Official Google Reader Blog: Powering Down Google Reader.
I’m definitely one of the affected faithful that will be sad to see Google Reader go.
I’ve been using Chrome on my iPhone since it became available over a month ago. Here are positives and negatives from my point of view.
Positives
The best part of Chrome for iOS is the integration with Chrome “as a platform.” That means I can use Chrome on multiple devices and leverage the Google Sync features tied to my Gmail account. Here’s the setting in Chrome for iOS:
As a result, I can see my bookmarks from other devices:
And reports on when/where my information was last synced:
The multiple tab view on Chrome for iOS is also efficient. You can click the tab icon in the top right and see all active tabs. You can scroll up/down easily and Chrome for iOS with automatically slide the tabs so 3 show at one time. Also, you can swipe any active tab (not in the all-tab view) left or right to quickly switch tabs. That’s a lot easier than opening all pages and swiping to the desired one as in Safari for iOS.
Lastly, I can see the usual icons for recently-closed tabs here:
Negative
One negative, but a really annoying one, is that my bookmarks are at least 3 clicks away. I need to open the context menu, click bookmarks and then click the bookmark I want to visit. That’s translates into a lot of clicking every day. Luckily, the tab swiping feature lets me keep all my frequently-visited tabs open at once and easily switch between them, which is faster than opening bookmarks.
A client recently experienced a Denial of Service (Dos) attack….except it originated from a partner! Well, not an authorized partner. Turns out a to-remain-nameless financial aggregation company asks their customers to provide login credentials to their financial websites. They then use the credentials to write a script that simulates a log in on their customer’s behalf and retrieves balance and payoff information to include in the aggregated financial report. There are a few problems with this:
- The aggregator simulates the login in a batch process, sometimes hitting a single financial institution with 10′s of thousands of requests in a short period of time, which behaves a lot like a denial of service attack
- The fact an individual shared login credentials with a third party (the aggregator) is usually against the Terms of Use with their financial partner
- The login simulation can be easily disrupted since it relies on open access to a public website, which is not a quality service to offer customers.
In my client’s case, they discovered the unauthorized access to their site and opted to block all traffic from the aggregator’s services. This left the aggregator in a precarious spot — service cut off to their customer and no leverage to negotiate a way to get back access to the financial site. They aggregator asked nicely for access to be reopened, and my client is considering it, but two months later they are still waiting.
Removing Locations from Facebook status updates when using your browser is pretty easy. You can clear it out once and it won’t come back the next time unless you proactively add it back in. Let’s call this an opt-out setting. Thanks, Facebook!
But….who uses a browser to update status? The same feature is not available for my iPhone app, or any mobile app for that matter. According to the Facebook help library, this article describes how to remove location from a specific status update:
http://www.facebook.com/help/?faq=297024380340522
But of course, there’s no way to save that preference and you need to remove location EACH TIME you update your status. Thanks, Facebook! (this time I’m being facetious of course.)
This reminds me why I linked my Twitter account to Facebook. I’ll just have to remember to Tweet status updates instead of enter them in the app.
I do a significant portion of my shopping at Amazon.com. It’s easy, the selection is impressive and with Amazon Prime, I get my purchases fast and more affordably than paying for shipping each time.
Today I shopped for a swivel arm desk lamp and found a good one that I added to cart. I was happy to see the item available for “Next-day shipping FREE bonus”. There was an additional note later in the checkout process (no I didn’t use one-click because I didn’t want to use my default shipping and payment options) that indicated the next-day delivery was “from a location near you” which made the shipping fast and free.
This is something I haven’t yet seen at Amazon and for which I can’t find any recent news articles. Is it a new feature? Is it available only to Prime subscribers? Maybe I just never hit the right product for my location!?!?! I’m curious if anyone knows answers and I’m happy to be getting my desk lamp at my door tomorrow.
