Even Google is not secure from the downturns on the economy. This week it announced the discontinuation of its virtual world service called Lively. Lively was launched with a lot of fanfare earlier this month, but quickly lost traction with the crowd. I personally only checked it out once. Google does give a reason for why it is shutting down the service on its own blog here. Here’s the gist of this reason:

It has been a tough decision, but we want to ensure that we prioritize our resources and focus more on our core search, ads and apps business.

Well, that is a fair enough reason for shutting down the service. After all everyone is cutting costs, and though I am pretty sure no one at Google lost their job as a result of this shutdown, but I think I would still think of this as a Layoff from Google’s point of view.

If you are one of those people who get asked a lot of questions by colleagues, friends, and family, and the answer usually composes of the first link that you got after you googled their question, here’s the best thing for you.

It’s called, let me Google that for you.

Let Me Google That For You is a nice joke on all people who can’t get it through their minds to simply use Google instead of asking mundane questions of others. It will allow you to specify a Google search, and then it generates a link which you can send to whoever raised the question in the first place.

When the user visits the link, it shown an animation of how to conduct that Google Search, and then takes the user to the search results. I guess this is a pretty indirect direct way of letting people know what you think of their questions.

Give it a try, and let us know in comments if you actually end up using it with someone.

If you thought that Google Docs is cool when it allows multiple people to edit a document at the same time, you will be surprised to know that it doesn’t even show updates in real time. But here’s a tool that shows Google Docs how it is done. It is called Etherpad. This neat little tool does allows you to have any number of coordinators on a single text document and shows you changes made to the document in real time. I foresee a very neat use of this already: imagine a client telecon, where there are a number of your colleagues present and all are trying to take notes. A tool like this would be awesome, because then everyone can take these notes collaboratively in real time, and add to each others comments.

(Click image to enlarge).

It may not have the best UI in the world, but it is certainly one of the most functional piece of software around. And its simple. I don’t even need to create a login to be able to use this. All I do is click on a button, get a unique URL, and share the URL with all the people I need to collaborate on this piece of text.

What’s more, I can chat as well on the side. It also allows you to save versions of the document which you can recover later. I think its neat – a very handy tool which can be setup in a jiffy and is very simple to use. Just what you need in a collaboration tool. I think they should be integrated into something like a freeconference.com or a gotomeeting.com service.

Chegg.com is a service that may be a dream come true if you are a college student in the United States. They basically offer you a rental service for your college books. It’s a simple process. You can search for the books that you need and then place an order for their rental. The book is shipped to you, and you are welcome to use it. They even allow you to highlight in the books that are sent to you (but not write). Once your term is over, a pre-paid shipping pack is sent to you to return your book back to Chegg.

And what do you pay? Anywhere between 30%-70% of what the book would have cost you had you bought it new. If you are one of those who likes to use new books, you can even purchase a book from them, and then sell the book back to the service. They offer a guaranteed buyback policy for these types of purchases (of course the book must be in a usable condition when it is returned). You can even sell your old books to them.

What’s more, if you are the environmentally conscious type (if not, then you should be), you will be glad to know that you directly contribute to trees being planted when you do your business with Chegg.

And if you have any doubt of this business having success, then here’s a report on TechCrunch which talks about the company receiving further rounds of VC funding.

I talked about Kongregate some time ago as one of the most awesome destinations for playing flash games. What I didn’t mention is that almost all of these games are developed by people in their basements or garages. Kongregate has a model that allows you to develop a game and make it available on their site. Kongregate shares a full 50% of the revenue that it generates from ads shown on each game’s page with the game’s developer (so, you can make a pretty sum if your game is popular). And to top it off, there are bonuses awarded for popular games under several categories.

However, that is not all. Now Kongregate makes it easier for you to develop games through their Kongregate Labs initiative.

They are publishing step-by-step tutorials for how to make a flash game. And on top of this, they have a contest running with cash prizes on the best enhancements to the sample game that they are using in the tutorial. Here’s the link to Kongregate Labs. If you have even a small programming bone in your body, its worth a try.

Someone went on hyperdrive in creativity (I think that is the right word for this) and used the feature of embedding links in YouTube videos to make a game on YouTube. This game is played by watching and interacting with the video.

Here’s the video below:

Knowledge is power, they say. If that is true, then it follows that if you know exactly where your hard disk space is being used, then you should have the power to free it up. So, how do we get this knowledge. Enter DriveSpacio. DriveSpacio is a freeware developed by someone who couldn’t find a freeware that did the job.

It takes less than a minute to download, and even lesser to install. Once you install it, it will give you an option to add itself to the Windows Explorer Context Menus – this allows you to right-click and analyze any given folder from Explorer. For my test run, I chose to run it directly and chose to analyze my D drive. Well, since it was run for the first time, it immediately started scanning my D Drive (at a very high speed).It took a couple of minutes to scan the entire 30 GB drive (which is almost full).

Immediately after the scan, I was able to visualize the space utilization information graphically. It was easy from there on to drill down into folders to figure out what was occupying space where. As a result of this, I was able to delete 5 GB of stuff that I didn’t need at all. All in all, this took about 5 minutes (I was writing the post as I did this). To get some more detail on the tool, read this post by The Geek.

Probably the only drawback in this is the fact that the UI is a little amateur. But I love the tool nevertheless.

I love LifeHacker, and should have blogged about it here (but I would imagine, almost everyone in the world knows about this site). Anyway, as a regular reader, I was deeply disappointed with one of their recent posts. Its about a ‘windows only’ screen saver which you can set to turn off your PC in a given time. Why would I even want such a thing when Windows has this built in. Just go and read the comments on this post to get an idea on how dumb everyone thinks this post is.

Since the team at LifeHacker has generally been good over the years, and I believe they are not dumb – the only conclusion for a post like this that I can derive is that they have totally run out of smart things to right about, and in desperation are posting any random stuff. Hopefully, this is a temporary phase.

I have always followed TechCrunch for my quota of tech news. The great thing was that it used to have a great number of people leaving very insightful comments. Like I said, ‘was’. Lately, there have been more and more shallow commenting on the site.

Take for instance this post about Microsoft Tie-up with RIM for default search on the BlackBerry devices. Almost all the comments are about how good or bad Live search is, and the rest are about how people are going to give up their BlackBerry because of this. I think that is mostly crap. How many of these users would have used Live Search in the last year to comment how bad Live Search is. And, they are going to give BlackBerry up because they are too lazy to change their default search engine?

Now, I have my complaints with Microsoft, and Google for that matter. But I don’t dismiss them out of hand. I think TC needs to have some type of a comment rating system. At least that way I will be able to ignore the poorly rated comments.

Just in case you are one of those people who only read this blog (hah), I would like to inform you that Google has released its own browser. And based on my initial testing, it is something that you have to go and get. There are bunch of new features that are available with the browser, and you can read all about them at the Google Chrome page.

One of the things that I like the most about the new browser is the Incognito mode. When you are browsing using this mode, nothing is stored on your computer: no cookies, no history, nothing. This is great because if for some reason you want to ensure that your browsing activities are non-traceable on your computer, this can come in really handy.

Another great feature is the ability to save web pages as applications through a functionality called Application Shortcuts. This allows me to access my most used web applications (such as gmail) as if they were Windows applications. So, whenever I click on this icon which it installs on my Quick Launch bar, I get a nice Window (that doesn’t look like a browser) with Gmail inside.

Finally, the browser is much more stable as compared to other browsers and blazingly faster.

Happy Surfing.