Google made a shameful move last week to people’s privacy. She has been losing in the social area since Facebook and Twitter’s dominance. On one side Microsoft – Facebook getting closer on search deal. Twitter is also moving towards Google. Facebook had revealed their search numbers several months back. “Over 600 million searches per month” when their member numbers was around 200 Million and they had doubled it since then. Putting together all this, Google needed the best dang for the shot and they did it by prying on everybody’s privacy. They couldn’t have any ground on social side with Orkut, Google Profile, Friends, Gtalk, all those things miserable failed and they couldn’t dominate it. Buzz privacy failure was another attempt to create the reaction to awaken people to use their services. It created a lot of debate and they took action right away to limit Buzz after the reactions.

Personally, I was exposed to my employees on my personal Gmail account and when I realized my private accounts were revealed all together in Google Buzz to everybody, I tried to close it down but there was no option offered by Google. It didn’t just happen to me but there was a woman with her lover in trouble which caused social reaction on twitter and other websites.

I find Google’s action to create the social reaction and find the attention that they were missing on social marketing side for a long time.

Google Update software is used to keep Google based applications up-to-date on your system. Google Update keeps track of downloaded softwares (Google Toolbar, Google Earth etc.) and as soon as there is download available, it downloads the update by default. If you are also getting tired of seeing GoogleUpdate.exe running in Windows Task Manager, you have several options.

1. Uninstall Google Updater

   You can follow regular steps of uninstalling software on your windows. Start -> Control Panel -> Add Remove Programs you will see “Google Updater” listed in Add Remove Programs window and click on Remove. Although this is the cleanest method,it is not the permanent solution. Next time you would like to download a Google Software, Google Updater will be installed automatically and you will end up dealing with same crap.
   

   With this step, you will uninstall Google Update Software.

2. Remove Google Updater from Scheduled Tasks

   Although Google claims to be “angle” and “not being any devil”, it really acts like one when it comes to Desktop Software. They are very persistent to keep running Google Update, Google Notifier and other Google software applications in the background of every Windows user. You will see one example of it with Google Update. As soon as you install Google Update software, it adds itself to Scheduled Tasks and unless you are a pro user of some kind, you will not realize this. You can check more details of this argument on “Why Google’s Software Update Tool is Evil“.

   Here are a few reasons why an always-active daemon (software speak for a tiny app that runs in the background) for handling software updates is a bad idea:

   1. It opens up an always-on tunnel to Google. While Google may be confident its update servers will never be compromised, how confident are you? If a third party gains control of that server, it can inject nearly any code it wants into your machine.
   2. It’s always on, always looking for update. On an expensive, pay-by-the-megabyte EVDO network? Google Updater doesn’t care and will suck down any available updates without asking, costing you money.
   3. Google updates Google Earth or Picasa or Gtalk, but the update ends up having a bug that wipes data from your drive. Sorry, too late — the auto-updater already grabbed the latest version without asking. Kiss your data goodbye.
   4. Administering a large network that needs to be locked down and tightly controlled? Cross Google software off your list. All the above problems apply, but they’re cascaded across your network for added headaches.

   In order to remove Google Update keep running in the background, you can go under Scheduled Tasks by; Start -> Programs -> Accessories -> Systems Tools -> Scheduled Tasks

   You should remove all Google Update tasks on this window.

   

Search engine giant Google is having very hard time with keeping up with Better Business Bureau. There are lots of complaints about Google Adsense payment practices which is affecting many web publisher. Google Adsense Support team is terribly lacking of replying to messages or solving the issues for webmasters. The forum opened for Google Adsense Support is left to users discretion and Google Adsense Support team is not even responding to one message in the forum.

There are tens of web publisher listed under:
Please respond here if you Google has not paid you in multiple months for no apparent reason and there hasn’t been any response to their quest. Many of those webmasters who couldn’t get an answer months of months waiting period, they started filing complaints to Better Business Bureau in Santa Clara, San Benito, Santa Cruz, and Monterey. We also filed a complaint recently to this department about our Google Adsense payments. Google had sent the payments to the wrong address and after tons of messages to Google Adsense Support Team, we are left without options.

If you are experiencing similar problems with Google Adsense Payments, you can simply follow this link to file a complaint on Better Business Bureau against Google.

