Google Lists Your Reviews

Google Lists Your Reviews:
Google gathers all your comments and reviews from services like iGoogle, Google Maps, Google Base, Google 3D Warehouse and lists them at http://www.google.com/reviews/search .


The list of reviews is public, but to get a permalink you need to know your user ID. Here's an example of public reviews page that mostly includes ratings for models from 3D Warehouse. One way to get a permalink for your reviews is to post a comment at Google 3D Warehouse and copy the link displayed next to your comment.


You can visit the discussion threads to read the replies, edit your comments or even delete them. Sorting the reviews by rating could reveal a list of gadgets, places, products or 3D models you found interesting at some point, assuming you took the time to provide feedback.


Google should provide more consolidated interfaces that show data gathered from different services. It would be useful to view and search all your comments from Blogger blogs, get an unified view for all the files uploaded to Google services (Gmail, Picasa Web Albums, Google Docs) or search all the starred items, whether they're bookmarks, Google Reader posts, Gmail messages or documents.

Gmail's Limitations for Sending Messages

Gmail's Limitations for Sending Messages:
It's likely that a normal Gmail users didn't notice that Gmail has a lot of limitations for sending messages. Here are some of them, as mentioned in a mail from Google:

- 500 messages per day (i.e., you can hit 'Send' a maximum of 500 times)

- 500 unique recipients per message

- 2000 total emails per day (for example, you could send one message to a group of 500 people four times)

In addition to these limitations, "Google will temporarily disable your account if you send a message to more than 500 recipients or if you send a large number of undeliverable messages". According to the help center, you can only send a message to up to 100 people at a time if you use POP or IMAP.

Google explains that these restrictions were created to fight against spam and to prevent abuse. The same rules are enforced for Google Apps users, as well.

Om Malik thinks that "500 messages are nothing in this day and age, especially if you are in the information business as I am" and wonders why Google doesn't list all these restrictions.

Google Map Maker

Google Map Maker:


Google Maps doesn't have street-level maps or information about local businesses for many countries. To make the service more useful in countries like Cyprus, Vietnam, Iceland, Pakistan and the Caribbean islands, Google launched Map Maker, a way to add or edit features, such as roads, businesses, parks, schools, and place them on a map. After submitting the information, it will be available at the Map Maker sites for other users to edit it and you could expect to see it live in Google Maps when Google decides there's enough information.


Google recommends to use the hybrid view to locate places precisely and to zoom in to a range of 50m to 1km. You can add businesses using placemarks, mark roads with the line tool and add parks using polygons. This wiki offers more information about locating features and tutorials for all the tools that can be used to improve the maps. "This product is a labor of love by many engineers based in Bangalore who have a desire to see the world mapped," explains Google.



Another collaborative mapping service is OpenStreetMap, that licenses all the data as Creative Commons Share-Alike. The project's motivation is to create a "a free dataset which will enable programmers, social activists, cartographers and the like to fulfill their plans without being limited either by Google's API or by their Terms of Service. The data used in Google Maps is sourced from NAVTEQ and Tele Atlas, two big mapping companies. They, in turn, have obtained some of this data from national mapping agencies (such as the Ordnance Survey). Since they've made multi-million pound investments in gathering this data, these organizations are understandably protective of their copyright."


It would be interesting to see if Google decides to change the licensing terms for the data obtained from users. In the past months, Google started to allow users to edit inaccurate addresses, to add places and to collaborate on maps.

Google Promotes Offline Google Docs

Google Promotes Offline Google Docs:
Google promoted on the homepage the offline support for Google Docs: "Get your documents whenever, wherever". If you have the Gears plug-in for Internet Explorer and Firefox, you can backup your documents, spreadsheets and presentations on your computer and view them offline in your browser. The documents can be edited and the changes are sent to Google's servers when you go back online.

