Different Themes for Each iGoogle Tab

iGoogle's themes were an instant hit. More than 30 percent of the users changed the default theme in the first weeks after the launch.

Now you can have different themes for each of your iGoogle tabs. If you select a new theme, you'll notice that only the current tab has a new look. All the other tabs have the old theme. This is also works when you share a tab: the theme is saved and is part of you tab's identity.

Google promised to release an interface that lets you create your own theme, but for the moment a good way to add custom themes is this third-party gadget. Note that you need to add the gadget for each tab you want to have a custom theme and you shouldn't expect to find themes that change depending on weather or time of the day.


{ spotted by Colin Colehour }

Google's Secret Sauce

While there are many start-ups called by the media "Google killers", becoming more popular than Google is increasingly difficult. Even if Google started with an algorithm for search, it built an infrastructure that prepared its later expansion and became more important than the initial innovation. From New York Times:

Consider the question of Google's greatest business secret. Is it the algorithms behind its search tools? Or is it the way it organizes vast clusters of computers around the globe to answer queries so quickly? Perhaps predictably, Google won't disclose the number of computers deployed in its vast information network (though outsiders speculate that the network has at least 450,000 computers).

I believe that the physical network is Google's "secret sauce," its premier competitive advantage. While a brilliant lone wolf can conceive of a dazzling algorithm, only a superwealthy and well-managed organization can run what is arguably the most valuable computer network on the planet. Without the computer network, Google is nothing.

Eric E. Schmidt, Google's chief executive, appears to agree. Last year he declared, "We believe we get tremendous competitive advantage by essentially building our own infrastructures."

Process innovations like Google's computer network are often invisible to the public, and impossible to duplicate by rivals. Yet successful companies realize that maintaining competitive advantage depends heavily on sustaining process innovations. Great process innovators often support basic research in relevant fields, maintain complete control over the creation of every aspect of a product and refuse to rely on outside suppliers for important components.

Google built a file system "for large distributed data-intensive applications", a programming model and a distributed storage system called BigTable that works on top of Google's file system. Hadoop, an open source project supported by Yahoo, wants to replicate Google's distributed systems.

{ Image from Eric Schmidt's presentation at the Stanford Graduate School of Business in April 2004. }

All Videos Uploaded by a Google Video User

One of the reasons why YouTube became successful and Google Video didn't is that YouTube built a community around videos. Each registered user has a profile, a list of uploaded videos and favorite videos. You can subscribe to the videos uploaded by a user and send him a private message.

Google Video doesn't have any of these options: the only thing you can see about someone who posted a video is a list of other uploaded videos. But what if you want to get notified when this unknown person posts other videos? In Google Video, each user has an unique alphanumeric ID. To find all the videos posted by a user, you need to search for: [source:USER_ID]. The ID can be retrieved from the page's source code, but I made a bookmarklet that gives you the URL of a feed which contains all the videos posted by a user, sorted by date.


GVideo Author Feed


How to add the bookmarklet?

1. Make sure the link toolbar is visible in your browser. You can enable it if you go to the View menu in your browser, click on Toolbars and check:
* Bookmarks Toolbar in Firefox
* Personal Bar in Opera
* Links in Internet Explorer

2. For Firefox and Opera, drag and drop the blue box above to the toolbar. For Internet Explorer, right-click on the blue box, select "Add to Favorites", ignore the security warning and choose "Links" from the list of folders.

A good example of interesting Google Video channel is "Google Tech Talks", that shows presentations on different topics from Googleplex. If you go to this tech talk and use the bookmarklet, you'll obtain a feed for all the tech talks uploaded by Google. You can subscribe to the feed using any feed reader, but Google Reader is a good choice because it lets you play videos without opening a new page.

YouTube Video Units

Google tested last year a way to embed videos from different content providers and monetize them with video ads (only MTV participated in this test). Basically, you had a video channel that displayed a playlist selected by the content provider. The playlist was changed every three to seven days and it was an opportunity to deliver premium content that keeps your visitors on your site more.

Google wants to use a similar idea for YouTube. The new YouTube video units will let you create a video channel related to your site's content a monetize it with text or image ads. It's not clear what kind of videos you'll be able to add, but it's likely the videos will be from YouTube's content partners. Music labels and other important content owners already had a special YouTube interface that included AdSense ads, but they didn't allow to embed their videos because they didn't gain revenue from the embedded players (or at least not directly).

"[Relevant, premium content] Deliver high quality video content to your site. Choose categories or have Google target your site content, and decide which categories you want to exclude.

[Targeted, non-intrusive ads] Earn revenue from ads targeted to your site content and to the videos being played. Ads appear as part of the YouTube player and outside of the video content to ensure a smooth user experience."

The new video units are an extensions of the custom players, so they're customizable and look better than the standard YouTube player. The option to create a video unit is not yet available for everyone, but you should be able to see it when you generate the code for a custom player.

{ spotted by ProBlogger }

Update (October 9th): The feature is now live in the US. Video content comes from some small YouTube partners, including: TV Guide Broadband, Expert Village, Mondo Media, lonelygirl15, Extreme Elements, and Ford Models, but Google hopes to add bigger names in the future. "There are three ways to choose video content:

* Selecting individual content providers, YouTube partners who have chosen to distribute their videos to publisher websites along with targeted ads
* Selecting content categories, topics and themes of video content you'd like to show on your site
* Automatic targeting, in which the video content you display will be automatically targeted to the content of your site. You can assist the targeting by providing relevant keywords. (...)

Video units may display two types of ads: text overlay ads, which are displayed in the bottom 20% of the video as it plays, and companion ads, which appear above the video content within the player. The ads displayed can be either contextually targeted or site-targeted, and may be paid on either a cost-per-click or cost-per-thousand impressions basis."

The Disjointed GDrive (or Where Do I Upload My Files?)

It's pretty weird to be a company that wants to move your data online, but not have a central place for uploading and managing that data. The long-awaited and much-delayed GDrive could be that place. But for now you have to spread your files in way too many places, with different interfaces, restrictions and options.

What	Where	Limits	How
Documents : .html, .txt, .rtf, .doc, .odt, .csv, .xls, .ods, .ppt	Google Docs	Documents: 500 KB. Spreadsheets: 1 MB. Presentations: 10 MB. Maximum 5000 documents and presentations, 200 spreadsheets.	One by one or by email.
Photos: .jpg, .gif, .png, .bmp	* Picasa Web Albums * Blogger * orkut	* Picasa Web: 20 MB per image. 1 GB free space. * orkut: 5 MB per image, up to 25 images.	One by one, by email, using an ActiveX control, a Mac uploader or using Picasa. The photos uploaded in Blogger are hosted by Picasa Web.
Videos: .mpg, .mp4, .avi, .wmv, .rm	* Google Video * Picasa Web Albums * Blogger * YouTube	* Google Video: 100 MB per video for the web uploader. Unlimited size for the desktop uploader. * For Picasa Web, the maximum space is 1 GB. * For YouTube, you can upload videos that have less than 100 MB and less than 10 mins.	* Google Video: from the web or using a desktop uploader. * For Picasa Web, you can only use Picasa. * For YouTube, you can only upload videos from the web interface.
Any file	* Google Page Creator * Google Groups * Google Project Hosting * Google Base * Gmail	* Pages/ Groups/ Project Hoting: Maximum 10 MB per file. 100 MB free space for a site/group/project. * Google Base lets you attach up to 15 files and less than 20 MB to an item; it has restrictions for file types. * The maximum size for Gmail's attachments is 20 MB. You can't upload executable files.	* Only from the web interface. No way to group files. * Google Project Hosting should be used to host open source software. * You can use Gmail Drive, a 3rd party software "that creates a virtual filesystem around your Google Gmail account, allowing you to use Gmail as a storage medium". Don't upload too many files in a short time.

{ Idea by Philipp Lenssen. }

Chat Rooms for Google Talk

PartyChat adds one of the many missing features from Google Talk: chat rooms. You need to add partychat@gmail.com as a friend and use commands to create a room or join an existing one. To make sure nobody joins your room accidentally, password-protect it.

PartyChat is like a group chat, except that it's less obtrusive and persistent across different login sessions.

For example, say your friends are in a party chat named "drivel". To enter the chat, IM partychat@gmail.com with the line "/enter drivel." After that, you'll receive messages sent in "drivel" from partychat@gmail.com and all messages you send to partychat@gmail.com will be broadcasted to your friends in "drivel."

If you log out of Google Talk and then log back in, you're still in the party chats you were in prior to logging out. To leave a party chat, IM "/leave" or "/exit" to the address you were chatting with (e.g. partychat@gmail.com).

PartyChat is an open-source project created by a Google employee: Akshay Patil in December 2005, not long after Google Talk was released. Since then, Google Talk didn't add too much features. Only Google Talk's gadget has an option for group chats, while PartyChat can be used in Gmail Chat, the desktop client or any other Jabber client.

Some useful commands:

/create chat_name [optional_password] - creates a new party chat. If you provide a password, then other users must give this password to enter the chat.

/join chat_name [password] - join an existing party chat. If the chat has a password, you must give the password to enter.

/alias [name] - give yourself an alias; if you do not specify a name, your current alias is removed

/commands - displays the list of commands

Google Buys Zingku, Mobile Social Network

Google's plans to extend in the mobile space could include the launch of a mobile phone. For now, Google bought another mobile social network: Zingku. "We've entered into an agreement to have Google acquire our Zingku service," informs us Zingku.com.

Our service is designed from the mobile phone, outward, allowing you to create and exchange things of interest ranging from invitations to "mobile flyers" with friends in a trusted manner. On the mobile phone, Zingku uses standard text messaging features that come with every phone. On the web, our service uses your standard web browser and instant messenger. There is nothing to install.

With Zingku, things you wish to promote or share, can easily be created and fetched via mobile, instant messenger, and web browser. Our service integrates your mobile phone with a personalized web site so that you can easily move (zing) things back and forth between the web and and your mobile as well as powerfully connect with friends and optionally their friends.

Zingku's features include:

* Store & fetch mobile photos and txt reminders with alarms on your companion mobile web site.

* Share mobile photos and posts with friends and friends-of-friends with txt msg'ing, instant messenger, & web.

* Gather a big crowd & their friends with txt messaging, IM, and email, all at once!

* Take an instant poll among friends, all with txt messaging. "Hey what should we do ? 1. Movie 2. Dan's party"

* Your own mobile cards that people fetch by txt'ing a magic code. Make as many as you want & link them together.

* Fetch postings from any blog or any syndicated feed (RSS, Atom) to your mobile phone via txt message.

The service is limited to the US and, until Zingku migrates to Google's servers, you can't create a new account.

In 2005, Google bought dodgeball, another mobile social network, but the product stagnated and its founders decided to leave Google. Grandcentral, another Google acquisition, links all your phone numbers. Zingku could unify instant messaging, SMS and email.

Update. Google confirms the acquisition: "It is true that we acquired certain assets and technology of Zingku. We believe these assets can help build products and features that will benefit our users, advertisers and publishers."

{ Thank you, Mark and Andrew. }

Google's 9th Birthday

Two weeks ago, AFP informed us that "Google, at age 10, is the official heart of the Internet. Born 10 years ago, the Google Internet search engine has grown into the electronic center of human knowledge by indexing billions of web pages as well as images, books and videos." That's true, except that Google is 9 years old. Even if Larry Page and Sergey Brin registered the google.com domain in 1997, Google was officially launched one year later.

"Google opened its doors in September 1998. The exact date when we celebrate our birthday has moved around over the years, depending on when people feel like having cake," says Google's help center. You can read more about it directly from Google. In the recent years, Google's birthday has been celebrated on September 27th with a doodle displayed on the homepage. Happy birthday, Google!



Update: "Happy Birthday, Google!" is in Google Hot Trends.


Update 2: A reader noticed that Google used in this year's logo a piñata, "a brightly-coloured paper container filled with sweets and/or toys. It is generally suspended on a rope from a tree branch or ceiling and is used during celebrations".

Live Search Launches Major Update

Nobody remembers exactly how many times Microsoft updated its search engine hoping to attract more users. But this time Live Search (formerly known as MSN Search and Windows Live Search) received a major update, "our biggest update since our debut in January 2005", according to its corporate blog.

Even though the update isn't yet... live, you can't still see the new version if you click on the URLs from this post. They contain a parameter that triggers the updated interface and set a cookie. To compare them with the results from the old Live Search, open a different browser and perform the same searches directly from live.com.