Google’s Better Business Bureau rating is “D” which simply means “don’t do business with Google”:

Our opinion of what this rating means:
We have enough concerns about this company (for example, their offer, customer complaints, advertising, etc.) that we recommend caution in doing business with it.

One sample complaint to Better Business Bureau:

DESCRIPTION OF PROBLEM: “Google has had numerous problems with its automated AdSense payments to its “publishers” (people who create original content that attracts internet viewers). Many like many others, it seems my account is on an invisible hold for unknown reasons. I have followed ALL the account setup instructions and pretty much worthless Help advice, providing accurate contact and bank account information for Electronic Fund Transfer. This bank account is showing as verified and no “Holds” of any kind are indicated on the account. And yet I have yet to be paid. Worse, Google AdSense has NO contact phone number or even a useful email address to resolve this problem. Further, its instructions note that if funds are “not claimed” by six month point they will be returned to the advertisers! So they are holding my money and threatening return of my earnings with no recourse. No PIN (confusing as to when/why it would be required) was ever issued and no links show up that enable me to request a new one.”

I was reading Matt Cutts blog about Google Chrome. He is the public face of Google and has been doing great job keeping it that way. This blog (Ten things I don’t like about Google Chrome) was a good proof of that.

After reading his blog and seeing comments, I wanted to add my negative views about Chrome:

-Google Chrome might claim memory usage improved. I normally work with over 10 tabs at a time and when I open Google Chrome with 17 tabs (right now) it is using:
Pysical Memory: 385 MB
Virtual Memory: 430 MB

This is a real life usage of Chrome and total memory of 815 MB / 17 = 50 MB per page doesn’t really look optimum to me.

I recently optimized Firefox 2, applied the tweaks offered on websites. It started doing great job. I have all the toolbars and addons that give me great flexibility as well. Even Maxthon is far better then this memory usage. I say “even Maxthon” because it is based on Internet Explorer 6 and we know how extravagant Microsoft when it comes to memory and disk usage.

Seeing I was able to improve a lot with Firefox 2, another question comes to mind, why act arrogant and start a brand new project, make a new department and hire lot of engineers while you can be great help to improve Firefox? an ON-GOING, OPEN SOURCE PLATFORM…

-Chrome uses lot of disk space for caching. All the images on ‘Most visited’ page is stored in BMP format (or somewhere close that) each of those screenshots take about 1 Mbyte. After I used couple of days, when I checked cache disk usage it was almost 1 Gbyte.

I had cleaned Chrome folder and just fired up after I saw this thread:

12/11/2008 11:34 PM 25,989,120 History Index 2008-10
12/11/2008 11:15 PM 16,547,840 History Index 2008-11
12/11/2008 11:46 PM 2,600,960 History Index 2008-12
12/17/2008 11:27 AM 444,256 History Index 2008-12-journal

12/17/2008 11:27 AM 30,412,800 Thumbnails

I couldn’t find any place to change Cache settings so I am stuck with Google Chrome’s high disk usage.

-URL section is TERRIBLE. It might be a strategic idea for Google to combine URL section with Google Search Engine as default and capture more data from users. I changed that to just use history but even that when I try to find ‘typed url’ it takes forever because I have to delve into all my historical crap and find the one I’m looking for.

-Another bad thick with URL section is that if you type something wrong, it remains there. You are stuck with that thereafter, you can’t remove it, clean it but have to live it till it gets overwritten.

I haven’t found any good addons for Google Chrome that will help my browsing experience. So far best part of Google Chrome is rendering speed. It has been doing great job with Ajax based javascript heavy loaded websites.

So final word is Google Chrome has achieved to get %2-3 of web browser portion in very short time but still lots to go and I am very reluctant to use unless above issues get fixed in new releases.

While I was looking at my Google Adsense profile, I saw a message box saying ‘TIP Is your phone number correct? Please visit the account settings page and make any necessary updates to ensure that you can be reached at the phone number associated with your account. ‘

I realised the phone number in my profile was old one so I just changed it with the new number and press on the update button. It gave a verification code, first I could not get into what’s going on and again pressed on ‘Submit call request now’ oops, my phone began to ring out of the blue
Helloo, this is Google adsense customer blah blah blah.

That was too quick, I was really surprised wanted to note this