The link from Google's homepage sends you to a page that explains the reason why Offline Google Docs is useful. "Worried about storing documents online because you can't get to them offline? Have no fear. Now Google Docs works offline."

In the near future, Google will add support for editing spreadsheets and presentations offline, but there are some features that will never be available offline without a local converter: exporting documents to DOC, PDF or opening a document from your computer in Google Docs. The documents aren't stored in a format that can be opened by other applications, so Google needs to find a way to sync your documents and convert them to an editable format.

Play YouTube Videos in a Loop

Play YouTube Videos in a Loop:
If you want to play a YouTube video one more time, there's a "replay" button at the end of the video or you can press the left arrow, after focusing the video.


To automate the process and play the video in an "infinite" loop, use Loopy for YouTube, a Greasemonkey script that adds a small link below the video to start the loop. The script requires Greasemonkey , a Firefox extension, and it's efficient: it doesn't reload the page to download the video again.


There's another way to play a YouTube video in a loop - use the loop parameter of the embeddable player (here's the complete list of parameters):


http://www.youtube.com/v/VIDEOID&loop=1 (replace VIDEOID with the video's ID)


If you add the autoplay parameter, the video will start to play automatically:


http://www.youtube.com/v/VIDEOID&loop=1&autoplay=1

Google Trends Shows Traffic Stats

Google Trends Shows Traffic Stats:
Google Trends no longer displays only information about searches, now you can use it to compare the daily unique visitors for two or more sites. To see the actual numbers, you need to log in using a Google account.


It's interesting to find the sources that are used by Google to estimate the traffic of a web site. According to the help page, "Trends for Websites combines information from a variety of sources, such as aggregated Google search data, aggregated opt-in anonymous Google Analytics data, opt-in consumer panel data, and other third-party market research. (...) Additionally, Google Trends for Websites only shows results for sites that receive a significant amount of traffic, and enforces minimum thresholds for inclusion in the tool."


For example, Google Trends estimates that the number of daily visitors for Facebook.com is 30 million, 3 times bigger than one year ago. You can also find the countries where a site is popular, related sites and searches.


One interesting tidbit: you can't see traffic data for most Google sites (for example: google.com, although there are some exceptions). Google explains that you may not find traffic data for web sites with low traffic, web sites that don't respect Google's guidelines or aren't indexed by Google.


Google's blog for webmasters warns that the data may not be very accurate. "Keep in mind that Trends for Websites is a Google Labs product and that we are experimenting with ways to improve the quality of the data. Because data is estimated and aggregated over a variety of sources, it may not match the other data sources you rely on for web traffic information."


There are other services that show web traffic stats: Compete, Quantcast (for US traffic), Alexa, but it's difficult to compare Google's data with the information provided by those services because they use different measures: daily uniques vs monthly uniques, actual numbers vs reach, worldwide visitors vs US visitors.


Update: Here's the reason why Google doesn't show data for its sites. "We have policy of not providing interim financial guidance, and have decided not to release Google numbers in accordance with that policy." I don't think this makes sense, as Google wouldn't release its internal traffic data, but only a rough estimation.

Froogle Integrates with Google Book Search

Froogle Integrates with Google Book Search:
After updating the listings for electronics, Google Product Search (previously known as Froogle) integrated the data from Google's book search engine. In addition to the list of stores where you can find a certain book, Google shows a summary of the book, the table of contents, references from the web and related books. There's also a link to Google Book Search, where you can preview and search inside the book.


In other book-related news, Panlibus points to Zoomii, a great visualization for Amazon's bookstore where books are placed in virtual shelves. If the products are more tangible, people are more likely to buy them, so Google should show more visual information: images, videos, trend charts, feature comparison etc.

Search Read Items in Google Reader

Search Read Items in Google Reader:
One of the most useful features that is missing in Google Reader is a way to search the items you've read in the past. This is useful, since Google Reader's search results are sorted by date and it may be difficult to find an article published two years ago.


