Play Solitaire and Tic Tac Toe in Google Search

Google Search now comes with 2 games you can play right from your desktop or mobile browser: Solitaire and Tic-Tac-Toe. Just search for [solitaire] or [tic tac toe] and you can quickly start the games.

Solitaire has 2 difficulty levels: easy and hard. The game has realistic sounds and animations (you can mute sounds) and it also shows your stats, just like any other Solitaire app. Unfortunately, Google doesn't save your state, so you can't resume a game later.

Tic-Tac-Toe is much simpler and less pretty. You can choose between 3 difficulty levels (easy, medium and impossible) or pick an option that lets you play against a friend. The easy level always lets you win, the medium level lets you win sometimes, while in the impossible level you can never win.

An older game you can still play from Google Search is Pac-Man. It's actually the interactive doodle from May 21, 2010.

{ via Google Blog }

How to Monitor your Website’s Uptime with Google Docs

Would you like to receive instant alerts as soon as your website goes down or is inaccessible to users? Would you like to receive these downtime alerts as an email message or text on your mobile phone or both?

Most website monitoring services follow the “freemium” model – they have free plans for basic downtime & uptime monitoring of a website but need to pay for unlimited email or SMS alerts. You may also need to upgrade to monitor multiple websites. There’s a good alternate though.

Create your own Website Uptime Monitor with Google

You can create your own website monitor that runs on Google servers and sends email alerts or SMS when your website goes down or is up again. It logs everything in a Google Spreadsheet or you can even store the downtime activity inside Google Analytics.

How to Setup Website Monitor

Here’s how you quickly configure Google Docs to monitor the uptime /downtime of your website. This has to be done just once and the spreadsheet will continuously monitor your sites in the background. Let’s get started:

1. Click here to copy the website monitoring Google sheet into your Google Drive. You may either use your Gmail or Google Apps account to sign-in.
2. Go to the Website Monitor menu (near Help) and choose Configure. You may have to authorize the sheet the first time you configure the monitor.
3. Specify your website URL and the email address where you wish to be notified. You can put multiple addresses separated by commas.
4. [Optional] Enter the Google Analytics Id (e.g., UA-123456-78) and the site monitor will log downtime / uptime events in  your Analytics account.
5. You can turn on “Get text messages” to receive download alerts by SMS* on the mobile phone connected to your Google account.

Click the Start button and the Google sheet will start monitoring your website in the background. You can close the sheet.

The uptime and downtime times are logged in theGoogle Spreadsheet so you can use that data to analyze the performance of your web hosting company.

How Website Monitor works with Google Docs

Internally, a Google Script attached to the Google Sheet is doing the monitoring and logging events in Google Sheets and Google Analytics.

The script triggers every few minutes and then tries to fetch your website using URLFetchApp, a Google service similar to wget or curl. If the HTTP response code is anything other than 200, it indicates that there’s an issue with your website and an email alert is sent.

Sending SMS Alerts via Google Sheets

Google Apps Script can send email messages through Gmail but uses a workaround for sending SMS text messages. It creates an event in your default Google Calendar with an SMS reminder  – the event is set to expire in 30 seconds and thus you get an instant text alerts on your mobile.

Also see: Get SMS Alerts for Important Gmail Messages

*The SMS option is however only available to Google Apps for Work accounts. If you aren’t getting text alerts on your phone, please ensure that your phone number is associated with Google Calendar as detailed in this tutorial.

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The story, How to Monitor your Website’s Uptime with Google Docs, was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 10/08/2016 under Google Analytics, Google Docs, Internet.

How to Set Expiration Dates for Shared Google Drive Files

When you share any file or folder in Google Drive with another user, the shared links will work forever unless you manually change the sharing permissions. For instance, if you have shared a document with an external vendor, they’ll continue to have access to the file long after your business contract may have ended.

In such a situation, wouldn’t it be nice if you could set expiration dates while sharing files in Google Drive? For instance, share a document temporarily for, say, 10 days and access to the file should be revoked automatically after that period has passed.

