Gmail will soon allow you to ‘unsend’ your sent email

In October 2014, Google launched a new email client called ‘Inbox’, which is essentially a much more organised, easy to access, more intuitive and informative mail service. 

According BGR India, Inbox will soon include a feature that will allow its users to unsend the sent mails. A similar feature exists on Gmail’s web version via its Google Mail Labs channel. It allows user a period of 10 seconds after hitting the sent button to retract the mail. Inbox is expected to feature a similar option.

Other than the power to retract sent mails, the Google team plans to introduce features like cross-browsing and integration with Google Drive. The team is also working to make the Inbox app available for tablet devices.

These features are expected to be rolled out in a few weeks. 

How to Clean Facebook, Twitter, and Other Social Websites

Have your social feeds become too messy? Is all the clutter taking up too much screen space and you can't enjoy social networks anymore? We've found some great Google Chrome extensions to help you eliminate the clutter and focus on the content you want to see.

Facebook
Facebook can be one of the most annoying websites on the Internet, if you judge by the amount of spammy notifications and clutter distracting you from the things your friends share. Although Facebook has taken several measures to eliminate spam from your News Feed, you can remove all the things you don't need using a Chrome extension called FB Purity. After installing FB Purity, login to Facebook. Then follow these steps:

1) Click the FBP button on the right side of Facebook's search bar. This will show you all the options in FB Purity.

2) You can tick mark options by clicking on the button next to them, to enable or disable features. Check the following options for a basic clean-up: Game + App Stories, People You May Know, Gifts, Trending Topics, News Ticker Bar, and Sort Feed : Most Recent. Now click Save and Close at the bottom to apply these changes.

3) There are several advanced options on the FB Purity settings page, such as hiding all sidebar links, or blocking chat, or change fonts and colours. Each is explained in a tooltip, which you can see by hovering the mouse pointer over the options.

For Firefox, FB Purity is available here.

Twitter

Twitter is a fairly clean website when compared to most social networks, but the people you follow can make your Timeline a mess. For example, whenever there is a contest on Twitter or when there is a major sporting event going on, you may not want to see all the tweets on your Timeline. To quickly clean that up, install Larry Filter. Now log in to Twitter and follow these steps:

1) Click the Twitter bird icon on the top right of Chrome browser. Here you will see a box where you can add usernames or hashtags that you want to hide from your Timeline.

2) Type the hashtag or username in the form on the right and click Add. A drop-down menu below lets you select if you want to hide those tweets entirely or reduce their opacity by 75%. Either method works well and makes your timeline look a lot cleaner.

Larry Filter is also available for Firefox.

Google+

If you use Google+, try the Google+ Optimizer extension to clear all the clutter on Google's social network. Install it and go through these steps.

1) Right-click the orange badge-like icon in the address bar and click Options.

2) Click the Filter tab and hover your mouse pointer over the thumbnails on the left to see what each one does. Here you can filter out all the "ABC +1'd this" posts, apart from YouTube comments, community invites, hashtags, people you may know, etc. Select what you need and enjoy a clean feed.

3) Our suggestion is to go to the Status-Filter header on this page, and click all three - community invites, You might know..., and birthday filter. Under the Content-Filter header, click +1 filter and YouTube filter. These options should get rid of most of the unwanted elements from your Google+ stream. Advanced options include filtering posts by hashtag or a keyword of your choice.

Unfortunately, there are no good Google+ addons for Firefox. However, you can get rid of the white space on Google+ using Whitespace Remover for Google Plus.

YouTube
The world's most popular video sharing platform may not be a full-fledged social network, but it has a huge community of commenters and comes with its share of annoyances. YouTube's several related videos on the side make it difficult to focus on the video you are watching, given that most uploaders are trying their best to grab eyeballs by uploading misleading thumbnails. To hide all the unwanted content, you can try a simple extension called Turn Off the Lights. As the name suggests, the extension makes the rest of the browser window dark, so that none of it distracts you. Here's how to use it.

1) After installing the extension, head to YouTube and play any video.

2) Now click the lamp icon in the address bar. This will dim everything on the screen except the video. Sounds simple right? There's a lot more to this extension than that.

3) Right-click the lamp icon and click Options. As you will see, there are more than enough YouTube tweaks here to help you get a clean layout. On the left side, you'll see tabs called Basics, Advanced Options, etc.