Depending on your preferred view, Google Reader defines read items differently: in the expanded view posts are marked as read when you scroll past them (this can be disabled in the settings), while in the list view you need to expand the posts. If you disable the setting that marks the posts as read automatically in the expanded view or if you use the list view, the read items will be a subset of all the posts from your subscriptions.


To see the list of posts you've read in the past, you can visit this page. But if you want to subscribe to the list, so you can easily search the read posts, these steps could help:


1. Find your user ID.Copy this code:javascript:prompt("User ID", _USER_ID);void(0);Go to Google Reader, paste the code in the address bar and press Enter. You should see a long number that needs to be used later so copy it in a text editor or in your browser's search box.


2. Subscribe to your read items.The feed for read items has a long address:http://www.google.com/reader/atom/user/USERID/state/com.google/readReplace USERID with the number obtained in the previous step and subscribe to the feed in Google Reader (for example, type a and paste the feed's URL).


The built-in feed doesn't have options for renaming or unsubscribing, but all these options are available in Settings > Subscriptions. The default title of the feed is "(Your name)'s read items".

To search your read items, enter your query in the search box, press Tab, type the first letters from the feed's title (by default, the first letter from your name) and press Enter.


(The first screenshot features Colorful List View, a Greasemonkey script that brings some color in Google Reader if you use the list view.)


Related:
Explore your interactions with Google Reader


Update (a day later):
You no longer have to subscribe to the read items feed, because Google Reader added "read items" as a restriction in the drop-down:

One Google Help Center to Rule Them All

One Google Help Center to Rule Them All:
To find some information about a Google service directly from the source, you no longer have to locate the help center for that service. The unified help center available at http://www.google.com/support/ lets you search across all the help information provided by Google. This could also be useful if you want to find something related to more than one service.


Behind the scenes, Google uses a custom search engine that includes 218 URL patterns. Google automatically creates an iGoogle gadget for the custom search engine so you can search directly from iGoogle.


Google has become more transparent and most services have lists of known issues and suggestions. The Toolbar help center links to videos, Google Talk's help center shows the most popular searches (among them: group chat, account locked, video chat, Linux, Mac, sign out), Gmail lists recommended articles that are sometimes related to previous queries, while Google Analytics searches many information sources, including Analytics-related blogs and discussion boards.

Better Terrain Representation in Google Maps

Better Terrain Representation in Google Maps:
Mehmet K. noticed an update of the terrain layer from Google Maps, a feature that lets you view physical features, such as mountains and vegetation, with elevation shading.

The fairly recent "terrain" feature in Google Maps now plots contours as well as
hill shading. The only problem that I can see is that the contours are in feet
in the UK whereas feet are only really used in the States. Even in the UK where
we still use miles for our roads, looking at familiar hill heights in feet is
very off putting. When I looked at other countries (Kenya) the heights there
were in meters.

"Contour lines are lines drawn on a map connecting points of equal elevation. If you walk along a contour line you neither gain or lose elevation." The other method used for representing terrain, "hill shading is a computer based mapping technique that shades each area of the surface to proportional to the amount of light that would be reflected off the surface from a light source at a specified location, usually to the northwest of the area of interest. Hill shading produces a planimetrically correct map that looks like a three-dimensional view of the surface."


Back in April, Google's geo blog mentioned some practical uses for these features. "Now, at a glance you can see the height of the world's peaks, or plan your next camping trip. Contour lines can even help you find a flatter bike route for your daily commute, which is key if you live in a city like Seattle."

New Google Mobile Homepage

New Google Mobile Homepage:

Google decided to remove the gadgets from the mobile homepage and place them in a separate iGoogle page. You still can't see all the gadgets from the desktop version of iGoogle, but your favorite feeds, the weather information and the Gmail summary no longer slow down the homepage.


Google Mobile Blog gives another reason why the mobile homepage will load faster: "when you navigate to google.com in your browser, we cache the homepage on your phone. If you bookmark this homepage, then returning to Google using the bookmark is almost instantaneous."