Add an Auto-Expiry Date for Shared Links in Google Drive

Google Drive does let you set expiration dates for shared links but this option is only available to paid Google App for Work accounts.

Well, no worries. If you have a free Google account, you can still create temporary links that auto-expire after a certain time. Here’s a step by step guide:

1. Go to labnol.org/expire and authorize the web app to access your Google Drive.
2. Open the File Picker and select any file or folder in your Google Drive that you would like share.
3. Enter one or more email addresses (comma separated) of users who should be given viewer (read-only) or editor (read & write) access to your file.
4. Finally, specify the time period after which the access should be limited. You can say 5 hours or 3 weeks or even 2 years.

Click the “Set Expiration” button and you are done. The Google Script will set a time-based trigger that will automatically remove the specified user from the access list after the specified date and time.

You can also use the Google Drive Auditor add-on to analyze the shared permissions of every file in your Google Drive and know who can see your files.

The auto-expiry app will list all the files and folders that are set to expire after a certain period. You can click the “cancel” link against any Drive link to prevent that shared link from expiring automatically.

Also see: Make a Google Drive Tree (video)

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The story, How to Set Expiration Dates for Shared Google Drive Files, was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 08/08/2016 under Google Drive, Internet.

How to Make Pixel Paintings with Google Spreadsheets

You may have been using Google Spreadsheets for budgeting and project management but did you know that the same sheets application can also help you create impressive pixel paintings in minutes? The Google blog recently published a story of two illustrators who created a bright and beautiful wall mural using Google Spreadsheets.

Marina and Mallory connected on Google Hangouts to plan and sketch out ideas, and creatively “hack” Sheets in order to make art: resizing cells into thousands of pixel-like squares, merging cells to create color blocks, creating vibrant color gradients with conditional formatting and cell values, and other cool things we had no idea you could do with Sheets.

The idea is simple. Each cell in the spreadsheet corresponds to a pixel in the painting. You compute the color of the pixel and make it the background color of the corresponding cell. Now resize the spreadsheet cells in small perfect squares and your spreadsheet will look exactly like the original artwork.

How to Paint with Google Spreadsheets

If you would like to create your own spreadsheet art but don’t have the time to carefully paint every cell manually, here’s a simple workaround for you. You can take any photograph, vector art, or any other image and use a Google Script to convert that bitmap image into spreadsheet art.

Watch the video tutorial  or open this Google Sheet for sample artwork.

Create Pixel Art with Google Sheets

It takes few easy steps to make pixel art with Google Sheets. You can use any free image but make sure they are 300 pixels or less for optimal performance.

1. Open the Google Spreadsheet template and copy it to your own Google Drive.
2. Go to the Spreadsheet Art menu, choose the Image Upload option and select the picture that you’ve downloaded in the previous step.
3. The sheet will now parse every single pixel of your image and write the corresponding hex color codes in the spreadsheets cells.
4. Select the “Apply Colors” option and the Google Script will set the background color of every spreadsheet cell equal to the cell value.
5. The cells in the spreadsheet are rectangles whereas pixels are perfect squares. Select step 3 to resize every cell in the spreadsheet as a square.

And that’s it. Your spreadsheet art is now ready.

The end result may appear slightly pixelated (video) because we have used a small image as the source template but impressive nonetheless. You can download the Google Sheet as a PDF file or save it in Microsoft Excel format.

Pixel Paintings made with Google Spreadsheets – Link

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The story, How to Make Pixel Paintings with Google Spreadsheets, was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 08/08/2016 under Google Docs, Software.

Google Album Archive

Picasa Web Albums will be discontinued on August 1st, but you can still access your photos from the new Google Album Archive. "The album archive is where we keep all the photos that have been shared or stored on Google products, like Picasa, Google+, and Blogger," informs Google.

