Start pages are always a mess in web browsers. Firefox put up a design contest for users to design a perfect start page recently. Be it Chrome’s most used pages or Firefox’s default Google search page. Well, Chome does the work to a pretty good extent not to mention opera’s and safari’s speed dial pages. But it is totally a different experience when you have the start page on the cloud that is perfectly customized according to your needs. All those web services on your home page for you to access at a click. Doesn’t that seem perfect.
Symbaloo - Start simple, is a simple interface that basically focuses to refine your first contact with the internet everyday. The symbaloo pages houses draggable boxes that link to your favorite web services like feeds, mail, radio, search, translate and what not. If even that doesn’t make you scream enough. You have free places where you can add your own boxes that link to a service specified by you. Now that’s too much YOU.

To set it as a start page. Just click the button at the bottom of the page that says “Set as startpage“. The following light box a the center of the screen gives you the instructions. OR simply drag the link http://www.symbaloo.com to the home in firefox.

ONLY FOR U.S. Schools

Google invites U.S school students to submit their artistic and creative imaginations for the Google logo on its home page. Last year winner Christin Engelberth’s entry. Some important dates are as follows:

School Registration Deadline – March 17, 2010

Early Bird Submissions -Win Netbook Computers – March 10, 2010

Doodle Entry Deadline – March 31, 2010

State Finalists and Regional Winners Notified – May 17, 2010

Online Public Vote – May 17-24, 2010

Awards Ceremony and National Winners Announced – May 26, 2010

Winning Doodle on the Google Homepage – May 27, 2010

Image via Wikipedia

To shorten links using Google new URL shortener goo.gl you need to install the Google toolbar. If you resist installing a new toolbar just for the sake of shortening URLs using Goo.gl then this is for you. Marklets.com has a smart bookmark link to shorten your links with Goo.gl.

These types of smar bookmarks are called bookmarklets. These are usually based on javascript and work with any browser. To use these just drag the bookmarklet to your bookmark toolbar. For the goo.gl bookmarklet, when you have to shorten a link click on the bookmarklet when the page is opened. A popup displays instantly giving you the shortened URL.

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Google now will officially allow uploading any file into the cloud. If you used to use Gmail drafts to save some work online, you can now stop doing that and use Google Docs. You don’t have to carry a storage device with you anymore. All the data you need to access somewhere else can be simply uploaded to Google Docs. The file size limit is presently 250mb. This is a threat to other such paid services, which don’t allow storing more than 2GB without payment.

You can also use a shared folder to share the files with anyone else. For more information, check out our post on the Google Docs blog.

If we look in the past, Gmail changed the way we used our email. It came in with a serious blow to yahoo. The email storage space and attachment size it could provide at that time was the largest in the market and made people to shift to it. Even presently Gmail gives huge storage space which  increases every second. I can see a similar trend building up in the cloud storage section again.

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• Google Docs adds live sharing to folders (news.cnet.com)
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• Google Docs Storage Increased: Users Get More Space To Store Files Online (huffingtonpost.com)
• Sync documents to Google Docs with MemeoConnect (macworld.com)
• Google Docs Gets File Storage: Is This the GDrive? [Google Docs] (gizmodo.com)

googlegooglegooglegoogle

The more is better. It gets awesome when you can make Four google searches from one page. http://www.googlegooglegooglegoogle.com lets you make four searches simultaneously using Google. The idea is simple but very useful. They are simply four CSS divs that link to Google each. The top of every frame has an option to change the div to Wikipedia. probably more coming soon.