Webtropic

I was complaining recently about the error one was about to get when attempting to subscribe to a feed with his iphone or iPod touch.
As if Apple was actually listening, the new version of the iPhone OS (2.2), remedied the problem: one can now use the mobile version of iTunes to subscribe to podcasts listed in the Apple Store(first pic).
There is an important difference though. Through iTunes, subscribing to the podcast feed is not an option. What you get instead is that you can select individual episodes to download. It’s better than nothing but this is stll a crippled podcatching. The question us why.

Problem :
I had this old Gmail account and all its paraphernalia (Google Reader, Google  Docs, Analytics, etc) which was named after a ‘nick’ I used in my first blogging days.

Recently I decided to consolidate my various email accounts in Gmail and since some of them were business accounts I did not want customers to see a mail proxied by a strange nicknamed email account. So, I decided to move my old account to a new one named after an abbreviation of my real name.

Now, this sounds simple but it is not. Here is why and how I did it.

Step by step solution:

1. Gmail: In old account go to: Settings>Forwading & Pop/IMAP and enable IMAP.In the new account go to: Settings>Account>Get mail from other accounts and set to receive mail from your old account. Depending on how old is your account and how many messages does it have, it is going to take a fair amount of time for the new account to get all the old messages. In my case it took approximately 24 hours.
2. Google Reader: Since your gmail is tied to a google account, your Google Reader will be, presumably, under the old account and you would want to move it too. There are two tasks to undertake here, an easy one, and a difficult one.
   1. The easy one is to move your feed subscriptions and it is easy because Google Reader provides us with the tools: Log in to google reader with your old account, go to Manage Subscriptions >Import/Export and export your  subscriptions as an OPML. Then log out and log in again with your new account, go to the same place, only now do an import of the OPML file you exported before.
   2. Now, the difficult one:  you want to bring in the new Google Reader, the friends you were sharing with. You have again two options here: share with a selected list of friend, or share with all your contacts. Google has a cumbersome process for making ‘friends’ in Google Reader. Basically, the people you share with have to be Chat contacts, and you need to explicitly ‘invite them to chat’. You start by opening once again your old Gmail account, going to contacts, selecting them all and exporting them in a csv file.From the same point but having logged with your new account, you perform an import of the .csv previously created. But the work just starts: you can use the setting ‘Share with your chat contacts‘ so that everyone in your chat list sees what you share, but there is no way to get the others to share back with you automatically. You have to ask them. I did it both by sending email and announcing the fact in twitter. On the other hand,  if you want to share with only selected people, you have to invite them one by one, in chat.
3. Next thing you’d want to do is create a new public profile for your shared items (and more). Go from Google Reader to your stuff and on the right you will see a link to create a new profile. After creating the profile you will end up with something like this:
4. Google Docs: For your old Google Docs you can take the painstaking approach and export each one of them and then reimport them in you new account (highly improbable) or just select all the documents and share them with … yourself under the new gmail account and as a collaborator.
5. Last but not least, in the Analytics part. Again, the things one will be required to change/tranfer/move depends on how many Google Products/Services was using. I have picked only these four (Gmail, Google Reader, Google Docs and Analytics) because this were the ones I had the most stuff on. Now, analytics is a bit different from the other Google services: there is an analytics account which is not identical with the Google Account.  Websites tracked are set as web site profiles under the analytics account. Assuming you were using analytics, these should already be in place but each profile has an admin which must be set under your old gmail account. Login to analytics with your old google account and add as new admin to each website profile your new account. Then, log in to analytics with your new account, go to each profile and  delete the old admin.

That’s about it.  I have posted everything here because I found the process quite time consuming. I hope this can help people who want to do the same, or motivate others who have done it more efficiently to share their own experiences

I am observing this strange rush the past 4 days: people come to this blog searching for comparisons between Blackberry Storm, G1 Android and iPhone. The source of the attraction is this month old post, which attempted a comparison between the three phones, plus Nokia 5800, using Google Trends.
My question is why? Are there not enough comparisons out there? Why this particular post ranks high in Google searches while it does not provide ANY technical comparison?

And why Google keeps sending people regardless the search word combination they try. Any ideas?

I saw it today. Checked it with two different browsers (Firefox and Safari) in two different computers. Looked the same as the image below. Don’t know how long is it like this. The question is how long it will remain…

Image by ViaMoi via Flickr

Qwitter, the recently launched service that notifies twitter users who is unfollowing them, has created tremors in the blogosphere. Most posts I have read consider qwitter an unnecessary nuisance or even plainly harmful (to the peace of mind at least).

I beg to differ and I’ll try to explain why.

When one has a few thousands of followers on twitter, he probably really knows only a few dozens of them. He ignores who and why  follows him (he probably does not even care), while he rarely engages in a spammer cleanup activity.

Before Qwitter one would look at the total number of his followers and if a notable difference was observed, he might wonder why, but never go to looking who actually started or discontinued following him.

But getting emails that say: “such and such xxxstopped following you on Twitter after you posted this tweet … (implying that there might be a relationship between the two facts), then these emails have an alarming effect. They become personal. They stir emotions. They upset. Justifiably? Well, no. Unless one has a fair idea who is unfollowing him. But for a big  number of followers this is impossible.

Now, in my case, my current number of followers allows me to be able to distinguish whether someone is a spammer, or a true follower. And qwitter has been helpful in making me recognize certain patterns of behavior among true followers and spammers.
I don’t follow back any spammer so they have no reason to follow me for a long time. They do not have any kind of relationship to retain with me, so after adding up for a while in the number of people they are following, they have to get rid of me, to bring their follower/following ratio down to a more ‘acceptable’ level. And this is precisely what they do: after a while spammers unfollow those who follow.

When receiving a qwitter notification, I can immediately recognize  whether  the ‘person’ unfollowing me is a spammer or not, because, as I said, I know all my true followers by name.

In the past few weeks that I use qwitter only one non spammer has unfollowed me. But then again wasn’t he? Because along with the obvious spammers there is a category of aggressive twitters who want to attract followers by all means. So what they do is practically the same with what spammers do, only more clever: they follow others in the hope the others will follow back, but they do it while keeping all the time their following/follower ratio balanced in order not to be considered as spammers, and follow people with whom they had a light interaction before, so that they are not considered completely strangers.

These are the things that qwitter helped me realize. Maybe too obious, maybe trivial. But from a hunch to a proof, there is always a distance to cover. And, for this distance, qwitter has been my vehicle.

Or is this is just a ‘bad’ kind’ of applications? Don’t know but it is annoying.