As you probably noticed, Google Photos doesn't show photos uploaded using other Google services, so it can't fully replace Picasa Web Albums or Google+ Photos. Google Album Archive lets you see, download or delete photos from Picasa Web Albums, Google+, Blogger, Hangouts, Google Drive and Google Photos.

Album Archive doesn't have a search feature, but there are separate sections for Google services. For example, you can find all the photos uploaded to Hangouts in one place.

If you're wondering what's happening with Picasa Web Albums links, this article has some answers:

Links that will continue to work
* Links to photos and albums whose URLs use your user ID number (and not your username).
* Links to Public Galleries whose URLs use your user ID number (and not your username).

Links that will stop working
* Slideshows embedded on websites.
* Picasa Web Albums & photos embedded on websites.
* Links to photos, albums, and Public Galleries whose URLs use your username (and not your user ID number).

{ Thanks, Brandon Giesing. }

Google Image Labeler Is Back

Google Image Labeler used to be a game that helped Google categorize images and improve image search. It was launched in 2006 and discontinued in 2013. Now Image Labeler is back, but it's no longer a game.

If you go to http://ift.tt/2an36ID, you'll see this message: "Ready to help Google Image Labeler? Look at a few public images to see if Google is organizing them right."

Then you can pick a category like birds, cats, dancing, concerts, food, cars, mountains, sky. If you use this URL: http://ift.tt/2algteA, you can add your own category (replace "Dogs" in the address bar with something different like Rainbows, Stairs or Moon).

Google shows Creative Commons images from Flickr categorized by Google's algorithms. You only need to answer to questions like "Does this image contain dancing?".

Add the Same File to Multiple Folders in Google Drive without Copying

Gmail works around the concept of tags (or labels) and any email message can belong to one or more tags. Google Drive has folders instead of tags and thus any file or folder in Drive can have a single parent folder. For instance, if you have uploaded a presentation file in Folder-A, it can’t simultaneously exist in Folder-B. Right?

Well, you’ll will be surprised to know that Google Drive does allow you to place any file inside one or more folders without you having to create multiple copies of that file. This makes Drive organization easier and if you edit the file inside one folder, all the other instances are updated as well since they are essentially pointing to the same file.

Add a file or folder to multiple folders in Google Drive without copying

How to Add a File to Multiple Folders in Google Drive

Here’s how you can place existing files or folders inside different multiple folders on Google Drive without making copies of the file.

Open the Google Drive website in your desktop’s web browser and select one or more files or folders. You can use the Control key on Windows, or Command key on Mac, to select non-consecutive files and folders. Now press Shift + Z and you’ll see an “Add to Folder” pop-up (see screenshot). Next select the folder where you wish to add the selected files and click OK.

That’s it. You have neither copied nor moved the files to the destination folder, you’ve merely created references or aliases to files inside the other folder. You can use the Shift+Z keyboard shortcut again to add the selected files to any other folders in your Google Drive.

This little feature will come handy in several cases. For instance, if you have a folder of pictures inside Google Drive, you can use Shift+Z to place some of these pictures into another shared folder. You need not create duplicate files in your Drive (saving storage space) and if you remove a picture from the parent folder, the file is gone from other folders too.

Also see: How to Replace Shared Files in Google Drive

Remove Files Placed in Multiple Folders

Let’s say you have a Folder B that contains references to a file placed in Folder A. If you move the Folder B to trash or if you remove the file from Folder B, the original file is deleted from the original Folder A as well. In such cases you may need to remove the placed file from Folder B before deleting the folder.

Remove a file alias from multiple folders in Google Drive

In Google Drive, select the file that is placed in multiple folders and open the activity sidebar. Here you’ll see a list of all folder that the file belongs to. All you need to do is click the little [x] symbol to remove that file from any folder in the list.

