Get Invisible in Google Talk at Desktop with Prism

Google Talk was launched on August 24, 2005. Since then it lacked in features such as Invisibility mode, Video Chat, etc which other competitors like Yahoo Messenger supported. Google has surely added these features in past year but only to its online versions of Gtalk i.e. Gmail and the desktop version is lacking behind.

Google also have a beta version which is based on Adobe Flash and is having a sky of errors. Using the Google Talk Labs Edition gets impossible at times and most users un-install it. Google seems to be slow at desktop development of Gtalk. So we came up with the following solution for invisibility in Google Talk.

In order to use invisibility at desktop, here is a short tutorial which lets you run the online version of Gtalk on your desktop.

First step is to download Prism, a product in development by Mozilla Group which integrates web applications with the desktop, allowing web applications to be launched from the desktop and configured independently of the default web browser.

Note: This trick will only work on all Windows OS as currently Prism runs only on it.

Second step is to run the prism and configure and create a Prism app (basically a Prism shortcut) and specify the Google Talk Gadget URL in it.

The Step by Step Guide:

1. Download Mozilla Prism.
2. Install the Prism.
3. Run Prism, a window will open. Paste this link ( http://talkgadget.google.com/talkgadget/popout ) in the URL field.
4. Give it a name as “Google Talk Gadget”.
5. Configure other options as per your need as where do you want to place its shortcuts. Prism creates a shortcut for every app you create. Make sure you place atleast create one shortcut.
6. Run the shortcut you just created.
7. Re-size the window to look like a messenger by using Drag button in the bottom right of the window.

I found this as an effective way to remain offline while staying at your desktop and without launching your heavy browser. Though you get invisibility in Gtalk at your desktop but there is still a flaw in this trick. It doesn’t notify you when a contact comes online or goes offline. Also when someone sends a message, the window in Taskbar never blinks and so you have to keep a check at this window in order to know if you have got any message. So basically you get no notifications by this method. If you have any better way than this, do drop a comment below.

Run Any File of Any Format in Windows Media Player

Windows Media Player is one of the best media players for Windows OS but many people avoid using it as their main player because it supports very few formats as Microsoft ships it with Windows without much codec’s built-in. But now you can play just any file of any format in Windows Media Player by just installing a small package. Though Windows Media Player has been ignored by many but I still prefer using WMP because of its strong integration with Windows and other apps. And now you can also bypass the limitation of playing limited formats by installing a small package known as K-Lite Codec package, so you get another reason to love Windows Media Player.

Download K-Lite Codec Package

K-Lite Codec Package has different variants to suit everyone’s need from Basic to Mega and a special Corporate Edition. To find the one that best suits you, visit the CodecGuide site to download the one of your need.

Watch a Short Video Tour of Microsoft Bing

Bing is the name of Microsoft’s new search engine that expected to go live sometime next week. You can find overview documents and screenshot images of Bing here while of video tour of the Bing.com service is available here.

See What’s Popular on the Web In One Page

OurSignal is an interesting visualization that shows the current most popular stories from Digg, Delicious, Reddit, Hacker News and Yahoo! Buzz in one page.

Most Popular Tech Stories on the Web

The font size in the visualization is relative to the popularity of a story (bigger means more popular) while colors denote the trend - warm colors mean that story is increasing in popularity while cool colors indicate that the story is sliding off the charts.

What’s useful about OurSignal is that it auto-hides headlines of all stories that you may previously read in the browser. It does so by matching the web address of stories against URLs stored in your browser history and if there’s a match, it means that you’ve visited that link before and so it’s not shown in the the visualization map.

Stories on the OurSignal page are refreshed every 15 minutes so this could do as an interesting screensaver as well.

New Evolution of Web 3.0 and its Concepts

This slide neatly sums up the main differences between Web 1.0, Web 2.0 and Web 3.0.

Web 1.0 - That Geocities & Hotmail era was all about read-only content and static HTML websites. People preferred navigating the web through link directories of Yahoo! and dmoz.

Web 2.0 - This is about user-generated content and the read-write web. People are consuming as well as contributing information through blogs or sites like Flickr, YouTube, Digg, etc. The line dividing a consumer and content publisher is increasingly getting blurred in the Web 2.0 era.

Web 3.0 - This will be about semantic web (or the meaning of data), personalization (e.g. iGoogle), intelligent search and behavioral advertising among other things.

If that sounds confusing, check out some of these excellent presentations that help you understand Web 3.0 in simple English. Each takes a different approach to explain Web 3.0 and the last presentation uses an example of a "postage stamp" to explain the "semantic web".

The Evolution of Web 3.0

View more Microsoft Word documents from Marta Strickland.

Here is another classic video explaining the Web 3.0 concepts.

Why Web 3.0?

View more Microsoft Word documents from Sabin Buraga.