Why Does Google Shut Down Products?

Google is one of the most successful internet company, and it's scope is so wide now that almost every internet user uses at least one product from Google. And Google continues to expand and create new products. But in the process, it has been pulling the plug on some products as well. Take iGoogle, for example. Or Google Video or Google Talk Chatback. There's a whole plethora of products that Google introduced, but now have been discontinued. But why does the internet giant cut off its products, even when people do seem to be using them?

As Google's chief of webspam team puts it, there can be a variety of reasons for this, but malice or ill-will is not one of them, as supposed by some of the people out there. The purpose of killing off products is not to "get" anyone or something. Rather, it has more to do with 'rearranging' things, so to speak, and see how they work out.

Old and new ideas

Sometimes, it's all about the ideas that are presented. Google didn't become the leading search engine overnight. It had to explore new things, and try out new ideas. Sometimes, when you're trying out new ideas, not all of them work. So it's just better to let go of them, rather than clinging on and using up your resources.

In some cases, some ideas might not just get the required traction over time. The speed with which technology evolves, and the speed with which people adopt it might cause an idea to become outdated pretty soon. So instead of maintaining it, it's just easier to let it go, or maybe merge its functionality into another project, or dump the project entirely and start from scratch with few modifications.

Resource limitations

Another concern at Google is resource limitation, and it's pretty interesting actually. Google, despite being a pioneer and a giant, still has finite resources. And the projects that it starts only have a limited amount of resources. A lot of people think of Google as being a very large company, with infinite resources (or close to infinite). But the fact is, every project has its own projected cost, and output. And if the output isn't what was expected, then the project might be scraped.

And finally, its about what services people are using, and which they aren't. A widely used service, such as Gmail is bound to stay around, because millions of people like it, and use it everyday. But some products get used simply because they are from 'Google', but people don't actually like or want such a product. So if the volume of users is low for a products, then there are good chances it's gonna be scraped. This is one of the reasons why Google+ is here to stay (a lot of people like, and use it). Buzz lost focus because there weren't many enthusiastic users around it. Orkut, however, failed due to completely different reasons.

This was a fairly informal summary, by Matt Cutts, of the reasons why Google shuts down some projects. It is not an official declaration, and there are other reasons involved as well, such as technical issues etc. But these are the basic ones. Stay tuned for more on Google and the web. Cheers :)

Source : mybloggertricks[dot]com

Important cPanel Settings For Beginner Webmasters

CPanel has become a very popular web hosting platform / software, and once you migrate to your own domain or buy a new one, your hosting company will most likely provide you with the cPanel software pre-installed on your domain for your ease. In fact, it has now become the industry standard for hosting companies. For those of you who are acquainted with web-hosting, you will know how important such a software can be. It puts a lot of tools and features at your finger tips, thus allowing you to stop worrying about the management and concentrate on the domain itself. But for beginners, especially those who have no prior web-hosting experience, it could be a challenging and confusing environment. Here are some basic settings every beginner should set to ensure his domain is safe and secure.

Create a strong password

The first thing you should do when assigned a cPanel access is to set up a strong password. Now this is a bit obvious, but this step is more important than you think. There have been numerous complains regarding cPanel hacks, mostly because of the default passwords that were never changed. Once you lose your cPanel password, it's really hard to get it back, and you have to contact the web hosting company for a retrieval. And if it comes to the worst, the hacker might even get into your billing information, and steal your credit card number (full or partial) for future use when requesting password resets with the company.

Mostly, the default passwords assigned are the same for stuff like cPanel login, email, billing account, and so on. Change all of them and use strong passwords to ensure your own security. You can change your cPanel password from Preferences >> Change Password.

Get rid of spam

Once your domain becomes a bit popular, you will get tonnes of spam mails from rogue email addresses. So your next step should be to enable Spam Assassin, as it will take care of some spam for you. You can find this in cPanel >> Mail >> Spam Assassin.

Also set up a Discard message when an email is sent on your domain to a non-existent email address. You can do this by going into Mail >> Forwarders >> Add Forwarder. Click on Discard with Error to Sender, and click on Add Forwarder. If you don't set up this option, all the emails sent on non-existent email addresses on your domain will be sent to a default address.

Server interface

Just like checking out specs for a new computer, it's important that you check out the specifications for the web server your site is hosted on. You can see some information on the left sidebar of your cPanel. You might need to scroll down a bit. There, you will see the Account information, and Statistics. Keep an eye on these statistics, because you might be in trouble if you exhaust any limit. You can check CPU and memory usage, along with graphs to see what time your site gets loaded, and how much.

(Note: These stats show data for a new and inactive domain. An in-service website will use up more resources, such as CPU and Memory usage).

Monitor

Another useful setting is to update your contact info, and add a secondary email to get notifications and alerts. You can do this from Preferences >> Update Contact Info. This is an emergency email, in case you lose your primary email address. Notifications will be sent to this email address as well.

Depending upon your hosting company, you can get monitoring tools that also notify you when you are reaching your limits, or when your site goes down, and so on. Such data is valuable to a webmaster.

Getting set up with cPanel is the major step. But after that, there's no rocket science involved. You can easily learn along the way. Just make sure you don't meddle with your databases and stuff and delete them accidentally (lesson hard learnt =/). Just keep to yourself, and explore the features that are at your disposal. Cheers :)

Source : mybloggertricks[dot]com