Add Files to Multiple Folders with Code

If you know Google Scripts, you can place a file or folder current folder into multiple folders using the Drive API as show below. [H/t David Scotts]

function organizeFolders() {
  
  // Parent Folders
  var parentA = DriveApp.createFolder("Dad");  
  var parentB = DriveApp.createFolder("Mom");
  
  // Child folder inside Parent Folder A
  var child   = parentA.createFolder("Child");
  
  // Place Child Folder inside another Parent Folder B  
  parentB.addFolder(child);
  
}

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The story, Add the Same File to Multiple Folders in Google Drive without Copying, was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 21/07/2016 under Google Drive, Internet.

How to Embed a Muted YouTube Video Player in your Website

It is easy to embed YouTube videos in your website. You grab the default IFRAME embed code, paste it anywhere inside your web page and you’re done. YouTube offers basic customization – you can modify the player dimensions or hide the YouTube branding – but if you would like to exercise more control over the  behavior of the embedded player, YouTube Player API is the way to go.

This tutorial explains how you can embed a YouTube video that will automatically play when the web page is loaded but with muted audio.

For instance, a products website may use short screencasts to highlight features and these videos will autoplay when the page is loaded. The volume is however set to 0 and the user can manually click to un-mute the video. Similarly, if you are using YouTube video backgrounds, it makes more sense to embed muted videos that run in a loop.

Mute the Embedded YouTube Player

See the demo page to get an idea of what we are trying to do here. The page loads, the video plays but with the audio slide is all the way down.

This is easy. Go the YouTube video page and note down the ID of the video from the URL. For instance, if the YouTube video link is http://youtube.com/watch?v=xyz-123, the video id is xyz-123. Once you have the ID, all you have to do is replace YOUR_VIDEO_ID in the following code with that string.

<div id="muteYouTubeVideoPlayer"></div>

<script async src="https://www.youtube.com/iframe_api"></script>
<script>
 function onYouTubeIframeAPIReady() {
  var player;
  player = new YT.Player('muteYouTubeVideoPlayer', {
    videoId: 'YOUR_VIDEO_ID', // YouTube Video ID
    width: 560,               // Player width (in px)
    height: 316,              // Player height (in px)
    playerVars: {
      autoplay: 1,        // Auto-play the video on load
      controls: 1,        // Show pause/play buttons in player
      showinfo: 0,        // Hide the video title
      modestbranding: 1,  // Hide the Youtube Logo
      loop: 1,            // Run the video in a loop
      fs: 0,              // Hide the full screen button
      cc_load_policty: 0, // Hide closed captions
      iv_load_policy: 3,  // Hide the Video Annotations
      autohide: 0         // Hide video controls when playing
    },
    events: {
      onReady: function(e) {
        e.target.mute();
      }
    }
  });
 }

 // Written by @labnol 
</script>

Next place the edited code in your web page and the embedded video would automatically play but muted.

You can further customize the player by modifying the various player variables as commented in the code. For instance, if you set loop as 1, the video will play in a loop. Set fs to 1 to show the fullscreen button inside the video player. Internally, the player is embedded using the YouTube IFRAME API. When the page is loaded, the onReady event runs that mutes the video.

The embedded YouTube video will autoplay, but muted.

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The story, How to Embed a Muted YouTube Video Player in your Website, was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 04/06/2016 under Embed, YouTube, Internet.

The 10 Important URLs That Every Google User Should Know

What does Google know about the places you’ve visited recently? What are your interests as determined by Google? Where does Google keep a list of every word that you’ve ever typed in the search box? Where can you get a list of Google ads that were of interest to you?

The 10 Important Google Links

Google stores everything privately and here are the 10 important links (URLs) that will unlock everything Google knows about you. They are hidden somewhere deep inside your Google Account dashboard and they may reveal interesting details about you that are otherwise only known to Google. Let’s dive in.