4) Under Basics, move the Opacity slider to 100. Now check the box next to "Automatically dim the background when you click the play button" and "Automatically set the YouTube player to the larger size". These tweaks should be enough for most people, but you can go through all the options to find what suits your needs.

Turn Off the Lights is also available for Firefox.

Bonus: Gmail
While Gmail isn't really a social network, we decided to include it in this article due to its popularity. Gmail is an awesome email service, but that doesn't mean it that it is perfect. Over the years, Google has added several elements that make it hard to focus on the stuff you're looking for - email.

If you'd like a cleaner Gmail layout, install Gmelius on Google Chrome. This extension allows you to hide unnecessary elements such as the top bar linking to other Google sites, the chat box, and Google+ activity, among other things.

To clean up your social feed, install Gmelius and log in to your Gmail account. Follow these steps for a cleaner look.

1) Click the "G" icon to the right of the address bar on Chrome. This will take you to Gmelius settings.

2) This page lists all the different settings such as the people widget, chat and calendars, which you can turn on and off.

3) Here are the changes we suggest. Make sure that there is a tick-mark next to these options: Footer, People Widget (only if you don't use Google Voice), Remove Google+ Activity, Colourize navigation icons, and Google icons. This will help you focus on just email. Once you're done, click on Save Changes at the bottom of the page.

4) If you're not sure which ones are best, Gmelius has some suggestions too. The settings page has small buttons next to each of its tweaking options, labelled Power User, Popular, Design, Zen Mode, etc. Selecting the ones marked Zen is a quick way to help focus on the best ones for mail, or you could look at the ones marked popular, to see what other people are selecting.

Gmelius is also available for Firefox, but you'll have to install the extension from their homepage as the developer will soon deprecate the version available on Mozilla's addon site.

These extensions should have helped you clean all your social feeds quickly. In case you use any other extensions, please leave a comment to let us know.

Hangouts 1.3 Will Reportedly Add SMS, Giving Android Its Own iMessage Equivalent

Google is said to be prepping an update
to its Hangouts instant messaging/video
chat Android app that would allow it to
integrate with SMS, making it possible
to get all text and MMS messages right
in the same inbox. That would fulfill a
promise made a long time ago, near
when Hangouts was first announced, by
Hangouts and Chat community manager
Dori Storbeck.

The new info comes from Android Police,
which says it had heard that Google
would be building SMS integration into
Hangouts in a version releasing soon, a
report which was then corroborated by
screenshots from an anonymous tipster.
In the screenshots, Hangouts is depicted
as showing messages clearly sent “via
SMS,” as well as being able to “Send an
SMS message” in the existing compose
screen. There’s also a screenshot of the
settings where SMS can be toggled on
and off.

The update would also offer up video
sharing via Hangouts, the report claims,
but the biggest news for both Google
and for other third-party messaging
platforms would be the SMS integration.
It would consolidate one more service/
app offering into Hangouts for Google,
which has already subsumed Google Talk
and Google+ Messenger. It would be
easy to see it taking the next logical
step from there and offering VoIP
services, too, providing a complete over-
the-top service.
It would also be potentially bad news
for competitors like WhatsApp and
Facebook Messenger. FB’s messaging app
already offers SMS integration, but
Google’s Hangouts version would ship on
devices pre-installed, and could
conceivably replace the Messaging app
altogether, making it the default option
for Android users. It could also eat
away at more carrier business, as
combining the two and favoring Google
+ based messaging first would have a
similar effect to iMessage, where
carriers eventually derive less revenue
from shuttling SMS content back and
forth.
SMS has long been in the cards for
Hangouts, and hopefully it’s arriving
soon. There’s no timeline attached to
the report, apart from some speculation
it could arrive with Android KitKat, but
in all likelihood this functionality will be
generally available to Hangouts users
regardless of their OS version.

LG's curved display smartphoneconfirmed for November launch

LG Electronics Inc's display unit said on Monday it will start mass production of curved smartphone displays as the South Korean phone maker plans to launch a smartphone with the new screens next month to catch bigger rival Samsung Electronics Co Ltd. 

Samsung said last month it would introduce a smartphone with a curved display in October as the world's top handset maker seeks to set the pace of hardware innovation amid slowing growth in the high-end smartphone market. 

Curved displays are in the early stages of development and allow bendable or foldable designs that could eventually allow mobile and wearable gadgets to take new forms that could radically change the high-end smartphone market.