Since the homepage is now static and doesn't display personalized content, it can be cached indefinitely. Google chose to politely ask your browser to cache it for 1,209,600 seconds = 14 days.

But Google still wants to see how many people visit the mobile homepage and this is impossible if all the content is cached. That's why, the last element from the homepage is a tracking pixel, a 1x1 GIF image: http://www.google.com/m/ping?source=magmahome.

Google Browser Sync To Be Discontinued

Google Browser Sync To Be Discontinued:
Google Browser Sync is a Firefox extension that synchronizes your bookmarks, web history, browser sessions and passwords across multiple computers by temporarily saving them to Google's servers. Unfortunately, this was the project of a small team at Google and it's no longer maintained. The extension won't be updated for Firefox 3 and the service will only be available until the end of 2008. Here's the message received from Google by an inquisitive user:

It was a tough call, but we decided to phase out support for Browser Sync.
Since the team has moved on to other projects that are keeping them busy, we
don't have time to update the extension to work with Firefox 3 or to continue to
maintain it.

For those of you who want to continue to use Firefox 2, we'll maintain
support for old versions of Google Browser Sync through 2008. After that, we can
recommend a few other products that scratch a similar itch. We hope that one of
them works for you:

* Mozilla Weave from Mozilla Labs - Offers bookmark and history
synchronization across computers.

* Google Toolbar for Firefox -
Store your bookmarks online and access them from any computer online. [although,
this is not 3.0 compatible as of writing]

* Foxmarks
Bookmark Synchronizer - Synchronizes your bookmarks across all computers
where it is installed.

The latest version of Opera also includes a feature that synchronizes
bookmarks across computers and mobile devices, so we'll probably see it in the
next versions of Firefox and Internet Explorer.

It's pretty sad that Browser Sync wasn't considered important. The extension could have been the first step towards an online Google desktop, available from any computer and always updated. I'll miss the feature that restores the last session remotely.


Update:
Mozilla Weave will add support for synchronizing cookies, passwords, saved form data and sessions, in addition to bookmarks and browsing history. "The next major update to Weave [is] expected to be ready for wider testing shortly after the release of Firefox 3". As you probably know, Firefox 3 will be released next Tuesday.

{ via Alex Polvi }

Export Your Google Calendars

Export Your Google Calendars:
If you created many calendars in Google Calendar and you want to download them so you can view them in a desktop client, there's a simple way to export all the calendars. Just open https://www.google.com/calendar/exporticalzip and you'll get an archive that contains your calendar data.


"In the resulting compressed folder, you'll see an ICS file for each of the calendars to which you have permission to make changes and manage sharing. Note that this method will not export calendars in your Other Calendars list (e.g. public calendars you've added to your list, shared calendars with view access only, etc.)," explains Google.


If you use iGoogle to view your calendars, it's good to know that there's a new version of the Google Calendar Gadget that uses infinite scrolling for the agenda and it shows event descriptions without opening a new page. Like in the previous version of the gadget, you can select multiple calendars to view them on your personalized Google homepage.

Google-Yahoo Search Ads Deal

Google-Yahoo Search Ads Deal:

In June 2000, Google became the default search engine provider for Yahoo. The agreement lasted until 2004, when Yahoo launched its own search engine. Yahoo realized that you can actually make money from search, so it acquired Overture, a company specialized in pay-per-click advertising that also owned two search engines: AltaVista and AlltheWeb. Unfortunately for Yahoo, it moved too slowly and Google became the leader in both search and PPC advertising.

Yahoo's decision to temporarily outsource some of its search ads to Google was predictable, especially after the two-week test from April. Instead of being acquired by Microsoft, Yahoo chose to partner with a company that has a better search ads system.