1. Google stores a list of usernames and passwords that you have typed in Google Chrome or Android for logging into various websites. They even have a website too where you can view all these passwords in plain text.

passwords.google.com

2. Google creates a profile of yourself based on the sites you visit, guessing your age, gender and interests and then use this data to serve you more relevant ads. Use this URL to know how Google sees you on the web.

http://ift.tt/18DDZYU

3. You can easily export all your data out of the Google ecosystem. You can download your Google Photos, contacts, Gmail messages and even your YouTube videos. Head over the the Takeout page to grab the download links.

http://ift.tt/nvNKto

4. If you ever find your content appearing on another website, you can raise a DMCA complaint with Google against that site to get the content removed. Google has a simple wizard to help you claim content and the tool can also be used to remove websites from Google search results that are scraping your content.

http://ift.tt/1PkWie3

5. Your Android phone or the Google Maps app on your iPhone is silently reporting your location and velocity (are you moving and if yes, how fast are you moving) back to Google servers. You can find the entire location history on the Google Maps website and you also have the option to export this data as KML files that can be viewed inside Google Earth or even Google Drive.

http://ift.tt/1SCbUZl

6. Create a new Google Account using your existing email address. The regular sign-up process uses your @gmail.com address as your Google account username but with this special URL, you can use any other email address as your username.

http://ift.tt/1gXTlNq

7. Google and YouTube record every search term that you’ve ever typed or spoken into their search boxes. They keep a log of every Google ad that you have clicked on various websites, every YouTube video you’ve watched and, if you are a Google Now user, you can also see a log of all your audio search queries. OK Google.

history.google.com (Google searches)
http://ift.tt/1wzUUvL (Voice searches)
http://youtube.com/feed/history (YouTube searches and watched videos)

8. You need to login to your Gmail account at least once every 9 months else Google may terminate your account according to their program policies. This can be an issue if you have multiple Gmail accounts so as a workaround, you can setup your main Gmail account as the trusted contact for your secondary accounts. Thus Google will keep sending you reminders every few months to login to your other accounts.

http://ift.tt/1IQNzfI

9. Worried that someone else is using your Google account or it could be hacked? Open the activity report to see a log of every device that has recently connected into your Google account. You’ll also get to know the I.P. Addresses and the approximate geographic location. Unfortunately, you can’t remotely log out of a Google session.

http://ift.tt/1JrCT60

10. Can’t locate your mobile phone? You can use the Google Device Manager to find your phone provided it is switched on and connected to the Internet. You can ring the device, see the location or even erase the phone content remotely. You can even find the IMEI Number of the lost phone from your Google Account.

http://ift.tt/16Xavbs

Also see: Secret URLs for Google Drive & Google Docs

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The story, The 10 Important URLs That Every Google User Should Know, was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 03/06/2016 under Google, Internet.

Find Who has Access to your Google Drive Files and Folders

The files and folders in your Google Drive are private by default until you decide to share them. You can share your documents with specific people or you can make them public and anyone on the Internet can view the shared files. Google Apps users have the option to share files and folders within the organization while restricting access to anyone outside the domain.

You can not only control who has access to your Google Drive files but can also assign the level of access they have on the shared files. You can set the access permissions to either view (read only) or edit (read & write). For instance, if you are to send a large file, you can upload the file to Google Drive and share it in view-mode with the recipient.

Who Can View or Edit your Drive Files?

You may have a number of documents, spreadsheets and other files in your Google Drive that are accessible to other users. These users could be your contacts, someone within your Google Apps domain or some of the shared files could be public meaning they are available to anyone on the web who have the link (URL) to the file.

Would you like to know which files and folders in your Google Drive are shared with other users and what kind of access permissions they have on your files? Google Drive, unfortunately, doesn’t offer an easy option for you to figure out who you are sharing the files with either inside or outside your organization.

Meet Permissions Auditor for Google Drive, a new Google add-on that scans your entire Drive and then generates a comprehensive report revealing who has access to your shared files and what kind of permission they have on the files. If you have been collaborating with people for some time, the Drive Auditor is probably is the easiest way to find out what you’ve shared in Google Drive and sanitize it.

Here’s a sample audit report.

Google Drive – File Permissions Report

Getting started is easy. First, install the Google Drive Auditor add-on and authorize it. Internally, this is a Google Script that runs inside your Google Account, reads the files found in Google Drive and writes their access details in the spreadsheet. Not a single byte of data every leaves your Google Account.