LG Display Co Ltd said on Monday it has started production of a six-inch display curved top to bottom. LG Electronics plans to launch a smartphone with the curved display in November, a source familiar with the matter said. By contrast, Samsung's phone will have a display curved side to side, another source who has direct knowledge of the matter said. In January Samsung, which has taken over from Apple Inc as the global smartphone leader, showed off prototype products with a flexible screen and a display that extends from the side of a device. 

Technology firms have yet to figure out how to mass produce the parts cheaply and come up with display panels that can be thin and heat resistant. 

Curved displays are already commercially available in large-screen televisions. 
Samsung and LG Electronics started selling curved OLED TV sets this year priced at about $9,000.

New apps know the answer before youask the question

In Hollywood, there are umbrella holders. Outside corner offices, there are people who know exactly how much cream to pour in the boss's coffee. In British castles, royals have their valets. And then there is Silicon Valley, where mind-reading personal assistants come in the form of a cellphone app. 

A range of startups and big companies like Google are working on what is known as predictive search - new tools that act as robotic personal assistants, anticipating what you need before you ask for it. Glance at your phone in the morning, for instance, and see an alert that you need to leave early for your next meeting because of traffic, even though you never told your phone you had a meeting or where it was. 

How does the phone know? Because an application has read your email, scanned your calendar, tracked your location, parsed traffic patterns and figured out you need an extra half- hour to drive to the meeting. The technology is the latest development in Web search, and one of the first tailored to mobile devices. It does not even require people to enter a search query. 

Your context - location, time of day and digital activity - is the query, say the engineers who build these services. Many technologists agree that these services will probably become mainstream, eventually incorporated in alarm clocks, refrigerators and bathroom mirrors. Already, Google Now is an important part of Google's Internet-connected glasses. 

As a Glass wearer walks through the airport, her hands full of luggage, it could show her an alert that her flight is delayed. Google Now is "kind of blowing my mind right now," said Danny Sullivan, a founding editor of Search Engine Land who has been studying search for two decades. "I mean, I'm pretty jaded, right? I've seen all types of things that were supposed to revolutionize search, but pretty much they haven't. 

Google Now is doing that." But for some people, predictive search - also in services like Cue, reQall, Donna, Tempo AI, MindMeld and Evernote - is the latest intrusion into our lives, another disruption pinging and buzzing in our pockets, mining our digital lives for personal information and straddling the line between helpful and creepy. "To the question of creepiness, the answer is it depends who you ask," said Andrea M. Matwyshyn, an assistant professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, who studies the legal implications of technology. "What works for a group of 30-something engineers in Silicon Valley may not be representative of the way that 60-year-old executives in New York tend to use their phones." Many software programmers have dreamed of building a tool like this for years. 

The technology is emerging now because people are desperate for ways to deal with the inundation of digital information and because much of it is stored in the cloud where apps can easily access it. "We can't go on with eight meetings and 200 emails a day," said N. Rao Machiraju, co-founder and chief executive of reQall, which sells its technology to other companies to make their own personal assistant apps. "We have a technology that isn't waiting for you to ask it a question but is anticipating what you need and when is the best time to deliver that." The services guess what you want to know based on the digital breadcrumbs you leave, like calendar entries, emails, social network activity and the places you take your phone. 

Many use outside services for things like coupons, news and traffic. Google Now, which came to some Android phones a year ago and iPhones in April, tells you when it is time to leave for a dinner reservation. That is because it noticed an OpenTable email in your Gmail inbox, knows your location from your phone's GPS and checked Google Maps for traffic conditions. 

A couple days before you travel, it will show you weather in your destination, and when you arrive, currency exchange information and the time back home. Ask aloud that Google Now remind you to pick up milk next time you step in a grocery store, and an alert will appear when you are at Safeway. Successful predictive search, though, is as complicated as real life. If you are in London on business, which an app would know from the events on your calendar, you probably want a PDF related to work. 

But if you are there on vacation, you might want directions to Big Ben. "By the time you search, something's already failed," said Phil Libin, chief executive of Evernote, a note-taking app that actively shows previous entries related to current circumstances. Many of the apps use machine learning to get to know people over time. ReQall's service, for instance, can block calls from interrupting you during meetings. 

But one day, the young son of reQall's co-founder, Sunil Vemuri, was sick at home with Vemuri's father, who was urgently trying to reach him with a medication question. Because he called more than once and reQall knew the two had the same last name and spoke often, the app interrupted the meeting. 