Old version:


New version:


The new design moves the search box to the left, transform the tabs for other search engines into links, changes the text colors and the fonts (from Verdana to Arial) and the page is easier to read. The page also loads faster because Microsoft optimized the code (7.23 KB vs 15.9KB when you search for [Google]).

Microsoft says the new index is four times bigger than the previous one, but that's not a measure for quality. As you can see in the screenshot above, Live Search 2.0 shows two spammy web pages at #3 and #4 when you search for [Google Pack]. The same pages have lower ranks in the previous version.


Microsoft updated the instant answers to show more information about celebrities, including a Celebrity XRank, which is similar to Google Hot Trends. You'll also find rich information about products from MSN Shopping.


The new video search engine shows video previews while you hover over the thumbnails. This is useful to decide if a video is right for you, but it's also very easy to accidentally trigger a video while moving your mouse on the page. Unfortunately, if you click on the thumbnail of a YouTube/MySpace/Metacafe video, Microsoft will only show the embedded player, without any description, comments, ratings. Other videos, like those from MSN Video, are played at their original page.

Live Search detecting more subtle misspellings and includes related terms by expanding your query. "The new Live Search does a much better job in predicting the intent of the query to return the best results possible. New investments improve the search service's ability to read and understand queries in a way that more accurately determines intent despite common problems such as spelling errors, stop words, punctuation and synonyms," says Microsoft in a press release.

The new ranking algorithm is closer to Google, although it seems to not be influenced too much by the number of links or their importance. A search for [Google OS] returns as the fourth result a page that was linked from this blog and very few other sites.

Live Search is still far behind Google in terms of quality, but this is the first time when Microsoft focuses on the important things: relevance, speed and user interface.

Update: Read this very cool live blogging from Microsoft's Searchification event where they launched these updates. The post was written by Vanessa Fox, a former Google employee.

New Homepage for Google Book Search

Google Books Search's redesigned homepage invites you to discover books by clicking on a category or the cover of a popular book. "At Book Search, we have a lot of books, but we don't have shelves or sections, which can make casually browsing books in our index difficult," mentions the product's blog. The intimidating search box is placed at the top of the page, leaving space for some examples of books:

* interesting: practical books like "How to be an even better manager", Math books, medical books

* classics: Shakespeare, Walter Scott, Goethe, Francis Bacon, Alexander Pope - all of them are in the public domain and can be downloaded as PDF files

* highly cited in scholar papers: authoritative books like Hegel's "Science of logic", Thomas Hobbes' "Leviathan"

* random subject: books from a randomly-selected topic

Google also lists the main subjects for fiction and non-fiction books and some random subjects. It's interesting that Google Book Search defaults to the cover view when you explore the books from a subject and to the list view when you do a normal search.

For ambiguous queries like [logic], you'll be able to restrict the results to an appropriate subject. You can also use the subject: operator to make your search more precise (for example: war subject:"Science fiction"). Google doesn't offer the complete hierarchy of subjects, so a clever autocomplete would be helpful.

Google Using Traditional Advertising

Google became popular without having to use advertising to promote its search engine. People liked the tool and started to recommend it to others. Even if Google uses its own advertising system to promote some of its services, Google has always been reluctant to use traditional advertising. Here are some of the few offline Google ads:

* a billboard that asked you to solve a Math problem: find the first 10-digit prime found in consecutive digits of e. If you visited the site and answered other complicated questions, you were directed to Google's jobs site.



* job ads posted in newspapers: "Google is looking for engineers with great aspirations" (Wired), "Are you scary smart?" (New York Times)

* 15-seconds TV ads on a science program from PBS, in 2005. "The spots, which quietly launched at the end of the summer, start with the keywords string theory, Egyptology, and astronomy being typed into a search bar; as the terms are typed in, videos that relate to the subject appear behind the search bar. The spots end with the tagline: Google is proud to support NOVA in the search for knowledge." This is probably the first brand ad for Google (here's the video).

In the recent months, Google started to promote its own products using undisclosed ads or partnerships with media companies. Last week, Google 411 graduated from Labs and it's promoted using billboards and taxi ads in San Francisco.

(Creative Commons, photo by Steve Rhodes)

(Creative Commons, photo by Niall Kennedy)

Google, which is still trailing behind Baidu in China, intends to heavily advertise its products to gain more market share. "Google has not done any marketing until now. But in China there are many users who are new to the internet, and many other name-brand search engines," said Lee Kai-fu, Google China's president.

"By always placing the interests of the user first, Google has built the most loyal audience on the web. And that growth has come not through TV ad campaigns, but through word of mouth from one satisfied user to another," says Google in "Ten things Google has found to be true". But even though search is almost synonymous with Google, the company still has services that are unknown to the general public and important markets to conquer.

Google Hosts Videos from Third-Party Sites

I was complaining in May that Google Video served content from third-party sites (not from Google-owned sites) in a Google Video-branded player and hosted all the content on its servers. Google changed its mind in June and started to only show thumbnails from the videos.

Apparently, this was only a change in exposing the content, because Google continue to host FLV videos from third-party sites like Metacafe. Searching for [Sunshine Metacafe] on SearchMash, an experimental Google site, you'll notice that, even though all the videos come from Metacafe, the interface doesn't communicate this. The only way to realize that the source of the videos is Metacafe is by clicking on "see larger video". You'll be sent to a Google Video page that shows the original source in a frame.

All the videos from third-party sites are displayed in a Google Video player...


... and they're hosted on Google's servers:


I agree that it's more convenient to host all the videos in the world and play them using a standard interface, but I don't think copyright laws allow you to do that. It's the same reason why Google only shows thumbnails in Google Image Search and sends you to the original site to see the images in full size.

Other video search engines have different ways of displaying videos: Yahoo Video shows a thumbnail and sends you to the original site, Truveo displays the embedded player of the original site, while Blinkx hosts a 30 seconds preview for each video.

More Google Alerts

Executive summary: Google adds video alerts and you have more options to monitor search results.

Sometimes a search results page is not the best medium for finding things: if you want to find great new web pages about Google Web Toolkit, searching every day for this query and trying to find what's new is time-consuming and inefficient.

Google Alerts lets you receive email notifications when new web sites appear in the top results for your query. You can get alerts for results from web search, blog search, Google News, Google Groups and now Google Video. There's also a type of alert that combines the results from three search engines (web, news, blogs): you could call it the universal alert, but the official name is comprehensive alert. The number of top results that are potential candidates for Google Alerts is: 10 for blogs/news/videos, 15 for Google Groups and 20 for web search.

Depending on how often you want to receive the alerts, there are two types of alerts:

* as-it-happens: this is useful if you want to monitor an event or an important news. You should choose this option if you want to receive the alerts as soon as a new web page becomes relevant for your query. If your query is too general, you'll receive a lot of alerts, so use quotes or negative terms to make your query more precise.

* daily or weekly summary: this option is useful to monitor the latest news about a product, a company, a person, a research subject. The most common type of alert is the daily summary.


Usually, to monitor an event you should choose Google News, to find opinions about a product choose the Blog Search alerts, for new important pages about a subject Web Search alerts are the way to go, for answer to technical or not-so-technical question Google Groups alerts are helpful, while the new video alerts are great to find the latest video of your favorite band or a demo for that Google killer that's still not ready for the prime time. The comprehensive alerts are useful to get the full picture of a subject, for example to find if there's anything newsworthy or at least interesting about Google Reader.

Some of Google's search engines (Google News, Blog Search, Google Video) provide feeds for search results, so you can monitor the results in a feed reader. You should note that Google's alerts only include the top results sorted by relevance, while the feeds can also be sorted by date. So if you've wanted feeds for Google's search results, you could use Google Alerts as a partial replacement or subscribe to Yahoo's search feeds.

Google Alerts are also a way to produce "content" for your site with minimal effort. For example, Blogger has an option that lets you post by email and it's so easy to setup a Gmail filter that automatically forwards Google Alerts to Blogger's mail address. A way to monetize this "content" is to use Google's contextual ads. A simple Google search reveals a lot of sites that pollute the web with search results in disguise. Indirectly, Google Alerts, Blogger, Gmail and Google AdSense can be connected to generate revenue and pollute the search results.

Hopefully, Google will start to detect patterns in your search results and offer the option to create alerts if you search for some keywords frequently. The alerts might be combined with recommendations in a web interface that shows search results without having to type queries. Google could also add SMS alerts for important Gmail messages, traffic increases in Google Analytics, breaking news, weather changes, sports results and combine the service with Google SMS. Until then, you could try other alert services from Yahoo, Microsoft or AOL, which are less focused on search.

Gmail Mobile Improves the Interface

Gmail updated the mobile version available at m.gmail.com by adding more features from the desktop version. Now you can configure the links to some of your labels and add other views like Spam or Drafts. Next to the messages you'll see a checkboxes that allow you to perform one of these actions for all the messages: archive, delete, report as spam, add a label, star or mark as read.

There's also a link to the AJAX-free version, for mobile browsers that are able to render more complicated web pages. Of course, a better way to use Gmail on your mobile phone is to install the Java application, which preloads some of the messages and requires less clicks and keystrokes.

For example, to read a conversation that has 16 messages at Gmail's mobile website, you have to go to a page that shows previews for the first 9 messages, click on the first message and then move to the next message 15 times (if a message is very long, Gmail uses pagination so you need to click even more). In the desktop version and the Java app, you can read all the messages in a single page.


{ Thank you, Chance. }

iPhone Interface for Google Calendar

"We wanted the best web browser in the world on our phone, not a baby web browser or a WAP browser, a real Web browser, and we picked the best one in the world, Safari, and we have Safari running on iPhone. It is the first fully usable HTML browser on a phone."
(Steve Jobs, Macworld Conference and Expo, January 2007)

It's unclear whether Safari is the best browser in the world or whether iPhone has the first usable mobile phone browser, but one thing is for sure: many web sites launch iPhone-optimized versions. Maybe it's cool to have a website that looks really well in iPhone or maybe it's fairly easy to target a single mobile phone, because I've never heard about a website that launched an interface optimized for Opera Mini or Nokia's S60 browser.

Google Calendar released an interface for iPhone, based on the mobile version launched in May. Each calendar has a distinctive color, so it's easier to locate important events. Google Calendar for iPhone is available at calendar.google.com, but you can also try it at TestiPhone.com (don't forget to change your user-agent).

Google Trends, Updated Daily

After many complaints about the infrequent updates from Google Trends, Google decided to allocate more resources for the project and update the data daily. Google Trends shows information about queries: how popular they are over time, the locations where they are popular and some news that might have influenced their popularity. Google Trends doesn't show actual numbers, so the best way to draw some conclusion is to compare two or more related queries.

For example, the graph below compares how often people entered in Google's search box orkut, Facebook and MySpace in the last 12 months. As you can see, MySpace's popularity is declining, Facebook grows steadily, while orkut is pretty constant. You can also see that orkut is popular, but mostly in Brazil and India.


Now that Google Trends has fresh data every day, it would be nice to have an embedding option. It's easy to hot link to the image, but Google could provide a mini-version of a Google Trends page that shows the graph and the refinements. Maybe they can even build a site like Swivel that lets you rate Trends comparisons, add comments and find explanations for the bumps.

Another improvement would be to automatically generate related queries using Google Sets or even from Google's live data. This could be even more useful if you could discover related queries that are popular in a region: for example, enter [MySpace, Facebook] and find other popular social networks in Russia.

{ via Google Blog }

Gmail 2.0

Garett Rogers reports that Google prepares a new version of Gmail, according to a message from the translation console. It's not clear what are the new features, but one thing that will change is the user interface.

When Google introduced Gmail in 2004, it was one of the first important web applications that used AJAX, but not in an excessive manner. Meanwhile, Yahoo and Microsoft released new versions of their mail services that tried to duplicate the familiar interface of a desktop mail client like Outlook (Yahoo bought Oddpost - an AJAX pioneer, while Microsoft rewrote Hotmail from the ground up). Yahoo Mail Beta had many problems with performance and that's why the classic version of Yahoo Mail is still available as an option. Windows Live Hotmail offers by default a classic version that doesn't use AJAX because the new interface "was too slow to load, too different and, well, just not like the old Hotmail it was intended to replace". The advantages of a desktop-like interface are many: an easier way to move a message to a folder using drag & drop, a reading pane that lets you read messages, "infinite scrolling" for reading your mail, but the trade-off is an interface that reacts very slowly and is not user-friendly.

The new Gmail interface could add some new views for your messages, a way to group related messages, sorting messages by size or sender and improve the search by indexing attachments and providing a better way to filter search results.