Watch the video tutorial (download) for a more detailed guide.

After the Drive Audit add-on is installed, go to the Add-ons menu inside the Google Spreadsheet, choose Drive Permissions Auditor and select Start Audit. It will open a sidebar where you need to specify a query and all matching files that match the query will be analyzed by the add-on.

Some sample Google Drive Search queries include:

• “me” in owners and trashed = false (all files owned by except those in trash)
• modifiedTime > ‘2016-01-01T12:00:00’ (file modified since Jan 2016 UTC)
• mimeType = ‘application/vnd.google-apps.spreadsheet’ (scan the access permissions of only Google Spreadsheets in my Google Drive)

Once the audit is complete, the report will reveal detailed information of every file including:

• When was a file created and last modified
• What is the file size and MIME type (file extension)
• Who is the owner of the file
• Who has edit, view and comment permissions on the file
• Where is the file located in Google Drive

You can click the File Name in the spreadsheet to directly open the corresponding file in Google Drive. Also, you can use the find function or even filters in Google Spreadsheets to display specific files that match a certain criteria. For instance, if you wish to know about all files that are public, you can apply a filter on the Access column in the spreadsheet.

The Drive Permissions Auditor add-on works for both Gmail and Google Apps accounts. If you are a domain administrator, you can install the Drive Audit add-on for all users in your domain through the Google Apps Marketplace.

The add-on is free and lets you audit up to 200 files in your Google Drive. If you have more files, please upgrade to the premium edition and analyze every single file and folder in your Google Drive.

Bonus tip: Did you know that you can set an auto-expiry date for your shared links in Google Drive. The shared link will automatically stop working after a certain date or time set by you.

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The story, Find Who has Access to your Google Drive Files and Folders, was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 01/06/2016 under Google Apps, Google Drive, Privacy, Internet.

How to Extract Email Addresses from your Gmail Messages

Acme Widgets Inc. has been in business for over 10 years and they have exchanged emails with thousands of customers and suppliers. The email messages are archived neatly in Gmail but most of the email addresses aren’t stored in Google Contacts. The company is now shifting office and they need to inform everyone via email of the office move.

The big task ahead is to extract all these email addresses from the Gmail mailbox and download them in a format, like CSV, that can be easily imported into the Google address book or a mailing list service like MailChimp.

Introducing Email Address Extractor, a Google add-on that sifts through all email messages in your Gmail account, extracts the email addresses and saves them in a Google Spreadsheet. It works for both Gmail and Google Apps accounts.

The Extractor can mine email addresses from a particular Gmail folder (label) or the entire mailbox. You can choose to extract emails of the sender, the recipient(s) and those in the CC list. The add-on can also parse the email‘s subject and message body for email addresses. This is useful for extracting addresses from generic senders, like PayPal emails or contact forms, where the email addresses are contained in the message body.

How to Extract Email Addresses in Gmail

You may follow the step-by-step guide or watch the video tutorial on YouTube (download) to get started:

1. Install the Gmail Extractor add-on and grant the necessary permissions. The add-on needs access to your Gmail and also to Google Drive for saving the email list inside a Google Spreadsheet.
2. Go to the addons menu inside the Google Spreadsheet, choose Email Address Extract and click Start to launch the extractor addon.
3. Specify the search criteria and all emails that match the rule will be parsed by the extractor. You may use any of the Gmail Search operators to filter messages.
4. Next select the fields (to, from, cc, bcc) that should be parsed for extracting emails (screenshot). The add-on can also pull names of the sender and recipients if they are available inside the message header.

Click the “Start” button and the extractor will start pulling emails into the spreadsheet. The entire process may take some time depending up on the size of your Gmail mailbox.

Gmail Extractor FAQ

The Google sheet should remain open and the computer should be online during the extraction. If the connection is lost, or if the extraction process is interrupted for some reason, you can simply click the “Resume” button and the extractor will pick from where it left off earlier.