The goal is to move beyond logistical help to sending you anything you might need to know. Google recently added book, movie and music recommendations, for instance. "You can just imagine several years down the road, if that personal assistant was an expert in every field known to humankind," said Amit Singhal, Google's senior vice president for search. 
Ads are not far off. "The better we can provide information, even without you asking for it, the better we can provide commercial information people are excited to be promoting to you," Larry Page, Google's chief executive, told analysts in April. Some skeptics say pushing ads and other unwanted information could be annoying or even a violation of privacy as the apps extract information from your private online files. 
If you watch a movie trailer on YouTube, for instance, Google Now might send local showtimes when the film arrives in your city. 

But what if you hated the trailer? "People could find the interface disruptive rather than helpful," Matwyshyn said. "It may not be the information you need just at that moment, because of the unpredictable rhythm of your life." Baris Gultekin, a product management director at Google who helped invent Now, said the company is aware of that risk and is "very conservative" with what it shows people. 

Daniel Gross, co-founder of another personal assistant app, Cue, said that is why it has started with alerts in which a person has signaled interest, by creating a calendar entry for example. "It's a really tricky problem, because on one hand you really want to give someone the best experience you possibly can," he said. "And on the other hand, you don't want someone to have this uncanny valley type of moment: 'Oh my gosh, this feels too good.'" © 2013, The New York Times News Service

How Much Is Your Gmail Account Worth?

Many people don't realize just how
valuable their email account is
. Now, thanks to researchers at the
University of Illinois at Chicago, a
nifty tool called Cloudsweeper
calculates how much your account
would be worth, if cyber-criminals
ever managed to get control.
Whenever someone's email gets
hacked, whether through a phishing
attack, malware, guessing passwords,
or plain brute-force, a common
complaint goes something like this:
"Why did I get hacked? There is
nothing interesting in my account."
The thing is, the criminals aren't
looking for exciting gossip buried
within your correspondence or looking
at the pictures you've emailed people.
They are looking for valuable data,
such as passwords to other accounts.
Your email account is quite frequently
used for password resets. If someone
gets control of your account, that
person can search through the saved
messages and figure out what other
sites use the email address for
account recovery. Access to your
online banking account, login
credentials for Facebook and Twitter,
and details for iTunes and Amazon
accounts are all accessible via your
email account. I know many people
who treat their email accounts as
secret storage, frequently emailing
private keys and password reminders
to themselves.
My Gmail Is Worth $15
Enter Cloudsweeper, a project from
researchers at the University of
Illinois at Chicago. The tool scans all
the messages in your account to figure
out what other services use the
address to send password reset
emails, or to login to the service. The
tool also tracks services that sent the
actual password when the user
clicked on the "forgot password" link.
The tool assigns a dollar figure to the
data pieces found to determine how
much the account is worth in the
underground market.
I ran one of my Gmail accounts
through Cloudsweeper, and it
determined my account would be
worth approximately $15.30 to bad
guys. I was surprised, because I use
this account purely for accessing
Google services and don't use it to
sign up for third-party services (I
keep a separate account for that) or
for regular correspondence (a
different account for that). I'd
forgotten that I did use this account for
one of Twitter accounts, as well as
my Kindle account on Amazon.
According to the tool, my Amazon.com
account was worth approximately $15
to the criminals and Twitter was worth
$0.30.
There were some false positives, as a
result of the fact that I long ago used
this account for my PayPal account.
I've since then changed the email
address associated with PayPal, but
since I still had some of their emails
archived, CloudSweeper flagged the
service as a potential risk. I asked a
friend to scan his account, and
Facebook popped up (worth $5) on his
list of risks, except he doesn't have an
account on that social network. The
alert seems to have been fooled by
various Facebook friend requests he
received in the past that he never
deleted.
How Much Are You At Risk?
Cloudsweeper uses prices for account
types and data collected from various
sellers across multiple underground
forums to calculate how much the
information in the user's email
account is worth, said Chris Kanich,
assistant professor at UIC's computer
science department and principal
organizer of the project. It uses OAuth,
so you just have to be logged in to the
account when you run the "audit" from
the project's page. No passwords are
stored, and you can just revoke
permissions at the end so the tool no
longer has any visibility into your
account.
If nothing else, this tool is great for
spring cleaning, to wipe out some of
the old emails that you don't need to
keep anymore. Close accounts you
aren't using, or at least make sure
your information has been removed.
And once you realize just how
valuable your account is,
Sources: PC Mag