Beyond the interface, Gmail 2.0 could be an important part of the new social trend at Google and may even become Social Gmail. Google could use your messages to detect social relations that would the base of a new contact management application. Because you use Gmail's address book in an increasingly number of Google applications to share web pages, photos, documents, blog posts, Google could show you a comprehensive overview of all the items shared with a contact.

Many people asked for a Google Reader integration in Gmail (you can already do that using a Greasemonkey script) and a recently leaked video mentioned this possibility, even though Google Reader still has problems with scaling and wouldn't handle Gmail's traffic.

Gmail should also add offline support using Google Gears. "Gmail Offline will allow users to browse, reply, save drafts and do everything that currently Gmail does in an offline mode even when you don't have an Internet connection," reported an Indian newspaper. More likely, the offline Gmail will provide limited access to some of your recent messages, to your contact list and will let you compose new messages. It's just a small compromise for those who don't want to use a desktop mail client, but need offline access for their mail and contacts.

The IMAP support would make Gmail an even better option for the enterprise, so Google might also consider complement POP3 with a more robust and flexible protocol.

Hopefully, Gmail 2.0 will continue to focus on simplicity and user-friendliness, while polishing the interface and adding new features that connect it with other Google applications. One of the goals for Gmail 2.0 is "70% user happiness", so don't expect it to be perfect.

Update (October 30): Gmail 2.0, now available.

A Social Network for Google Earth?

Arizona State University's students have the opportunity to test a new product "that will be publicly launched later this year". The invitation page mentions that the product is developed by "a major Internet company" and there are hints that the application is related to social networking, 3D modeling and video games. To complete the questionnaire and get the opportunity to test the product, you need to be a student at ASU.

So where's Google in this picture? One of the questions from the form asks you if you have a Gmail account and if you are willing to get one. The product's name is "My World" and the logo shows a globe - this could be related to Google Earth. Google also owns a 3D modeling software that could be used to create avatars.

Arizona State University has a very close relation with Google: it's one of the first large universities in the US that uses Google Apps, the site search is powered by Google Search Appliance, the university uses Google Maps and the ASU campuses already have 3D models in... Google Earth. But there's actually more than this: the university offered photos for the Google Mars project, Google employees serve as guest speakers or adjunct lecturers at ASU and Google has an office on the Tempe campus of Arizona State University.

The speculation about a Google Earth Second Life started last year. "The notion that you can create objects and buildings and place them in a virtual world makes Google Earth sounds less like a mapping tool and more like a metaverse. What's a metaverse? Science fiction writer Neal Stephenson introduced the term in his seminal 1992 novel, Snow Crash. (...) In Stephenson's novel, millions of users uploaded customized "avatars," or virtual personalities, and strolled the street, entering shops and exclusive nightclubs, conversing and trading with the metaverse's other denizens." In fact, Snow Crash inspired the development of Google Earth.



{ via MacRumors }

Saving Search Results in Google Maps

Google Maps does a pretty good job at ranking search results, but sometimes you want to save some of the results and review them later. You may want to compare them or to share a list of the most interesting places with someone else.

An easy way to save only some of the search results is to use Google My Maps. When you click on a result, a tooltip shows more information about the place and lets you save it to My Maps. You'll have to create a new map and add the results you like. Each result will become a blue placemark on the map. When you save a search result, the title and the description are pre-filled, but you can change them and add notes. You can switch between "Search Results" and "My Maps", enter a new query or go to the next page of search results.

When you're finished, click on "Clear search results" and make sure all the placemarks are visible. The personalized map can be printed, sent by email or embedded into a web page. It's also accessible in the My Maps tab and you can always add new places later.


If you want to collaborate on a map with other people, use Google Notebook (don't forget to install the plug-in). Create a new notebook, go to "Sharing options", make it public and invite other collaborators. To obtain a map-enabled notebook, switch to the text view in Google Maps. For each search result you want to add to the notebook, select the title and the address, right-click and choose "Note this".


A notebook can have multiple sections and you can write comments next to each note. When you go to the published notebook, you'll see a link that says: "View this notebook on a map". All the notes become placemarks on a map.

Google to Open up Its Social Platform

TechCrunch has the news that Google plans to open "a new set of APIs on November 5 that will allow developers to leverage Google's social graph data. They'll start with Orkut and iGoogle (Google's personalized home page), and expand from there to include Gmail, Google Talk and other Google services over time. On November 5 we'll likely see third party iGoogle gadgets that leverage Orkut's social graph information - the most basic implementation of what Google is planning. From there we may see a lot more - such as the ability to pull Orkut data outside of Google and into third party applications via the APIs."

The idea isn't surprising if you look at Google's renewed interest in orkut, a social network that didn't get too much traction in the US. orkut has recently added a new feature that shows updates from your friends and the new design leaves a lot of space for gadgets. Google didn't exploit the wealth of information from a social network and ignored that many of its other services could be even more valuable in the context of a trusted environment. For example, a news or a video recommended by many of your friends has an added value. Your search results could be better if you subscribe to recommendation feeds from orkut communities related to your interests.

An internal Google video showed that Google intends to integrate all of its communication apps and to create activity streams for each user. All the streams from your contacts could be aggregated in a single place that shows what's going on with the people you care about. A glimpse from this project is the recently launched Shared Stuff that lets you share web pages with your contacts and keep track of the shared items.


I think one of the problems that hinder Google's social plans is the distinction between Gmail contacts and orkut friends, which are two separate lists. Google tried to synchronize them with the Google Talk integration, that automatically added your orkut friends to the list of Gmail contacts. In the future, Google could create a special layer for "friends" in Gmail: those who get the list of broadcasted activities. The list of Gmail friends could include your orkut friends and the Google Talk contacts.

iGoogle, the personalized homepage, is another central point in Google's social plans. The homepage lets you create gadgets that can be shared with your friends, you can share tabs and customize the page using themes. The gadgets are similar to Facebook's applications, except that they don't have a social aspect.

Google intends to open this data to other developers and to other social networks. Brad Fitzpatrick, who now works at Google, wrote an interesting article last month that proposed the creation of a decentralized social graph that combines data from different social networks. "There doesn't exist a single social graph (or even multiple which interoperate) that's comprehensive and decentralized. Rather, there exists hundreds of disperse social graphs, most of dubious quality and many of them walled gardens." Google could support this project by sharing its data and providing search features for the graph.

All in all, the social component of web applications is increasingly important and a big differentiator. YouTube was more successful than Google Video because it had a stronger community and many loyal users. While search is an important way to find things online, a social filter could enable to discover more interesting things without having to actively search for them.

Google Maps Brainstorming

In this video, Google Maps team from New York tries to figure out how to display the information about a business in a better way. The brainstorming doesn't generate too many ideas, but one Googler admits that the interface is "unreadable".


Even if Google shows a lot of information, it doesn't do a good job at helping you find a place you like. If you search for a pizza place in New York, Google Maps shows the same results for everyone and you can't refine your query with details about the menu, delivery area, price or the amount of recent positive reviews. Google Maps could also let you add a business to your favorites and personalize the search results based on your bookmarks and search history. As for the presentation, it would be nice to compare the results side by side and choose what are the most relevant criteria for comparison.

Anyway, here's the Google Maps brainstorming. Maybe you can help Google find the best way to structure the interface.

Google Shared Stuff

Google's social side is more visible every day. A new service called "Shared Stuff" lets you share interesting links with your friends and the entire world. You need to drag a bookmarklet to your browser's link bar or to click on the "Share" button from a web page (the button can only be found at Google Video right now).


When you click on the button, a new window pops out and you can choose between posting the page to your profile, emailing it to your contacts or bookmarking the page using services like del.icio.us or furl.


A profile page is public and can include information about yourself, a photo, links to your sites. You can select the photo from one of your public Picasa Web Albums. Here's the profile of Kevin Marks, a former Technorati engineer who now works at Google.


This page lets you see the latest web pages shared by your Gmail contacts:



There's also a page that lists all the popular items shared by Google users, but some of them are questionable (I saw pages that only had a single view):


... and a way to see popular items from a domain or for a tag:


You can also subscribe to feeds for all of these pages, but it would be nice to have a special feed for your contacts and gadget that keeps you up-to-date.

Overall, the service adds the social component to Google Bookmarks and integrates a lot of ways to share content online. It will be interesting to see if Google manages to build a community around the new service and if you can rely on it to find and disseminate what's cool on the web. Google will probably allow you to add the "Share" button to your site so you can replace all the bookmarking/sharing buttons for del.icio.us, Digg, Facebook etc. and provide a better experience to your users.

This is probably the first appearance of the Moka-Moka social project and Google will include shared information from other services (Picasa Web Albums, public events from your calendar, Google Reader's shared items or public Google Docs).

{ via Blogoscoped forum }

Promoting Your Own Services in Search Results

What happens when you have a search engine, but also some services that produce content? Well, you could use the search engine to promote those services or at least to leverage the fact that you have better access to their data.

Let's say you are Google and you own a very popular video site called YouTube. What do you do? Here's what Google did:

* YouTube was the first video site added to Google Video when it was relaunched as a video search engine. Even if Google added other sites, YouTube dominates the search results. Of course, YouTube has a lot of videos and a strong community that provides feedback, but Google Video still can't provide the right balance between YouTube and the rest of the sites.


* as part of the Universal Search, YouTube videos that appear in Google's search results have extended snippets that include thumbnails, links to related videos and the full video can be played inline. Google doesn't do this only for YouTube, but Google Video and YouTube are the only video sites for which you can play videos directly from the search results page. This decision was probably influenced by the fact that Google can't control the performance for other video sites and those sites didn't want to lose traffic.

But what if you are Yahoo and own a photo-sharing site called Flickr? The site doesn't have a dominant position like YouTube (6.42% for the US in July 2007, according to Hitwise) and an image search engine can easily integrate images from other sites.

Yahoo also shows extended snippets for Flickr images, but it commits the cardinal sin for a search engine: forget about relevance and promote arbitrary sites. For example, the first page of search results for [Google Reader] only includes Flickr photos, while you can find many other relevant images on the web (in fact, the first 49 Yahoo results are from Flickr). Other queries also show a very-difficult-to-justify Flickr domination. While Flickr is a great place to find photos, it's not very relevant if you want to find Vista screenshots: 9 from the first 20 results are from Flickr and all of them show Vista wallpapers. A search for minimal surface includes a single result from a math-related site, while the rest of the images are from Flickr.


The conclusion is that it's difficult to have a search engine and sites for user-generated content. You can be tempted to arbitrarily increase the influence of these sites and show biased results.

Using the Command-Line to Get Things Done

I've written before about Enso, a very interesting project that lets you perform tasks from a command-line that interacts with the user interface. The software comes with some basic commands (like launching programs, performing calculations), but it can be extended with other commands. Enso has recently launched in beta some plug-ins that add new commands.

Let's say you need to translate into French some text from an email message you're composing in Gmail. You'll have to select the text, open a new window or tab, go to Google Translate or other translation service, paste the text, choose the option to translate from English to French, click on a button, select the translation and copy it, go back to Gmail and paste the text. The new translation commands for Enso let you perform the same task much faster: select the text, trigger the command line (press Caps-Lock), type the first letters from the command ("translate to French") and the translated text will replace the selected text. Of course, you won't get a more accurate translation, but at least you won't lose the original context and get distracted by other tasks.


The search commands let you select some text and type the name of one of the supported search services to launch a new page with the corresponding search result. This is faster than using your browser's search features or extensions like Hyperwords because you don't have visually identify the right option from a long list. Unfortunately, these commands defeat the one of the main purposes of Enso: don't lose the context. An alternative way to implement them would be to use APIs like Google AJAX API to display search results without leaving the page. In fact, my favorite use of this API is a tool called Linkify that allows me link to a search result by selecting some text from a textarea and choosing one of the search results displayed in a small sidebar.

There are also commands for controlling music players or to convert LaTeX markup into a nice mathematical expression. Of course, an API would make it easier to build many other plug-ins for Enso.

For now, Enso works only on Windows 2000/XP/Vista and the main program costs $20 (there's a 30-day trial), while all the plug-ins described above are free. I think a better approach would be to pay for some additional commands and make the main program free. When you can find a lot of great software like Google Desktop, Launchy, Quicksilver, Foxytunes, I'm not sure many people are going to pay for Enso.

The software comes from a small company called Humanized that promises "to provide you with the most humane software we are capable of making". Great interfaces, easy to use software, simplicity - I've heard these things before (I wonder where?).

