two messages left your Inbox.

Email Sending Limits for Gmail users

If you want to send bulk mails using a regular Gmail account, the rules are similar.

You can only send out emails to a maximum of 500 recipients during a 24 hour* period but if you are using a desktop client (like Outlook), that limit is reduced to 100 messages in a day.

[*] The Gmail help site mentions this limit as 500 recipients per message but a Google employee on the Gmail support site has confirmed that this cap is not just per message but per day.

Workarounds for sending mass emails
With all these limitations in place, Gmail is obviously not the best option for reaching out to a very large customer base. However, if you have no other option, it may be a good idea to plan well in advance.

For Gmail: Distribute the mail merge process over 2-3 days so that you never exceed that 100 messages per day quota.

For Google Apps: You can either upgrade to a Premier edition or create multiple accounts in Google Apps as each will have its own 500-recipients limit.

Google Earth is probably the first and only desktop application to have AdSense Ads. These ads are is now showing in at least two different places inside the application:

Figure A: When you search for a location or business, the ads are displayed in the search results itself.

Figure B: When you click a placemark (any red pin on the map), the ads are displayed next to the review /address of that location.

Google makes an exception
I find this interesting because Google policies strictly don’t allow software developers to integrate AdSense ads in their desktop applications. If that policy changes, we could see more and more of Office 2010 Starter or FeedDemon like applications that are completely free to the end-user but supported by web advertising.

If you are using FeedBurner to syndicate the RSS feeds of your blog, you can now easily track all the incoming traffic from feed clicks through Google Analytics.

Just open your FeedBurner dashboard, click the title of your RSS feed and choose "Configure Stats" under the Analyze Tab. Tick the options that say "Item views", "Item click" and "Track clicks as a traffic source in Google Analytics" and save.

In addition to click counts, you’ll also know the exact source from where that click may originated.
This is useful data because, for instance, it will help you understand if people who subscribe to your feed inside Google Reader are more engaged than your "My Yahoo!" subscribers (or vice-versa).

Traffic from clicks inside your RSS feed will be included under "All Traffic Sources" and "Campaigns." in your Google Analytics reports. Select "Ad Content" from the segment drop down in the traffic source data table and it will show you the incoming traffic from your RSS feed segmented by specific feed readers or email clients.

Puru Pratap Singh, a class IV student from Gurgaon in India, has won the Doodle 4 Google contest and you can see his artwork live on the Google India homepage.
The theme of this year’s Google Doodle contest was "My India".

Dennis Hwang, who is the creative genius behind every holiday logo that you see on the Google homepage across countries, was also in Delhi for the award function.

Puru, who is just nine years old, gets a laptop computer for winning the Doodle 4 Google Competition and his school (Amity) will receive a technology grant of around $2000 from Google India.

Some 4,000 logos were submitted by school students from across India for the contest and, though you won’t see any of them on the Google homepage, some of them very extremely creative. Here are my favorite picks:

And here’s a time-lapse video that shows how Dennis Hwang draws a Google Doodle from start to finish.

Read more: http://petnol.blogspot.com/2009/12/google-homepage-sports-new-logo-drawn.html#ixzz0bs7XflMG
Under Creative Commons License: Attribution