A lot of information are displayed in Google Dashboard many with links to the services to look and manage the information. It is likely that a lot of Google users will be surprised at the wealth of information that are displayed in Google Dashboard.

Probably even more useful than the display of the data are links to various privacy policies and options to clear or manage the data that gets stored in the accounts. It is for example possible to use a link to remove items or clear the web history, manage privacy settings in Orkut or Google Reader, manage Gmail https settings or manage Blogger blogs.

In an effort to provide you with greater transparency and control over their own data, we’ve built the Google Dashboard. Designed to be simple and useful, the Dashboard summarizes data for each product that you use (when signed in to your account) and provides you direct links to control your personal settings. Today, the Dashboard covers more than 20 products and services, including Gmail, Calendar, Docs, Web History, Orkut, YouTube, Picasa, Talk, Reader, Alerts, Latitude and many more. The scale and level of detail of the Dashboard is unprecedented, and we’re delighted to be the first Internet company to offer this — and we hope it will become the standard. Watch this quick video to learn more and then try it out for yourself at www.google.com/dashboard.

Google Dashboard is definitely an interesting concept to manage many privacy related tasks from one central interface. Users who want to try it out to see the data that is stored in their Google account can visit the Google Dashboard website directly. (via official Google Blog and Connected Internet.

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• Files must be fairly high-resolution — rule of thumb is 10 pixel character height.
• Maximum file size: 10MB, maximum resolution: 25 mega pixel
• The larger the file, the longer the OCR operation will take (500K: ~15s, 2MB: ~40s, 10MB: forever)

Supported image formats that are uploaded on the demonstration page will be turned into text documents and displayed in Google Docs once the process has been completed. The quality depends largely on the quality of the image. It is usually necessary to look over the text and correct errors that have been made during character recognition. Google Docs helps in the error correction by underlining unknown words in red in its interface. It still takes some time to correct the errors.

The OCR demonstration is linked to a Google Docs account but not integrated into Google Docs yet. It is very likely that Google will integrated OCR capabilities to Google Docs in the near future. You can use the demonstration page for now to test the OCR service.

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The option to enter a cell phone number and recover the Google account password by SMS was only available to US users. Google seems to have changed this frequently as German users (and probably users from other countries such as the UK, France or Canada) can now add a cell phone number to their account as well to use the SMS for password recovery.

The option is available after logging in (at any Google service), selecting the My Account link on the top right corner of the screen and the Change password recovery options link under Security. Please let us know where you are from and if you are seeing the SMS option under security.

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Google Talk is not only used by individuals who want to chat with their family, friends and relatives but also by businesses who use it to communicate with customers and for internal support. One of the problems that users do experience is that there is not a way to let the user initiating the communication know that they are not available at that time.

Enter Google Talk Autoreply; A lightweight Open-Source computer program that can be used to configure auto-replies that notify the Google Talk user that the person is currently not in the place to answer.

The message that is automatically posted whenever the Google Talk Autoreply client is running can be configured individually. This message is then send to users who try to contact the user running Google Talk Autoreply.

Security conscious users might want to analyze the source code as a Google account username and password have to be supplied. Google Talk Autoreply is available at the project’s homepage at Codeplex.

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The common security options to avoid this horror scenario are a secondary email and a security question that can be used to recover a Google account. Google users from the United States have another option at their disposal which has been added recently to Google: The ability to recover an account password by a SMS that is send to a cell phone.

The option is currently only visible to US visitors. The Googlesystem blog suggested to use a US proxy server so that the option would become visible to users from other countries as well. I personally would not be using a proxy server to log into important web account. The possibility is there however and you can check out their blog post for some pointers. It is apparently possible to select another country from the list which makes it strange why they are not enabling the option for all users.

Users from the US or those using a US based proxy can open the Google Accounts page to enter a cell phone number as an additional method of restoring a Google account. It is likely that Google will roll out the feature soon for other countries as well.

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