"Some tasks—for instance, teaching a child arithmetic—are intrinsically pretty complicated. But some aren't. Setting the time on a wristwatch, for instance, shouldn't be that hard; on old analog wristwatches, it basically involved pulling out a knob, twisting it until the watch showed the correct time, and pushing the knob back in again. But on newer digital wristwatches—ones that claim to be more powerful and feature-loaded than their analog counterparts—it involves pressing a series of buttons in a hard-to-remember, often unforgiving order. Most people dread setting the time on their digital watches, and for good reason."

Google Launches Gadget Ads

As mentioned earlier this year, Google tested a new ad format that uses gadgets to display interactive content. The gadget ads are now officially launched and available for many (but not yet all) AdWords advertisers. "The new widget ads represent a more aggressive push by Google to attract big brand advertisers who like flashy ad units rather than the simple text ads commonly run in Google's ad network," reports The New York Times.

The main benefits of the new format: it's easy to create a gadget using Google's API, the gadget can be stored and/or cached on Google's severs and people can add the gadgets they like to Google's personalized homepage. "Gadget ads can incorporate real-time data feeds, images, video and much more in a single creative unit and can be developed using Flash, HTML or a combination of both. Designed to act more like content than a typical ad, they run on the Google content network, competing alongside text, image and video ads for placement," says Google (my emphasis).

Because most of the normal gadgets can be embedded into a web page and many people already use iGoogle, the gadget ad will be a familiar presence. "Google Gadget Ads are nearly identical to Google Gadgets, except that they run as rich media ads on the Google content network. By adding a small bit of code called a click URL to your Google Gadget, the gadget becomes a Google Gadget Ad, capable of running as an ad on thousands of content network sites. Otherwise, the two can be identical in their basic construction and content." This way, Google also solved the problem of monetizing iGoogle in a clever way: users will voluntary add gadget ads to the homepage and interact with them. The ads won't be perceived as annoying because you chose to include them in your homepage. "Widgets are a dream for marketers. They allow them to extend their brand off of their individual sites and allow their brands to live as long as consumers want them to live," thinks Dimitry Ioffe, chief executive of Media Banners.

Here's an ad for Nissan that lets you see information about traffic from Google Maps (example of US zip code: 90210). There's also an option to explore the car and a link to Nissan's web site, but the gadget is attractive because it's useful:



The gadgets can be contextually targeted or site targeted, but you won't find too many of them right now. Unfortunately, Google doesn't offer granular options for publishers, so if you choose to display image ads, you'll also get video ads, Flash ads and now gadget ads. Because advertising agencies can add anything from Flash animations to mini-websites created with AJAX, some of the ads could be obtrusive. If you look at the samples offered by Google, some of the ads show an animation for 10-15 seconds to attract your attention, while others are static until you interact with them. Here are some quotes from Google's editorial guidelines:

* Audio and video effects are allowed, but must be user-initiated.
* Users must have the ability to 'mute' all sounds in the ad, if applicable.
* Google Gadget Ads that contain Flash must not exceed 50% utilization of a user's computer.
* Gadget ads that directly capture any personally identifiable user information must have an applicable privacy policy which is directly accessible from the gadget ad.
* Animation is restricted to a maximum of 15 seconds (at a 15-20 fps frame rate).
* The ads must be 50K or smaller in size "on load".

I think a successful gadget ad should include useful content so you could use it as a stand-alone mini-application. It should include animations only if they're necessary and not just as a distraction. LabPixies is one of the companies that creates cool gadgets for all kinds of companies. "Gadgets are easy to install and easy to use, with no technical knowledge necessary, so they work very well as a distribution platform. Gadgets are the next generation of content syndication," says Ran Ben-Yair, co-founder of LabPixies.

"Gadget ads provide new mixed media interactions across Google's AdSense network. A Starbucks ad unit could display a web feed of the latest 5 tracks playing in its stores, query the local weather and suggest either an iced or hot drink, display local stores on a Google Map, and help you browse seasonal offerings from within a single ad unit. Google serves all of the content via proxy, and the rich media load never touches Starbucks' servers," thinks Niall Kennedy, who also found a directory of branded Google gadgets.

Searching for Celebrities in Reuters Videos

Reuters has a wealth of interesting videos, but the descriptions don't include all the persons that appear in the footage or the time when they appear. That's why Reuters started to use face recognition technology developed by Viewdle to power a new search engine that finds people in the videos.

"The technology, devised by Viewdle, analyses each frame of video footage, looking 'inside the clip' to identify the appearance of people on-screen. (...) The technology is largely impressive and Viewdle says it's building the world's biggest people-in-video reference database and has multiple patents in preparation," reports Journalism.co.uk. Viewdle is one of the companies selected for the Techcrunch 40 conference.

The project is part of Reuters Labs, which showcases a lot of interesting technologies that improve the way you interact with news. Reuters Popup Video lets you add comments for a certain part of a video, while Newsbeats mixed news with electronic music (the service was discontinued).

Google Presentations Finally Launched

File manager

Google has finally released the presentation app. You can only import Microsoft PowerPoint files that have less than 10 MB and export a presentation as an HTML file with images. You can change the theme or the layout of a slide, but there aren't too many options available. There's also an option to create the first slide of a presentation from a document, but it only works for short documents.

Editing a presentation

The presentation can be shared with everyone and any viewer can follow the presenter or take control of the presentation. The preview includes a group chat feature based on Google Talk's gadget that shows the active collaborators and viewers. If all the viewers click on "View presentation", they can watch the presentation at the same time.

Viewing a presentation

To see a scrollable overview of all the slides in a presentation, check the "Printable view". It's also a way to search inside a presentation, but you can't go to a certain slide.

"As with its other applications, Google intends to add additional features, like customization for mobile screens and the ability to integrate files stored on remote servers," mentions InformationWeek. But for now, Google's new presentation app is pretty average: it doesn't have options for embedding, you can't export the presentation as a PowerPoint file, there's no option for adding transitions, notes, audio files or content from the web. Google Presentations' strongest point is collaboration, but it delivers far less than other online presentation apps.

"Presentations are a natural addition for Google Docs , as they are usually created with the intention of being shared. Web-based, collaborative presentations offer users much-needed relief from manually managing and compiling group members' input in separate attachments, and they make it possible for multiple users to view a set of slides while a moderator controls the presentation. Users will see that these features are still in simple, early stages; the Google Docs team is making them available today in response to strong user demand for presentation-sharing, and updates and improvements will continue to roll out over the coming months," explains Google.

It's also worth mentioning that the new member of the Google Docs family doesn't have a name and that Google Docs & Spreadsheets transformed into Google Docs.

The local copy of the presentation

Update: Here's an example of published presentation.

Yahoo Buys Zimbra to Compete with Google Apps

Yahoo paid $350 million for Zimbra, a collaborative online suite that integrates email and group calendar using an AJAX interface. The application can be installed on your server or you can choose from one of the many hosting solutions. Because it's open source, you can install it for free unless you need support or some proprietary components.

The ugly-yet-versatile application has many of Gmail's features (conversation view, labels, attachment preview), but adds IMAP support, attachment indexing, saved searches and shared address books. Zimbra Mail is closely integrated with the calendar, so you can always see the recent events and the events that take place in a day mentioned in a message. Zimbra also offers an offline version, mobile clients for many devices and great compatibility with the most important enterprise software.

"Zimbra is a global leader in email and collaboration software and its services are aimed at universities, businesses, and ISPs worldwide, which is a major driver of what made the company so attractive to us," explains Yahoo. The decision to buy Zimbra had a lot to do with the growth of Google Apps and the potential partnerships with universities and ISPs that could endanger Yahoo Mail's position. By combining its existing solutions with Zimbra, Yahoo could extend its influence in the corporate space. After all, both Yahoo Mail Beta (previously known as OddPost) and Zimbra Mail are heavily influenced by desktop email clients like Microsoft Outlook and sacrifice the performance for a familiar interface.

When Zimbra was launched, in 2005, many people were impressed. "I would go out on a limb and say that it combines the best of both Microsoft Outlook and Google's GMail," said Om Malik. Others think this is not the right approach: "To me, Zimbra doesn't in any way resemble my mental model of a web application; it resembles Microsoft Outlook. On the other hand Gmail, which is also an Ajax-based email application, almost exactly matches my mental model of how a web application should look and feel."

Both Gmail and Zimbra were revolutions that had a big impact. Here's how Zimbra described enterprise email's problems in 2005:

As an email administrator, are you happy with how much time you spend per mailbox on basic "care and feeding"? Is Email Broken? Web browsing and email are the two killer applications of the Web. Given the ubiquity of email, it is perhaps surprising that we users are not a happier lot. The frustrations oft associated with the email experience stand in contrast to the relative satisfaction of web browsing and web administration.

You can judge for yourself if Zimbra solved email's problems from this demo or this Flash tour. As for Google Apps, the competition from Yahoo could accelerate its development. Here's some free advice directly from Zimbra:

"Since all Google Docs are stored on Google's servers, public companies would face big Sarbanes-Oxley compliance issues if they deployed Google Apps. Zimbra's Web 2.0 messaging and collaboration platform provides enterprise customers with freedoms that Google Apps just can't provide, including the ability to archive for compliance purposes. They can use Zimbra as a hosted service or deploy it on-site. They can use it online or offline while retaining killer AJAX functionality. They can offer their employees access from any desktop, Web, or mobile client."

Google's Server Names

Here's a list of the Google Servers used by different services as they're returned in the HTTP headers. Not all of them have transparent names and some of them may suggest interesting data (like the ctcserver for the not-yet-existent Google Call service linked from Google's robots.txt). Google Web Server is a modified version of Apache custom server that runs on Linux.

Server Name	Services
GWS (Google Web Server)	Web Search, Image Search and many other services
GFE/1.3 (Google Front-End)	Gmail, Calendar, Picasa Web Albums, Docs, Blogger, orkut, Reader and many other services
GWS-GRFE/0.50	Groups
bsfe (Blog Search Front-End)	Blog Search
OFE/0.1 (Ocean Front-End)	Book Search, Patent Search, Catalogs (Ocean is Google Book Search's code-name)
SMS search frontend 1.0	Google SMS
Search-History HTTP Server	Web History
Auto-Completion Server	Google Suggest, Firefox/Google Toolbar auto-complete
TrustRank Frontend	Safe Browsing
GCS/1.0	Safe Browsing
SFE/0.8	Finance
FTS (C)1997-2007 Interactive Data Managed Solutions AG	Finance charts
asfe	Base
mediaserver	Base (images)
cffe	Product Search (Froogle)
btfe	Thumbnails: Image Search, Google Video, Youtube
Video Stats Server	Google Video
cachefe:image (Cache Front-End)	Picasa Web photos
staticfe	interface images (Picasa Web)
ctcserver	Google Call ( www.google.com/call )
GoogleChartServer/1.0	used for dynamically-generated charts (e.g.: Google Video's stats)
NFE/1.0 (News Front-End)	News
mfe (Maps Front-End)	Maps
Keyhole Server 2.4	Maps, Earth (imagery)
PSFE/4.0	Alerts
igfe (iGoogle Front-End)	iGoogle
COMINST/1.0	Testing software installation (Pack, Picasa)
TWS/0.9 (Translation Web Server)	Translate
mws (Music Web Server)	Music Search
R2FE/1.0 (Reviews Front-End)	Reviews (Music, Movies)
zfe	Reviews
pfe	Co-op
codesite/5477219	Code
ga-reporting-fe	Analytics reporting
ucfe	Analytics
lpfe	Analytics (www.google-analytics.com/siteopt.js)
Toolbar Gaia User Service Server	Google Toolbar authentication
cafe (Ad Conversion Front-End)	Conversions
AdClickServer	Google test ad server
Google Trends	Google Trends
TFE/0.0 (Transliteration Front-End)	Google Indic Transliteration
Apache	most Labs services

{ Thanks, Tony. }

Online Presentation Apps: Google Presently's Competition

TechCrunch reports that Google will launch a new product next week at Techcrunch 40, while The Inquirer found out that "Google is presently touring publishing houses to show Presently, so even if they make hacks sign an infuriatingly Web 1.0 non-disclosure agreement, an announcement can’t be far off." Now that Google's presentation tool (code-named Presently) is about to be released, let's see what are the most important online apps that let you create and share presentations.

