You can manually input your facebook friend’s birthday in your google calendar or you can do it smartly by using fbCAL. One of the my favorite applications in facebook because it associates your facebook calendar to one of the popular event planning,calendar software and web applications available. So if you don’t like the feel of using Google Calendar then you can choose other applications in which you can  import the data.

First go to fbcal’s official website and click the button “Create your calendars Now“. Use your facebook account to login in fbCal and allow it to access your profile information and offline access.

When you’re in the main application you can choose two options. export your events and export the birthdays. Click the corresponding logo of Google Calendar and you’re done. There are times when fbCal’s export function doesn’t work so just download a copy of it and import the iCalendar File in your Google Calendar by going to Settings -> Calendar Tab -> Import Calendar. Choose the Downloaded iCalendar File  then wait for this confirmation to show. If unsuccessful repeat the import process until you got it right.

We will not be using Google’s search engine. Instead, we will use it’s Google Calendar as an SMS notification tool to keep you notified in certain events, birthday greetings and other things related to that. I’m assuming you now have a Google account to be used in Google Calendar. Log in using your account and get familiar with the interface.

The Main interface is like a big spreadsheet where you will input your scheduled greetings and plans. If you don’t understand a thing in the spreadsheet then perhaps it’s defaulted to weekly mode. You can adjust it by clicking the daily tab above the spreadsheet in the upper right corner of it. You can then click the spreadsheet to add your plans or use the links in the upper left corner for an added degree of customization.

When you are done with the preliminaries all you have to do is integrate Google calendar to your mobile phone. Click the Settings link in the upper right corner and go to mobile setup. Carefully input the fields needed and wait for the confirmation code to be sent in your mobile account. Submit your mobile code and enable SMS notifications to your events and plans. As of my experience Google does not charge you of the sms sent to you, so you can abuse the service without worry any fees.

The most important thing about getting the toolbar is that it makes your internet life easier when you use most of google services, these includes gmail, calendar, reader, search etc. The services is just a click away and you’ll be connected in using them in a matter of seconds. So if you depend most on google services then you have the best reason in getting the toolbar here.

Google Toolbar is available for Internet Explorer and Firefox web browser which is a big disappointment to me since I’m starting to fall in love with chrome.  Installation is relatively easy, just follow the instructions which follows after you visited the official web page and you are ready to go. Once installed the very first thing that you should do is to sign in using your google account so connecting to their services is just a click away. After that you can look for the button with plus sign ( + ) to start adding your favorite google services. When the plus sign is clicked you’ll be presented with the list of mostly used services. But the search form is where it comes handy when you can’t find the service you are looking for. Simply click the logos returned by search and you are done installing the service in the toolbar. It would take a couple of minutes to finish your initial setup and after that you’ll get addicted in using google toolbar in your favorite web browser ( IE or FireFox).

The search box in the far left of the toolbar is good for finding important files and data stored in your google account. Services such as Google Docs and Images are mostly populated with information and searching their archives will just be a child’s play when you use the google toolbar. You just need to configure the toolbar so that you can choose on which google service it will be searched. Clicking the arrow inside the search button will lead you to pick which google service you want to be searched and you can start typing in the search box and look for the file you want to find.

The Autofill feature of the toolbar is really helpful too. It’s much like roboform with less features but it’s more than enough if you are lazy to fill up forms when you are signing up for a membership in any website. The Autofill button is hidden if  the toolbar is crowded with buttons, you can access it by clicking the arrow near AutoLink. Setup your profile in the autofill window and save it and you can start filling web forms easily.

Most of the services in Google Toolbar are pretty straight forward. I mentioned here in this article the ones I love best when using it. If you’re a webmaster then you can do more with the toolbar with the share and pagerank button. But If you’re the casual internet user then the things I mentioned above will value the most.

1. Click the “Settings” link in the top-right corner of Gmail.
2. Click the “Offline” tab.
3. Select “Enable Offline Mail for this computer.”
4. Click “Save Changes” and follow the directions from there.

I usually use google trends to compare different keywords entered in google. You probably know how important keyword research when you are picking the right title for your articles and google Trends is a big help for me. Basically when I wrote an article I pick the title based on the google trends result. If there’s a graph from a given keyword I choose those keywords and I just make the title more interesting by adding catchy words.

To make it more interesting you can input multiple phrases separated by commas to compare keywords with a higher search volume index. A graph with higher search volume index means more people are inputting those keywords in google search. I always choose keywords with higher search volume index with less competition in search engines.Before I forget there’s a list of hottest keywords for the day in the main page of Google Trends and affiliate marketers use those keywords to sell their product and redirect them to their money page. Usually when you’re out of ideas you can select the keywords in Google Hot Trends since they are mostly searched during the said date. There’s also a google trend for websites which displays an estimate of the traffic in your site. People say that it’s pretty accurate and has similar alexa traffic results. But take note that you have to be logged in your account to view the Daily Unique Visitors estimate in the y-axis. But it only shows results to sites with high traffic rankings so if you’re site does not show a graph then it means you got a low traffic site.

The team has been simulating conditions tested in their lab by downloading 25 websites. A  dramatic speed increased of 55% showed encouraging results which could trigger a change of internet technology.Google once again is on it’s way changing the face of internet with their  innovations. If successful this could replace the popular HTTP protocol which flourished in 1996. If you are interested in SPDY , Documentation and sourcecode is now open in public.

via chromium blog

Google's Price list

Google just announced an affordable value of $5/year for a 20gb extra  storage online. What’s more to this is that you can push it for a  1Tb storage with a price value of $256 if a 20gb space is not enough for your precious data. Of course the free storage of your account is more than enough but you now have the option for an upgrade if the demands of your work/data needs a lot of space. The current price list dropped dramatically if you’ll be comparing it today which is  twice as much storage for a quarter of the old price. Competitions are tough but google won’t hold back, I mentioned in my blog before about a great Backup application(dropbox) which you can use but the storage it offers need some reconsideration if you’ll be comparing it to Google. But in terms of it’s functionality dropbox still wins.

This would be another trigger for companies to change their price plans for the services they offer. Google is a serious competition and a big name for small and medium players who ventures storage business. And for Google what could happen if they’ll be facing server crashes which is highly unlikely to happen since google is what we’re talking about.

1. First is to create a folder in which your application will be placed. Look in the sidebar to the left and right click “My Folders” Hover into “New” and Select “Folder” in the submenu. A new folder will be created with a name “New Folder”, rename it with the title you prefer.
2. Now prepare the Files( .doc, .rtf, .jpg, .xls, .ppt, etc) you want to convert into pdf format. In the sidebar click the “Upload Files” and click the files you prepared to be uploaded and use the folder you made in step one to be the container of the files you upload. You have a limit of 25mb total in case you don’t know.
3. Once uploaded go back to your dashboard and locate the files you uploaded in the folder you made. You just need to click the folder and wait for the tables in the right to be populated with the files inside it. Check the boxes of the files you want to convert and click “More Actions” and then export. If you want to convert all the files inside the folder into pdf just right click the folder and click export.
4. In the Export window click the drop down list and look for the file format you want the files to be converted and then click continue. You will be prompted of a download link once the files has been zipped and converted which you can click to receive the converted files. It’s in a zip format so you don’t need to worry individual downloads.

The sad part about this is that it’s only available for the windows version of Chrome and the MAC version is still not out as of the moment. The settings for syncing bookmarks in different computer requires you to keep the computers live with downloaded beta active and then choose “Synchronize my bookmarks” in the Wrench Menu. Since this is a beta build there are some expected bugs of course so it’s not perfect as of this time.