The first thing I noticed was that I’d lost some features I’d enabled on the standard gmail.

I’d been using:

Settings > General > Browser Connection > Always use https (for tighter security)
Settings > Labs > Signature tweaks

Experimenting with various others, including as announced in the last 24 hours:

Settings > Labs > Tasks (a new To Do list feature)

More than anything I wanted to see what I could see before. It’s frustrating not to have them available as standard in Google Apps.

The good news is that you can activate these “hidden” features in Google Apps if you know where to look. As it’s not in the most intuitive place, I thought I’d explain where to find it.

First go to manage your Manage this domain, select Domain Settings, then scroll down the General tab to the section called New Services and Features

Here you have two checkbox options for:

1. Turn on new features (like group chat or colored labels)
2. Turn on new features in this domain when they are launched to Google consumers (before Google supports them for organizations using Google Apps)

Switching these on should enable Labs in your apps settings.

In this series of short articles I’m going to run through a few things you can set up quickly and for free to follow what people are saying about the things you’re interested in.

This article looks at Google Alerts.

[Also in this series: Part 2 - Technorati Watchlists, Part 3 - Twitter tracking]

I’m using East Dulwich as an example, but you can do this for any number of subjects.

As well as for personal interest, these techniques are useful if you want to keep an eye on what people are writing about your industry, company, product, service, or your competition, not to mention your favourite sports team, tv programme, pop singer… So if you work in marketing, product development, corporate communication, the press office, public relations – to name but a few – take note.

Google alerts

Google Alerts is a service which emails you when it finds a new mention of your chosen subject.

So rather than you having to search for East Dulwich every now and then, you can get Google to do the searching for you.

You can have alerts sent to your preferred email address, but you’ll need a google account (free and quick to set up) if you want to edit and manage your alerts.

Here’s what you have to do:

1. Visit google alerts
2. Type in the subject you want to track, e.g. East Dulwich or SE22
3. Choose the type of search you’d like. The choices are news, blogs, video, web, groups or comprehensive (an aggregate of recent results)
4. Select how often you’d like google to email you. The options are as it happens, once a day and once a week.

That’s it. Now you’ll never miss another mention of your chosen subject – as long as google picks it up of course.

You can set up as many alerts as you need.

The alerts are in the same format as the search results. They highlight where your subject is mentioned and link to the original source.

Apparently you require a “high school” education to read this blog.

I haven’t dug around to see what, if any, algorithm is being used to calculate readability.

Rather worryingly when I put http://news.bbc.co.uk in it came back saying you needed to have a college postgrad education to read it, and to be able to read www.google.com you need to be a Genius. Something fishy going on there methinks.

OpenSocial from Google. Not another social network.

Is this a nail in Facebook’s coffin?

It’s funny, I’ve become so accustomed to consciously ingnoring google ads on web pages that the little box promoting the opensocial blog on the homepage nearly escaped my attention.

That’s a mighty fine amount of free (as in lunch) online data storage.

And to my great astonishment that day has arrived (at least on Google anyway)!

I had to capture this as no doubt tomorrow the search algorithms will be adjusted to counter vanity attacks like this (ok and the search spammers as well).

If you add in every small business in the world – and believe me, Google is thinking that way – you can sum up Google’s ambitions in the commercial world as this: the company would like to provide a platform that mediates supply and demand for pretty much the entire world economy.

John Battelle in his new book The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture

And from Battelle’s blog last week a post about base.google.com…

Word is ripping around the web that Google is testing a new subdomain called base.google.com. A screen shot – the site has been up and down – shows a Google database of sorts where you can “Post your items on Google.” It’s a tagged database of stuff that heads directly into the world of Paul Ford’s classic “Google Takes All” essay.

It’s weird. Even though lots of the time Google’s search doesn’t bring back what I want, and even though they’re starting to take over the world, my overall experience of Google is positive. I don’t feel the same sense of “can I trust them?” I feel when I’m using (or thinking of using) products and services supplied by other global brands.

You need a Google account (gmail address) to use it.

Like gmail it makes extensive use of ajax for screen-based rather than page-based interactions.

On the plus side it’s as jargon free as you can get with something like this. A healthy thing that should take the feed reader beyond the realm of the somehwat geeky.

You have “subscriptions” and a “reading list.”

The user interface lets you focus on articles and behaves like the “Preview Pane” in Outlook so you can move up and down the list of titles and the content will appear in a larger area of the screen to the right.

But in doing so it strips the content of any of its original personality and makes everything look the same.

You can label your subscriptions so you can find them later, in the same way you can label emails in gmail.

It mixes keyboard shortcuts with mouse clicks – I still haven’t figured out how you’d add a Star to an article without a mouse.

But I don’t get a sense of community from it and I can’t see how I’d share stuff other than being able to blog it (if I was using blogger) or email it (if I was using gmail). It doesn’t feel like a two-way thing.

I’m sticking with Bloglines for the time being.

Having just read that a google calendar might be with us within a month, I might just wait and see what it looks like.