Sharing

SlideShare lets you upload PPT, PDF and OpenOffice presentations without creating an account. The file size limit is 30MB and it's easy to upload multiple files. You can view the presentation in a Flash player that doesn't support keyboard shortcuts or switching to a certain slide. SlideShare uses an interface similar to YouTube, so you'll find many features from the video-sharing site (comments, tags, groups, favorites, stats, embedding code), but also a way to download the presentation. Unfortunately, you can't actually edit the presentation, so the site is mostly useful if you want to create an online version of a presentation that can be shared with other people.



Creating

Preezo lets you create simple presentations, but it can't import PowerPoint files. The interface is simple, there are few formatting options, there's no collaborative feature, you can't search text in your presentation or export your presentation. You'll probably like the slide sorter and the wide variety of transitions. The presentation can be published online and embedded into a site.



Spresent uses advanced vector graphics animation to create nice-looking charts, tables, shapes. The interface is inspired by Adobe Flash (the tool for developers, not the player).



Collaborating

Zoho Show can import presentations (less than 10 MB), but I wouldn't recommend trying to edit them. Zoho Show does a poor job at rendering presentations and it's one of the weakest Zoho apps. You can add shapes, arrows and change the text formatting. Even if the application says you can collaborate when editing a presentation, the feature is not functional.



ThinkFree Show also has a 10 MB limit for uploading files and the rendering is not very good. There's a quick edit mode that allows you to modify the text and a power mode that uses a Java applet. The Java interface looks exactly like Microsoft Powerpoint 2003, but it's much slower and has less features. You can collaborate with other users, but you don't see the changes in real-time.



Both Zoho and ThinkFree have full online suites. ThinkFree hosts more than one million documents and has a social networking community around office documents. Here's an interesting comparison between Google Docs and ThinkFree, from ThinkFree's blog:

Google Docs and Spreadsheets obviously has a larger market share in the industry, after all with the Google name and marketing team behind it its bound to have few users out there. GD&S is a great lightweight tool, but having the best MS Compatibility and the highest level of feature functionality of any online office suite has propelled us into the second spot.

While Google is attempting to become the platform of choice, with everything from Gmail to a news service, we have focused on the office functionality and delivering it in ways that no one else can:

* offline/online, and now a hybrid with ThinkFree Premium
* on-demand/on-premise
* tiered accessibility Power Edit (Java) / Quick Edit (AJAX) / Flash
* tiered sharing - private, shared restricted, shared unrestricted, read only, published

Google Presently has a big chance to become a powerful alternative to these applications if:

* it can do a good job at importing PowerPoint files (and not just small files) - most presentation apps have problems
* you can export the presentation as a PPT, HTML or SWF file
* the collaboration works as good as in Google Docs - I couldn't find an app that allows real-time collaboration
* it can add content from the web (Flickr photos, YouTube videos, Google Maps)
* you can embed the presentation in your site (or just some slides)

The PowerPoint viewer from Gmail is already a good option for embedding presentations and the screenshots from TonicPoint (acquired by Google) show an already mature application.

Google Maps in Your Sidebar

Mini Map Sidebar is probably the greatest Firefox extension for maps and geographical information. Its simple interface hides a lot of powerful tools that help you find places directly from your browser's sidebar.

The sidebar lets you drag and drop addresses from the current web page, search the map, get the latitude/longitude, embed the map or send a link by email. It's also easy to switch from Google Maps to Yahoo Maps, Windows Live Local or Google Earth. You always have a list of recent addresses, so you can go back to another address with just a click or select them when you want to get directions.

The extension also adds two options in the contextual menu that let you open the selected address in the sidebar or in a new tab.

Other interesting features: geodiscovery (if a page has geotags, you can view the locations - for example: some Flickr photos), preview KML files before opening them in Google Earth, find places reviewed at Platial and Tagzania.

Overall, the extension is very useful if you need to map a lot of places and opening Google Maps in a new tab is too time-consuming.

Google Maps Covers 54 New Countries

Google Maps increased the number of countries that have street maps and satellite imagery with 54. "We've more than doubled our coverage of Latin America and are now mapping three times as many countries in Asia as before. (...) We have better detail for some countries than others, but this is just the beginning," boasts Google LatLong Blog. While this a good news, some people complain that "the data is inaccurate and outdated" or only available "at the highway or major-road level".

Here's a list of the new countries, powered by Google Spreadsheets (the area is automatically generated using the GoogleLookup function and can be inaccurate). The largest country is Kazakhstan and the smallest territories are Bermuda and Aruba. Argentina, the eighth largest country in the world, is still a blank area on the map.

Profiles for iGoogle's Gadget Developers

If you like an iGoogle gadget, there's a big chance that the author wrote other great gadgets. Just click on the small arrow next to the title, choose "About this gadget" and the developer's name will point you to a profile page that contains all of his/her gadgets.

iGoogle also has a "hall of fame" of the authors that wrote the most popular gadgets. There's no overall ranking, as Google shows different rankings for each international edition. Here's the #1 gadget developer for the US edition of iGoogle: Phillip Olsen, who wrote 147 gadgets.

To find if one of your Gmail contacts writes gadgets, enter his/her name in iGoogle's search box or go to the My Community page.


"The evolution of this gadget ecosystem reminds me of the early evolution of the web itself. Many of our gadget developers, like many early web developers, built gadgets primarily for fun, and the hobbyist developer community remains vital to the success of the gadgets platform. As iGoogle grew, a second motivation for gadget development arose: impact. Building a gadget has become a way to reach millions of users on a daily basis. We now see companies building gadgets for the same reasons that companies started building websites in the early days of the web - to reach new and existing customers," writes Sep Kamvar, the lead software engineer of personalization at Google. He also mentions that iGoogle is a product that tried to answer a simple question: "What do I want to see?" and show this information without entering a query. Introducing an API for creating gadgets made it easier to offer a wide range of content. "Gadgets from our top developers get tens of millions of page views per week, and our users can choose from more than 10,000 gadgets in the directory."

The Number of iGoogle / Google Reader Subscribers

Google Webmaster Tools becomes more useful every month. Initially developed as a way to submit sitemaps, the service expanded its focus by displaying interesting information Google has about your sites, but shouldn't be available to the public: top search queries are the queries that most often returned pages from your site, PageRank distribution, backlinks, crawling errors. Google Webmaster Tools is also a way to alert webmasters about sites that violate Google's quality guidelines.

A new feature shows a list of feeds from your site and the number of subscribers that come from Google services. "If your site publishes feeds of its content, this page will display the number of users who have subscribed to these feeds using Google products such as iGoogle, Google Reader, or Orkut. Because readers can use other sites and aggregators to subscribe to your content, your total number of subscribers from all sources may be higher." At the beginning of the year, Google started to include the number of subscribers in Feedfetcher's user-agent, but only people that had access to the logs or used a service like FeedBurner could see it. Now everyone who authenticates a site in Google Webmaster Tools can see the number of subscribers.


Even though this blog's main feeds are redirected to FeedBurner, they still have Google subscribers. That's because Blogger does a temporary redirect to FeedBurner (HTTP/1.x 302 Moved Temporarily) and Google Reader treats them as separate feeds.

Google Reader's main competitor, Bloglines, shows extensive information about each feed: the number of subscribers and a list of those who made their subscriptions public. This information is even included next to the feed's URL in search results and can be obtained through an API. The complete list of backlinks, displayed in Google Webmaster Tools, is publicly available at Yahoo: just use the link operator. So some of the data could be easily made available to the public without causing too much trouble.

Visualizing Photos Recently Uploaded to Blogger

Blogger launched a new feature that shows the latest uploaded photos in a never-ending slideshow. Blogger Play is addictive, like many other real-time visualization tools, and could be a pretty good screensaver. The slideshow leaves out vulgar pictures, so the screensaver would be safe-for-work. "Blogger Play is (...) a great snapshot of what people are thinking and posting about, right now" and it expands the stream of recently-updated blogs from Blogger's homepage.

To create a screensaver from a web page, you can use RunSaver for Windows and IdleWeb for Mac (both are free, but there are more polished commercial alternatives).

Blogger Play was developed two years ago, but it remained a cool toy for Google employees. "Shortly after Blogger launched photo uploading two years ago, one of our engineers whipped up a web page that would show us the pictures that were being uploaded in real time. The result was fun, often beautiful, but above all, compelling. We couldn't stop watching. Over the years we've kept this photo scroller as part of the Blogger offices, on a monitor or projector, as an interesting (distracting?) slideshow, and a reminder of the diversity and vivaciousness of Blogger blogs."

Technorati has recently launched a real-time visualization of the most recent posts from the blogosphere, but it only shows posts from popular blogs. Now that Google indexes web pages really fast, it would be interesting to search for something and see the new web pages added at the top of the search results as soon as they're indexed.

Google Lunar X PRIZE

Google sponsors an exciting challenge to reconquer the Moon and bring interesting data from there. "Private companies from around the world will compete to land a privately funded robotic rover on the Moon that is capable of completing several mission objectives, including roaming the lunar surface for at least 500 meters and sending video, images and data back to the Earth." The prize is $30 million and the intention is to revive the interest for exploring the Moon.

"The Moon is a stepping stone to the rest of the solar system and a source of solutions to some of the most pressing environmental problems that we face on Earth – energy independence and climate change. Already, governments from around the world recognize the importance of lunar exploration, and national space agencies from the United States, Russia, China, India, Japan, and the nations of Europe plan to send probes to the Moon in the coming decade."

Google teamed up with the X PRIZE Foundation, well-known for the Ansari X PRIZE, a competition that offered $10 million to "the first non-government organization to launch a reusable manned spacecraft into space twice within two weeks". Google bought a replica of the SpaceShipOne, the winner of the Ansari X PRIZE, and installed it inside Building 43 at Googleplex.

In other news, Google Moon received an update and now includes "high-resolution immersive panoramas from every Apollo landing site (available in context for the first time), historic audio clips, re-projected high-resolution charts, surface imagery, and elevation data from the Clementine and Apollo missions". There's also a new Google site that showcases other space-related Google projects.


More at:
Google's Official Blog
Google LatLong Blog

Surprising Thumbnails in Google Search Results

Google crawls the web to find new or updated web pages, but these pages can be grouped in different categories. For example, some web pages include videos. If Google decides that a site contains a lot of videos, it might add it to Google Video and show thumbnails next to the snippet.

The query Amir Blumenfeld shows thumbnails next to a blog that occasionally posts videos and next to a "tumbleblog" that mostly consists of videos (the first and the seventh result from the screenshot below). The videos are hosted by other web sites (in this case, Vimeo) and the thumbnails are only included for homepages.

Google added thumbnails next to video search results as part of the Universal Search program that blends heterogeneous results from different specialized search engines. While the thumbnails sometimes help to describe a video, they also attract your attention as they're one of the few non-textual parts of the page.

It will be interesting to see if Google will eventually show different snippet formats depending on the type of a site (for example, Google could show the author of a blog, the date of a research paper, thumbnails from a photo album or the price and other information about a product).


{ via Googlified }

Google SMS Adds Location-Based Personalization

Google SMS is a very useful service that lets you text your query and receive instant answers. In addition to web search results, you can find local businesses, get directions, check the weather and use it for unit conversions. The problem is that Google doesn't know your location, so all your messages have to include information about your location, especially for local searches.

Now you can save your location by sending a SMS that contains:
set location [city, zip code, address]

To check the weather you only need to send "weather" instead of "weather 90210". This minimizes the text you need to type, so it saves time and effort.

Google SMS is available in the US, Canada, Germany, Japan, Spain at google.com/sms, but this new feature works only in the US.

Google Maps also has an option to set a default location, which is used to personalize your search results. "For those users who have provided a default location in Google Maps, Google will personalize results based on that location. For example, if a user has entered a default location into Google Maps and types in library, the results will bring up the user’s local library."

Google's Cricket OneBox

Google doesn't have too many sports-related features (there's a sports section at Google News and that's about it). The small OneBoxes are the perfect place for displaying live scores or information about teams and players, like you see in Live Search.

Google launched today a special feature for the Twenty20 World Championship of cricket. Search for cricket, cricket [Country] to see the latest scores and a list of current matches.

In true Google spirit, the OneBox links to three sources of information, some of the best sites about cricket, but it's interesting to see that the links contain oi=prbx, the same value used for the Bourne Ultimatum promotion. "Prbx" probably means "promotion box" and that doesn't look very good for Google.


{ via Google Blog }

Update: There's also a rugby OneBox, for the Rugby World Cup:

Mobile Search Ads For Everyone

Some Google advertisers received a mail that informed them about Google AdWords' extension to the mobile space:

In the next few days, your search ads will be eligible to run on Google Mobile Search pages (like they currently do on Google.com). We are offering this feature - and any resulting clicks - for free through November 18, so you can experiment with the rapidly growing mobile platform while still reaching qualified customers.