If you go back to Gmail, you’ll find a new label called Extracted. This keeps tracks of the emails that have been processed and can safely delete this label after all the email address have been parsed and extracted.

The Google Spreadsheet created by Email Extractor add-on has two sheets – All Emails & Unique Emails. The first sheet includes every single email found in your Gmail account while the second sheet is a cleaned up list sans any duplicate emails. This is the sheet you should use for building your address book.

The free version of the add-on is fully featured but it would only extract addresses from up to 500 email threads (a thread contains multiple email messages). The premium version (link) imposes no such restriction and it entitles you to 90 days of complimentary support.

Internally, it is a Google Script that uses the magic of Regular Expressions to pull email addresses from Gmail. The extracted email addresses are saved in a Google spreadsheet that can be used as input for sending personalized email messages through Gmail Mail Merge.

Also see: Schedule Emails in Gmail for Sending Later

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The story, How to Extract Email Addresses from your Gmail Messages, was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 26/05/2016 under GMail, Internet.

How to Identify the Gender of your Twitter Followers

Do you ever wonder what is the demographics of people who follow you on Twitter. How many of your Twitter friends are men? Or women? Or random colored eggs, people who are either too lazy to change their default avatar or maybe they are Twitter bots.

The Graph Search of Facebook can provide deep insights into the demographics of people who are connected with you on the social network. For instance, you can write a natural language query like “My friends who are older than 30” or “My female friends who live in Delhi” and the answer will be available instantly. Such granular data is however not available for Twitter users.

Who Follows You? Males, Females or Eggs

How do you programmatically determine the gender of a person on Twitter?

The Twitter API doesn’t provide the gender information but there’s a workaround. You can take the profile picture of a Twitter user, feed it into Siftr’s Vision API and it will detect the gender of the most prominent face in the photograph. You can go a step further and use Microsoft’s Face API and it will even provide the approximate age of the subject in the photo.

Detecting Gender of Twitter users with Image Recognition

 

Analyze your Twitter Followers

Meet Twitter Analyzer, a web app that analyzes your Twitter network (friends or followers) and logs the details of all user inside a Google Spreadsheet (see screenshot). You get to know their gender, how often they tweet, where are they located, when did they last join Twitter and more.

Getting started is easy. Go to labnol.org/analyzer and sign-in with your Google Account. It requires all these permissions because the underlying Google Script saves everything inside a Google Spreadsheet that will be in your Google Drive. Once the Twitter followers have been analyzed, you’ll get an email notification.

After you’ve granted the necessary permissions, click “Authorize Twitter” to allow the sheet to access your Twitter account. It will never post any tweet to your profile. Next click the scan button and close the page. You’ll get an email once the analysis is complete and this time will vary based on the number of followers you have.

Go to labnol.org/analyzer to scan your Twitter followers

 

Identifying Humans vs Twitter Bots

Camisani Calzolari wrote a set of rules (PDF) that can help detect real users from bots, inactive accounts and fake Twitter users. Some of the rules are:

• The account has written at least 50 tweets
• the account has at least 30 followers
• the profile contains a URL
• the profile contains an image
• the profile contains a biography
• it has been inserted into other Twitter lists

The Google Spreadsheet that is generated by the Twitter Analyzer app includes most of this information as well. Thus, apart from gender analysis, the Analyzer app may help you figure out how many fake bots and inactive profiles follow you on Twitter.

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The story, How to Identify the Gender of your Twitter Followers, was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 23/05/2016 under Twitter, Internet.

Google Translate Autocomplete

Google Translate for desktop now shows suggestions and autocompletes your text, much like Google Search. This works for English, French, Italian, Spanish, German, Portuguese, but you have to manually pick the input language instead of relying on automatic detection.

The new feature helps you translate faster common phrases and expressions, but it's not very useful for long texts.

{ Thanks, Emanuele Bartolomucci. }