Each ad’s eligibility will be determined by its landing page and only ads with landing pages that can be adapted for viewing on mobile browsers will be shown. (...) Again, you will not be charged for clicks on these ads until November 19, at which time we will begin charging the usual CPC prices. And as always, you may opt-out of this feature at any time.

Google will automatically adapt the landing page the same way they do with search results. This is a better idea than the previous iteration of Google's mobile ads that required to have a mobile-optimized web page. The new mobile search ads will be available only in the US, so if you spot one and manage to take a photo, post a link in the comments.

Update: Here's a test page for Google's mobile ads.

Google Reader Numbers

Here are some interesting facts about Google Reader:

* Google Reader has two kinds of feeds:
- feeds that have one subscriber (two thirds from the number of feeds, they're updated every 3 hours)
- feeds that have more than one subscriber (these feeds are updated every hour)

* Google Reader uses 10 TB for storing all the raw data

* Google Reader crawls 8 million feeds

* Google Reader is the only major feed reader that keeps the entire history for all the feeds.

* many Google applications use Google Reader's infrastructure for feeds: iGoogle, orkut, Gmail's web clips, Blogger widgets, Google Spreadsheets, Ajax API. Google Reader is the place for any kind of user-driven activities that involve feeds and it's independent from Google Blog Search.

* the rate of user growth = the rate of growth for the number of feeds

* the index size grows 4% every week

* 70% of the Google Reader traffic comes from Firefox (a lot of geeky users)

* Gmail and orkut are the only Google applications that have a bigger number of pageviews/user than Google Reader

* search requires a lot of computational resources. Google Reader uses two indexes for search:
- a big tree updated twice a day (150machines, 600 million documents)
- 40 small trees for recent posts, updated every 5 minutes (40 machines, 40million documents)

* future features:
- very soon: internationalization, feed recommendations, accepting pings sent to Google Blog Search
- in the near future: simple clustering based on links (posts that link to the same page), adding comments to the shared items
- in the distant future: getting calls to Reader from Gmail and orkut's main interface
- idea for monetization: adding AdSense ads and sharing the revenue with publishers, assuming they use AdSense

Note: Most of the information from this post comes from a confidential video in which Google's Ben Darnell explained to some Nooglers how Google Reader works. The video was hosted by Google Video, but it's no longer available. More about the video here.

{ via Blogoscoped }

Google Intends to Integrate Its Social Applications

Apparently Google learned something from Facebook's success and intends to connect all of its social applications. The new central place for social activities will create feeds for all or your events ("activity streams") and share them with your contacts, if you choose to do so. I called this Social Gmail, but the name of the project seems to be Makamaka. All of these feeds will be managed using Google Reader's infrastructure, so the project will not be launched until Google Reader manages to handle a lot of new users. Here's an example of Facebook feed that served as an inspiration for this project:


Google's social applications that will be included should be: Gmail, Calendar, Docs, orkut and probably others. orkut has recently launched a feature that aggregates and displays all the updates from your friends, so the new feature will be similar.

The updates from your friends section on your homepage shows updates when your friends perform the following actions on orkut:

* make changes to their profile
* make changes to their photo album
* make changes to their video favorites
* accept new testimonials

When you make these changes to your own profile, your friends will see your updates on their homepages.

The new project could also mean a radically improved contact manager that shows a lot of live data from your contacts. Hopefully, the data will be searchable and only available to the persons you trust.

Note: Most of the information from this post comes from a confidential tech talk in which Google's Ben Darnell explained to some Nooglers (new Google employees) how Google Reader works. This tech talk is part of the "Nooglers and the PDB" series of weekly talks, which is open to all Googlers, but it was accidentally posted on Google Video.

{ via Blogoscoped. Screenshot licensed as Creative Commons by Danny Sullivan. }

Google Apps Gets Important Endorsement

AP reports that Google Apps gained more credibility as "technology consultancy Capgemini will begin recommending Google Inc.'s online suite of office software to its corporate customers. (...) Capgemini, based in Paris, France, influences the type of software used on more than 1 million personal computers in companies worldwide. Its major customers include drug maker Eli Lilly & Co. and accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers."

While this doesn't mean Google is going to get a lot of new customers, the awareness of Google Apps will increase. Capgemini will explain the advantages of a hosted solution and will provide ways to integrate it with the current systems.

"SaaS solutions, such as Google Apps Premier Edition, provide a cost-effective, easy-to-deploy alternative to installed, licensed desktop software; they are delivered over the Internet via a Web browser and do not require companies to install or maintain software locally, or to tap into internal IT resources. Having the ability to share, review, and edit data in a collaborative environment on the Web naturally serves the needs of Capgemini's enterprise clients with multiple facilities, global locations and distributed employees," detailed Capgemini in a press release.

Capgemini will continue to recommend software from companies like Microsoft and IBM. Google Apps could complement these solutions or replace them. "Capgemini application and infrastructure management experts can help clients develop a strategy for the most effective use of Google Apps Premier Edition, whether as an enterprise-wide office application or as a complementary solution for select departments or employees within a traditional managed desktop environment."

Capemini becomes the first global IT consultancy company that recommends software-as-a-service solutions and it could play an important role in the rise of the collaborative IT - "real-time collaboration unlimited by location, platform, versions, user roles or proximity to the IT hub."

{ Thanks, Thomas Marteau. }

Related:

* Google launches Apps Premier Edition: "simple, powerful communication and collaboration tools for your organization without the usual hassle and cost" (February 2007)

* Google Apps, not yet a mature enterprise solution: "the solution's rudimentary feature set means that enterprises need to pick carefully and implement slowly" concludes a report from Burton Group (August 2007)

Google Hot Trends Has a Feed

A good way to find the latest important events is to monitor the queries from a search engine and look at the queries that suddenly become popular. Google offers a list of "hot" queries updated hourly. For each query, you can see a chart that reflects its evolution and a list of search results that could explain why it became popular.

Now you can subscribe to Google Hot Trends' feed and keep an eye on what people are searching for. Note that the list is restricted to the US and the first feed item shows the most popular queries from the last hour.

The presentation isn't great, but this feed makes it easier to create web applications that use the data. There's also a third-party gadget that displays the top 10 queries.

You can use Google Reader to reconstruct the archive or just to search the feed and see how often the iPhone, Britney Spears or Ivan the Terrible were a hot topic.

Google Tells You What Time It Is

Google updated the OneBox (or the instant answer, if you will) that shows the local time in different parts of the world. Instead of just showing the local time...


... Google now adds a dynamically-generated clock, the time zone and other possible matches:


To trigger the OneBox, use one of these formats:
time city (time madrid)
time region/state (time queensland)
time country (time usa)

or other verbose formats:
time in...
the time in...
local time in...
current time in...
what time is it in...
what's the time in...

Other search engines also show the local time, but Ask.com does a really good job. It shows the seconds and more information about the place: a map and the current weather.

{ via Google Blogoscoped }

Tips for Google Reader Search

While Google Reader's new search feature has many limitations and is still far from Bloglines, there are some features that help you find a post faster.

1. You have three ways to view search results:

* snippet view, similar to the way Google displays web search results. This view helps you decide if a result is useful by showing snippets related to your query.

* expanded view, that shows the full posts. Choose this view if you want to read most search results.

* list view, which only shows the title of the post. This is useful if you want to explore a lot of search results.


2. Exact matches: put quotation marks around your search terms to get the results that include an exact phrase.


3. Wildcard: use an asterisk to replace some words in your query. This only works for exact matches. Include an asterisk for each word you want to replace.

For example: "has * * * new features" matches: "has just announced several new features", "has recently added two new features", "has released a few new features".


4. Negative searches: if you want all the posts that contain [book search] but don't include [Google], search for [book search -Google].


5. You can bookmark searches. Google Reader doesn't offer an option to save searches, but if you find yourself repeating the same searches, bookmark them. The latest Google Reader update added transparent URLs so you can use the Back button or bookmark pages.

Example: http://www.google.com/reader/view/#search/myquery


6. Search using the keyboard:

/ - add focus to the search box
Tab - choose a folder or a feed to restrict your search
Enter - instead of clicking the Search button, press Enter

Alternate between the three views: 1 (expanded view), 2 (list view), 3 (snippet view).

To select the first search result, press j. Then you can go to the next result (j) or the previous result (k).

Press Enter to read the full post and go back to the search results by pressing Enter again.


7. View a search result in its original context: make sure that the result is active and press v or middle-click on the title. This will open a new tab/window with the blog post or news article.


8. You can search other people's shared items and public folders. Assuming you know the numeric ID of a user, do a search in your shared items and replace your ID with another ID:

http://www.google.com/reader/view/#search/query
//user%2FIDNUMBER%2Fstate%2Fcom.google%2Fbroadcast

Example: here's a search for [Microsoft] in Robert Scoble's shared items.


9. Because Google Reader is not yet able to rank results by relevancy, a good way to make sure you'll find a post in six months is to star it. When you want to retrieve an important post, restrict the search results to the starred items first.

Microsoft Launches Translation Service

Microsoft launched a service for automatic translation called Windows Live Translator. The site lets you translate a text limited to 500 words or a web page from English to German, Dutch, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Korean, Chinese, Japanese, Russian.

Microsoft uses Systran to produce most of the translations, but also offers an option to translate computer-related texts using a machine translation system developed in-house. Microsoft's translation technology has been used to translate technical materials, including MSDN Library.

"Recent research in Machine Translation (MT) has focused on data-driven systems. Such systems are self-customizing in the sense that they can learn the translations of terminology and even stylistic phrasing from already translated materials. Microsoft Research MT (MSR-MT) system is such a data-driven system, and it has been customized to translate Microsoft technical materials through the automatic processing of hundreds of thousands of sentences from Microsoft product documentation and support articles, together with their corresponding translations."

Microsoft intends to integrate this service into Live Search and provide a feature already available in other search engines for a long time. Windows Live Translator's presentation is extremely interesting: the default view shows the original page and the translation side by side in two vertical frames. If you hover over a sentence in one of the pages, the sentence is highlighted in both pages. If you scroll in one of the pages, the other page performs the same action. This is an interesting approach especially for those who speak both languages fairly well or want to learn a new language. Unfortunately, it's difficult to read a page that requires to scroll horizontally.


Google also has a translation service powered by Systran. The translations are identical to the ones returned by Babel Fish, but they're different from Windows Live's translations, so Microsoft might use an updated version of Systran's software.

Google developed a machine translation system that's available to the public for only three languages: Arabic, Chinese and Russian. To expand these systems to other languages, it's important to have a lot of parallel texts. "Rather than argue about whether this algorithm is better than that algorithm, all you have to do is get ten times more training data. And now all of a sudden, the worst algorithm is performing better than the best algorithm on less training data," explained Peter Norvig, Director of Research at Google.

While machine translation is not yet a replacement for human translation in most cases, it's a great way to get the approximate gist of a text in a foreign language. One of the most important problems is that machine translation doesn't always produce coherent phrases and doesn't understand the subtleties of language, so don't use it to translate poetry or to send important emails.

iGoogle Tab for the Rugby World Cup

The option to share an iGoogle tab is a great promotional mechanism. You can create special gadgets for an event or use existing gadgets and change their settings.

Google created a special tab for the Rugby World Cup that started yesterday in France. The tab is promoted on some of the Google homepages from countries that are involved in the competition (for example: Google Australia). Google also has a special doodle for this event.


The tab consists of five gadgets: two of them show results and news, other two let you support your team by uploading a YouTube video or hearing a cheerful sound and the last one shows satellite images of the stadiums.


Google should now build a directory for tabs and let you easily create themed tabs using popular gadgets as the building blocks. The new Gadget-to-Gadget Communication API could be helpful to create a unified package.

But Google should fix this weird bug before: if you click on the link to add a tab and you're not logged in, the tab is added to a default iGoogle page. When you log in, the tab is nowhere to be found. It would be nice to force a log in before adding the tab to iGoogle.

{ Thank you, Mark. }

Measuring Distances in Google Maps

If you want to measure the distance between two or more places, Google Maps can be pretty helpful.

One way to do that is to click on "My Maps", select "Distance Measurement Tool" in the Featured Content section and create a path on the map. You can add as many points as you want and if you make a mistake, there's an option to delete the last point. Distances can be expressed in Metric units or English units, but if you're feeling geeky there are many other less known units you can choose: Bohr radius, Egyptian remen, nautical mile, Olympic swimming pool, light-year, PostScript point and more.


"My Maps" can also be used to create personalized maps. Add lines, define a path and change it by dragging one of the white rectangles placed on the path. The personalized map can be saved for future reference, printed, shared with others and embedded in a site.


It's interesting to compare these distances with those obtained from driving directions. To customize the route, drag the blue line or add a new destination in the sidebar.


Google Earth offers similar ways to measure distances. In both Google Maps and Google Earth, "measuring is calculated using the lat/lon coordinates from point to point and does not consider elevation."

Only the distance measurement mapplet lets you choose between metric and English units of measures. The path from "My Maps" shows the total distance in miles, while the driving directions show the units of measures used in a country.

Google's Search Pages Could Include Richer Ads

When Google launched Universal Search, Marissa Mayer was asked if Google intends to include image or video ads. She didn't rule out this idea and said it's natural to see ads evolving in the same direction as the organic search results. In a chat with Gord Hotchkiss, she talked more about this:

"I think that there will be different types of advertising on the search results page. As you know, my theory is always that the ads should match the search results. So if you have text results, you have text ads, and if you have image results, you have image ads. So as the page becomes richer, the ads also need to become richer, just so that they look alive and match the page. (...) So while I do think the ads will look different, they will look different in format, or they may look different in placement, I think our commitment to calling out very strongly where we have a monetary incentive and we may be biased will remain."

At the Citigroup Technology Conference in New York, Nicholas Fox from Google gave an example of video ad for a local butcher that would work better than a standard text ad: "a video with shots of fresh meat and the overall store experience". He also assured us that Google will be careful about user experience and the new ads will be placed only if they're really relevant.


The promo for "The Ultimate Search for Bourne" was probably the most complex ad ever included in a Google search results page: it included a small image and an option to view the trailer inside the same box (the video was hosted at YouTube). Google now also includes big blue buttons next to the ads from advertisers that accept Google Checkout as a method of payment. Another interesting experiment shows the address of the business, a static map and an option to get directions next to local ads.

The main advantages of the text ads are that the page loads faster, they're not obtrusive and blend with the rest of the content which mainly consists of text. Now that search results also include geographical information, images, videos, news and the content is more diverse, the ads could also be richer. Google will probably keep the current text ads and use Plus Boxes to expand the content.

Personalization is another thing that could put the ads in line with search results. "My philosophy is that the ads and the search results should match. [And when it comes to targeting,] search and ads are almost the same," said Marissa Mayer.

Update: Daniel Dulitz, from Google, writes on Slashdot:

"I'm the product manager responsible for the way ads look on Google. You will not be distracted by image ads or video ads on Google search results pages. Period.

Just because other companies use image ads and video ads with the _purpose_ of distracting users doesn't mean Google will do that. Images and videos can be useful and entertaining, if you see them when you want to see them. It's taken us a long time to figure out how to do it right.

BTW, how many _years_ do we have to be in business before people learn Google isn't motivated by short-term greed? Yes, we want to make money. We want to make money 10 years from now. The only way to do that is to build great products that people want. I think we've done a pretty good job of that so far, and we're not planning to stop."

An Online Version of Your Library

Google Book Search has an incredibly useful new feature that lets you build a virtual library of your favorite books. You can import the books if you have a list of ISBNs or search them and click on "Add to library".

Your library has a public URL you can share with other people (here's mine) and even a feed. You can also write reviews, rate the books or categorize them using tags. Probably the most important reason you should build the library is because it becomes searchable. Imagine being able to find a scene from one of your books without knowing its title and by typing some keywords that describe the scene. Of course, Google didn't index all the books in the world, so many of your favorite books aren't yet searchable.

Another new feature is the "cover view", a way to only see the book covers and leave out the additional details. To find the author and the title of a book, hover over its cover.


Book summaries also show popular fragments quoted by other books. "Digitized text is useful beyond search, too. It enables us to infer connections between books through shared passages. (...) You can discover connections between books through quotations like this in a feature we call Popular passages," notes the Google blog.

New York Times reports that Google will also add a way to view the full text of some copyrighted books, but I hope this won't end up like Google Video Store. "This fall, Google plans to start charging users for full online access to the digital copies of some books in its database, according to people with knowledge of its plans. Publishers will set the prices for their own books and share the revenue with Google. So far, Google has made only limited excerpts of copyrighted books available to its users." I discovered this new feature in January in a Google page that describes how it works: "With online access, users who discover a book through Google Book Search will be able to pay for immediate access to its full contents. (...) The book will be available to users only through their browser, and only when they've signed in with their personal account. Users cannot save a copy on their computer or copy pages from the book."

Windows Live's Trojan Horse

Microsoft launched a software bundle for the most important products released under the Windows Live umbrella. Windows Live Installer (Beta) is very similar to Google Pack, but Microsoft doesn't include third-party software.

The confusing Windows Live brand brings together software and web apps that serve as an extension to Microsoft's operating system. It's pretty strange to include in the name of a webmail service the name of an operating system, even if Windows Live Hotmail also works on Linux and Mac.

Windows Live Installer has a triple role:

* to increase the adoption of Microsoft's search engine (there's an option to set Live Search as the default search engine)

* to bundle Microsoft's software offering in an unified package

* to integrate with Microsoft's web applications and to increase their usage and usefulness


"Windows Live makes it easy to store and manage your communications and information, and share what's going on in your life with the people who mean the most to you. (...) Today we're releasing beta versions of a new generation of Windows Live software designed for your Windows PC that makes it easier than ever to get connected to Windows Live or other services. (...) This new suite of applications is a new way that we can make connecting, communicating, and sharing anywhere a terrific experience on your Windows PC. Together with our web services, we have a complete suite that combines the best of the Web and the best of Windows, and works the way you want," explains Chris Jones, from Windows Live.

Essentially, Microsoft wants you to live in a "Windows Live World", where there's little difference between online and offline, but the installed software takes the central role. The software included in Microsoft's package have a consistent look and are tightly integrated:


* a sign-in assistant that lets you switch between your Windows Live identities the same way you switch between your Windows accounts (it works only in Internet Explorer).

* a shiny email client that looks and feels a lot like Microsoft Outlook. Windows Live Mail recognized my Gmail address and filled the POP3 settings for me, but it also provided me with an easy way to create a Hotmail address and to see the online status of my Messenger contacts.



* Windows Live Messenger, the software responsible for the huge popularity of Microsoft's social network, Windows Live Spaces.

* Windows Live Writer, an excellent blogging editor that works with most popular blog platforms, including Blogger and Windows Live Spaces.

* a photo gallery software that also installs Microsoft's desktop search tool and makes it easy to publish photos to Windows Live Spaces and videos to MSN Soapbox. Unfortunately, it wasn't able to index the "My Pictures" folder, but it has tags, ratings and an option to create panoramic pictures.

* the toolbar for Internet Explorer, whose main purpose is to let you search the web (with Live Search).

* Windows Live OneCare Family Safety is an online parental control service that helps "protect your kids from the online stuff you don't want them to see by filtering the Web sites they visit".

While many of these applications have counterparts in Google Pack, the integration between Google's products is almost non-existent or not very visible. Google also didn't use the opportunity of a software like Google Desktop to let you publish documents of the web or to send photos from Picasa to Google Talk.

Windows Live Installer has great software and a good distribution strategy could help it improve the awareness of the Windows Live brand and also keep people away from Google.

Google Reader Adds Search

As mentioned in the previous post, Google Reader is now mature. But how could it mature be without having a search feature? The wait is over: Google Reader finally added search.


You can search all your feeds, the feeds from a folder or the posts from a single feed. In fact, you can perform two searches: one for a folder or feed and another search for the posts that contain some keywords and are from the folder or feed you've previously selected. The results are sorted by date and it takes a couple of seconds for them to show up.


It's easy to navigate using keyboard shortcuts: j for the next item, k for the previous item, Enter to read the full post and to go back to the search results, v to go to the original site.

Some small complaints: it would be nice to search the current folder or feed without having to manually select it from the list; there's a noticeable lag so search is anything but fast; when restricting the search to starred items you can't find the post you've starred one minute ago; some advanced search features would be useful (restricting to an author, a date range, posts that have enclosures). Ranking search results by relevance (with a slight bit of personalization) and clustering them à la Google News would dramatically improve the search experience, but I'm probably a nitpicker. What's important is that Google Reader has a way to search your feeds.

Update: For about a day, Opera users saw new Google Reader interface, specially designed for their innovative-but-not-very-popular browser:

Reading Reactor (or a Google Reader Update)

A Google Reader update, released to a select number of users, solved a weird annoyance and added a long-existing feature to the interface. (Update: The new release is live and it also includes the most requested feature - search.)

Apparently, Google Reader learned to count to 1,000, which is a major improvement if we consider that Google Reader was only able to count to 100. More exactly, all the feeds, folders and other views showed 100+ if you had more than 99 unread items. I wonder if this is a technical limitation or Google is afraid we're not able to handle the information overload.

The other feature lets you hide the sidebar by clicking on a small arrow, like in Google Maps. You can already do this by typing u, but who's going to remember all the keyboard shortcuts? (You don't have to remember them. Google Reader is probably the only major web applications that makes it a piece of cake to see the available shortcuts: just type ?)

Like any grown-up Google product, Reader will also add support for multiple languages and remove all the icons reminiscent of Google Labs. Google Reader is now more than a feed reader, it's responsible for almost anything related to feeds at Google: from iGoogle to the feed API. After all, it started as an Atom parser in JavaScript that became a 20% project.

"[Aaron Boodman] let me know (I'm paraphrasing) that I was missing the big picture and that a reading tool would be more useful if its model started with the item (not the source) as a building block and allowed items to be interleaved and maybe even ranked and recommended to other people. Our conversation meandered into comparing certain views to television as TV channels are important but not as important to viewers as the shows themselves," describes Chris Wetherell the initial vision.

Hopefully, this vision will continue to guide Google Reader. Ranking, filtering, recommending help you see the most important information and obtain a personalized view for your feeds. Google Reader could truly become a reactor by reacting to your signals and to external signals (Reactor is Google Reader's codename).

{ Screenshot licensed as Creative Commons by Dan Ox. Tip from Tom Schenk Jr. Special thanks to Justin Blanton. }

Google Spreadsheets Lets You Import Online Data

Google Spreadsheets wins the prize for the coolest new features launched this summer in Google's web applications.

The magical autofill lets you type the first elements from a series, select them, drag the fill handle (a small blue square) across the range that you want to fill and obtain the rest of the items automatically. It works for time series (days of the week, months), numerical series (arithmetical progressions), a combination between text and numbers (for example: type Q1, Q2 and Google Spreadsheets will add Q3, Q4 etc.) or dates.


You can also try entering related words, products, companies, countries and you may get surprising results; just press Ctrl while dragging the fill handle. It seems that autofill uses data from Google Sets. Look what I got when I typed "pop", "rock", "rap":


The other great new feature uses the "online" part from from "online spreadsheet". Now you can add data from many different sources available online: feeds, HTML files or simply text files (CSV/TSV). The data is automatically refreshed, although it's not very clear how often.

For HTML or XML files, you have to type an XPath expression to describe the data:
=importXML("URL","XPath expression")

For example, to get the Google search results for [live], you need to check the source code and notice that the class attribute has the value "l":
=importXML("http://www.google.com/search?q=live", "//a[@class='l']/@href")


There's a special function to import tables and lists from HTML files:
=importHtml(URL, element, index)

Element can be either "list" or "table", while the index tells an element's order in the page. Here's how to import all the definitions for [live] found by Google:
=importHTML("http://www.google.com/search?q=define:live", "list", 1)


To import structured text files, use this function:
=importData("URL")

This is especially useful if you want to import data from multiple CSV files available online.


Atom and RSS feeds can be imported using this function:
=GoogleReader(URL)

The function has an advanced form that lets you add only some of the items from the feed. For example, here's how to obtain the latest headline from New York Times:
=GoogleReader ("http://graphics8.nytimes.com/services/xml/rss/nyt/HomePage.xml", "items title", "false", 1)

If we couple these new additions with the two other functions that retrieve information from the web and consider that each published spreadsheet is available as a feed, it's clear that you can connect multiple spreadsheets and easily reference data available online.

orkut Shows Updates from Your Friends

Google has finally realized that orkut is an important player in the social networking space and it could become more popular outside Brazil and India if Google invested more time and trust.

The latest orkut feature is similar to Facebook's mini-feed: a list of updates from your friends on the homepage.

The updates from your friends section on your homepage shows updates when your friends perform the following actions on orkut:

* make changes to their profile
* make changes to their photo album
* make changes to their video favorites
* accept new testimonials

When you make these changes to your own profile, your friends will see your updates on their homepages.

The feature is not available for everyone, but if you have it, this page should show updates from your friends. You can disable this feature from the settings, by clicking on the Privacy tab.

orkut will probably add many other missing features in the near feature. A simple addition that could provide similar value to Facebook's platform is the inclusion of iGoogle gadgets that could be shared with your friends. The gadget maker is also appropriate in orkut's social environment.

10 Questions and Answers About Google Phone

With so many speculations about a possible Google Phone, it's almost impossible to be just a rumor. Even if it didn't exist when rumors began to circulate, Google has certainly started to work on it. The visible side, the mobile applications, is impressive and grows at a high pace. But will Google Phone be more than just a collection of apps?

Here are some of the most interesting speculations about Google Phone, mostly containing information from "trusted sources". Apparently, Google develops a mobile OS and software, while trying to find one or more companies to manufacture the actual phones. Because there could be more than one Google Phone.


Who makes the Google Phone. Google made an interesting acquisition in 2005: Android, a company founded by Andy Rubin and Rich Miner.

"In what could be a key move in its nascent wireless strategy, Google has quietly acquired startup Android Inc., BusinessWeek Online has learned. The 22-month-old startup, based in Palo Alto, Calif., brings to Google a wealth of talent, including co-founder Andy Rubin, who previously started mobile-device maker Danger Inc. Android (www.android.com) has operated under a cloak of secrecy, so little is known about its work. Rubin & Co. have sparingly described the outfit as making software for mobile phones, providing little more detail than that. One source familiar with the company says Android had at one point been working on a software operating system for cell phones." (my emphasis)


Where: boston.com found out where the research lab is located.

"Cambridge has a chocolate factory, and a Willy Wonka. The chocolate factory is Google's local research lab, located on the seventh floor of a Kendall Square office tower, and the resident Wonka is Rich Miner, a Google executive sometimes described as the company's vice president of wireless but officially a "technical staff member," according to a Google spokesman. The golden ticket is a chance to see a prototype of Google's new mobile phone, which Miner has shown to a handful of Boston entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, some of whom have signed nondisclosure agreements and some of whom haven't." (my emphasis)


What: Om Malik found some details about the OS from a reliable source.

"Google Phone is based on a mobile variant of Linux, and is able to run Java virtual machines. All applications that are supposed to run on the Google Phone are Java apps. The OS has ability to run multimedia files, including video clips. (...) There is a special browser which has pan-and-browse features that are common to modern browsers such as browsers for iPhone and Symbian phones. The entire browser is apparently written in Java. (...) Initially there was one prototype, but over past few months Google has the mobile OS running on 3-to-5 devices, most of them likely made by HTC, a mobile phone maker, and all have Qwerty apps."


What about the phone? Says the Wall Street Journal:

"The specifications Google has laid out for devices suggest that manufacturers include cameras for photo and video, and built-in Wi-Fi technology to access the Web at hot spots such as airports, coffee shops and hotels. It also is recommending that the phones be designed to work on carriers' fastest networks, known as 3G, to ensure that Web pages can be downloaded quickly. Google suggests the phones could include Global Positioning System technology that identifies where people are."


What Google software?

The answer is pretty obvious: "a special version of Google Maps, compatible with built-in GPS", Gmail, access to Google search. "Google Talk will become a part of the phone, adding VoIP capability to the hardware."


How will it look?

The photos available online are just some Photoshopped proof-of-concepts. There's no real photo of a Google Phone. "People who have seen Google's prototype devices say they aren't as revolutionary as the iPhone. One was likened to a slim Nokia Corp. phone with a keyboard that slides out. Another phone format presented by Google looked more like a Treo or a BlackBerry."


When: Business Standard claims it will be launched at the beginning of this month. Other sources say the launch is next year.

"Google, the nearly $13.5 billion search engine major, is believed to be a fortnight away from the worldwide launch of its much-awaited Google Phone (Gphone) and has started talks with service providers in India for an exclusive launch on one of their networks. (...) Sources close to the development said a simultaneous launch across the US and Europe is expected, and announcements would be sent to media firms in India and other parts of the world." (news from August 24)


Why: Mobile is a big part of Google's strategy (New York Times).

"The biggest growth areas are clearly going to be in the mobile space," Eric E. Schmidt, chief executive of Google, said when asked about new opportunities (...). In case his point wasn't clear, Mr. Schmidt drove it home: "Mobile, mobile, mobile."


Seriously, why? Google intends to be the leader in the mobile ads space. A good browser that renders the ads correctly could be helpful.

"What's interesting about the ads in the mobile phone is that they are twice as profitable or more than the non-mobile phone ads because they're more personal," said Mr. Schmidt.


How much will it cost? Many sources indicate it won't be too expensive and it may be subsidized by advertising. It's unlikely it will be free, at least for now:

"Schmidt said Saturday that as mobile phones become more like handheld computers and consumers spend as much as eight to 10 hours a day talking, texting and using the Web on these devices, advertising becomes a viable form of subsidy. "Your mobile phone should be free," Schmidt told Reuters. "It just makes sense that subsidies should increase" as advertising rises on mobile phones."

Opera, the Real Google Browser

I've always thought that Opera is the browser most closely related to Google's philosophy. It may seem strange, but Opera's mail client has many things in common with Gmail (labels, a threaded view), Opera includes search in most views and it usually adds innovative features long before the competition. Another interesting tidbit is that Opera has been supported by Google's contextual ads.

Unfortunately, many Google services don't work in Opera, because of some browser flaws or lack of testing. Another reason is that Opera has a very small market share and very few people care about supporting it.

Opera 9.5, launched today in alpha, tries to solve two of the most important Google problems: persistence of your browser's settings and a searchable web history. Google already has solutions for these problems, but they're limited and not properly integrated. Google Browser Sync is a Firefox extension that synchronizes your bookmarks, cookies, passwords and sessions across multiple computers, while Google Toolbar lets you send all the pages you visit to Google Web History, where you can search them.

Opera also makes your history searchable, but it stores the index on your computer, the same as Google Desktop. You can search the full content of the pages, from the History page or from the address bar.

"With Opera 9.5, we introduce full history search - search the complete Web pages you visited, but without requiring you to bookmark them. Unlike previous and other browser history searches which only look at the URLs of the pages you have visited, full history search searches the actual content of the Web pages you have visited."


If you have a My Opera account (maybe you're a fan), you can store your bookmarks online and have them automatically synchronized every time you make a change. There's no interface for viewing the bookmarks online and no other data is synchronized for the moment. The feature will become even more valuable when you'll be able to synchronize your bookmarks between the desktop version and Opera Mini or Opera for Wii.


So I think it's ironic that the software most closely related to my definition of a Google Browser doesn't work well with many Google services, including Google Docs, Picasa Web Albums, Google Notebook, Google Page Creator, Blogger (this script solves some of the problems).

The latest build of Opera 9.5 is available here for Windows, Mac and Linux. Don't install it over a previous Opera installation or if you're not adventurous.

Exploratory Google Search

Google's search results are far from being flawless, but sometimes they're better than advertised. I was trying to find some information about an algorithm and Google returned a page from a book available online. I liked it so much that I almost read the entire book (mostly for the writing styles and the "war stories"). Last week, I searched for the title of a book and found a great short film inspired by the book.

Marissa Mayer said in an interview that many of the web pages available online wouldn't exist if we didn't have a good search engine. If nobody is able to find your web page, you'll have less visitors and your site will grow much slower (a lot of web sites receive most of the traffic from search engines).

I wonder if showing a list of great web pages not necessarily related to your query, but from the same domain, will help you understand a topic better. Google could provide an "exploratory" mode that expands your query and shows you more from the full picture, like zoom feature from Google Maps. Google already provides recommendations based on the choices of other users and has a log of your previous queries, so it could disambiguate your query, assign it a point in the big space of searches and show the most interesting results from the important queries that surround it.

Did you ever discover unexpectedly great things by searching with Google (or other search engine)?

{ link to Marissa's interview via Google Blogoscoped, that also tells the story of AdSense and Gmail's contextual ads }

Customize iGoogle's Layout

Now you can edit the layout of an iGoogle tab. Choose between 7 layouts:

(1) single column (this is pretty ugly)
(2a) two equal-sized columns
(2b), (2c) two columns: a narrow one and a wide one (there are two flavors for this layout)
(3a) three equal-sized columns (this is default one)
(3b) two narrow columns and a wide column in the middle
(4) four equal-sized columns

I think the most interesting layouts are the ones that combine different types of columns, so you can have more space for the gadgets. The last layout is great for wide-screen computer monitors.

To edit the layout of a tab, click on the small arrow next to its name and choose "Edit this tab". You have the option to rename it and choose a new template. For now, there's no option to change the layout for all the tabs at once.


{ via Google Blogoscoped }

Explore Popular Google Maps

Google's personalized maps are a great way to share details about your trips or to place geographical information in its context. Unfortunately, it's not very easy to find them as the custom maps are buried at the bottom of Google's local search results.

This mapplet lets you see popular maps created by other users as you navigate in Google Maps. You may find details about interesting places, pictures and videos, art guides, tips and tricks from tourists. Don't forget to enable "Browse Popular Maps" in the left sidebar.

Other interesting overlays include photos from Panoramio and Picasa Web Albums (added by default), videos from YouTube and Wikipedia articles.


{ via Google LatLong }

Google Presentations and JotSpot Could Be Available Next Week

Google will participate at the Office 2.0 Conference that takes place next week in San Francisco. Jonathan Rochelle, Product Manager at Google Spreadsheets, will be there:

"Almost a year ago - it was October 10-11, 2006, actually - I participated in the Office 2.0 conference where we (Google) announced the combination of two of our collaborative content creation/editing products: Spreadsheets, which was in Labs at the time, and the Word Processing product formerly known as Writely. Google Docs & Spreadsheets won't even be 11 months old when this year's Office 2.0 conference is held.... which is really just a shocking (to me) reminder of how young this space is."

This conference seems the perfect place for launching the much-anticipated presentation app. Google announced in April that the "due date is this summer" and made two acquisitions: Tonic Systems and Zenter.

Another Google acquisition, JotSpot, could also be integrated into Google Docs. JotSpot's help center is already hosted at google.com, the same as JotSpot's discussion board. In January, JotSpot launched "the last JotSpot version produced before the migration [to Google's infrastructure] occurs", while in July, Dave Girouard announced that JotSpot will be a part of Google Apps.

After all, if Google launched Docs & Spreadsheets at the Office 2.0 Conference, it makes sense to showcase its evolution there.

Update (Sept. 7): No Google announcement at the conference. A new information about JotSpot's development is that it could replace Google Page Creator.

Related Searches, at the Top of Google's Results Page

It's always difficult to show good results for general terms, that's why search engines suggest refinements to precisely define what you want to find. Yahoo displays them both at the top and at the bottom of the page, while Ask has an entire sidebar for search suggestions. Clusty aggregates results from other search engines and clusters them dynamically.

Google was more conservative and placed the related searches at the bottom of the page and sometimes in the middle of the page as an "inline revision", but now it started to show the queries at the top of the page. Usually the related searches add one or two words that disambiguate the query. They're also useful as a guidance if you don't know too much about a certain domain and you want to explore it.

From all the search engines, Ask.com is the most courageous because it offers a wide variety of suggestions while typing your query, so it can drastically improve the quality of your search query. In many cases, all you need to obtain great search results is a well-chosen query and these suggestions, obtained from other users that manually refine the queries, are helpful.

Google OS Tab for Your iGoogle Page

Google has improved the way you can share iGoogle tabs with your friends. Now you can also share the settings, so a weather gadget will keep the information about locations, zip codes and temperature scale.

Here's a Google OS tab that contains some of the most popular Google gadgets grouped in three columns:

- navigation and search (links to the most important Google services and to your bookmarks, a gadget for searching the web)

- news (the top Google News and your feeds from Google Reader)

- communication (Gmail, Google Calendar, to-do items and Google Docs)

This tab remembers some of the changes I've made to the gadgets: I removed some Google services from the list of links, I added a custom section to the Google News gadget and disabled local search in Google Mini Search.


To share a tab, you need to click on the small arrow next to its name, select "Share this tab" and enter a list of friends. If you only want to get the URL that lets you share the tab, you can enter your email address. The changes aren't reflected in the iGoogle pages that contain your shared tab, so make sure everything is in the right place before sharing the gadgets.