"Under the terms of the agreement, Yahoo! will select the search term queries for which - and the pages on which - Yahoo! may offer Google paid search results. (...) Yahoo! believes that this agreement will enable the Company to better monetize Yahoo!'s search inventory in the United States and Canada. At current monetization rates, this is an approximately $800 million annual revenue opportunity. In the first 12 months following implementation, Yahoo! expects the agreement to generate an estimated $250 million to $450 million in incremental operating cash flow. The agreement will enhance Yahoo!'s ability to achieve its goal to grow operating cash flow significantly, while at the same time providing flexibility to continue to invest in ongoing initiatives such as algorithmic search innovation and search and display advertising platforms. It gives Yahoo! complete flexibility to continue to use its Panama paid search results."


Yahoo gets a lot of value from this deal and is no longer pressured by investors to significantly improve the search ads. Even if the agreement has a term of up to ten years, I think this is a short-term deal and Yahoo is more motivated than ever to succeed on its own.


Google Blog is quick to announce that this isn't an anti-competitive move. "Yahoo! will remain in the business of search and content advertising, which gives the company a continued incentive to keep improving and innovating. Even during this agreement, Yahoo! can use our technology as much or as little as it chooses." Since the agreement is non-exclusive and Yahoo won't drop the search ads services, it's unlikely that the U.S. Department of Justice will block the deal.


In other related news, Google Talk users have a reason to rejoice. "Yahoo! and Google agreed to enable interoperability between their respective instant messaging services, bringing easier and broader communication to users." Hopefully, this will actually happen, since the previous agreements with AOL and eBay didn't produce any visible effect and there's still no interoperability with AIM and Skype.


Related:
Search, ads, Yahoo and Microsoft
Could Google save Yahoo from Microsoft?
Yahoo tests Google's search ads


Update:
Google Watch has some interesting quotes from the conference call. "We began by saying 'Is there a partnership that would make sense? Is there one that is strategic to both companies and in particular a partnership that would allow Yahoo to remain independent," said Eric Schmidt. "Then Schmidt turned cloak-and-dagger like, noting that the executives met in an empty building that Google owned in an unknown and unfindable location for most of us. Apparently, Yang, Schmidt, Yahoo's Sue Decker and others showed up, sometimes on bicycles."

Edit Google's Mobile Homepage

Edit Google's Mobile Homepage:
Google's mobile homepage, available at http://www.google.com/m, lets you add some of the gadgets from iGoogle: feeds, weather, stocks, Gmail and few other gadgets. While the homepage can be edited from your mobile phone, the interface is pretty difficult to use and it requires a lot of clicks. Now you can customize the mobile homepage from iGoogle's settings: rearrange the gadgets, delete the ones you don't use or add other mobile-compatible gadgets from your iGoogle page.

A better mobile version of iGoogle, optimized for iPhone, can be found at http://www.google.com/ig/i. This version includes all the gadgets from your iGoogle page and preserves many features from the desktop iGoogle.

Skip Flash Intros in Google Search Results

Skip Flash Intros in Google Search Results:
There was a time when many web sites were designed in Flash and included a short animation on the homepage, to impress you before viewing the actual content. Unfortunately, the intro was a time waster.


"Splash pages were an early sin of abusive Web design. Luckily, almost all professional websites have removed this usability barrier. However, we're now seeing the rise of Flash intros that have the same obnoxious effect: They delay users' ability to get what they came for. On the upside, most Flash intros feature a skip intro button," wrote Jakob Nielsen in 2000. The animations were usually gratuitous and didn't allow people to make choices. "Many Flash designers decrease the granularity of user control and revert to presentation styles that resemble television rather than interactive media. Websites that force users to sit through sequences with nothing to do will be boring and pacifying, regardless of how cool they look."


Eight years later, Google added a new option next to the search results that show Flash intros: "skip intro". Clicking on the link saves you time and effort because you can directly bypass the animation.

This is not the first Google feature intended to improve navigation: sitelinks and site search boxes help you save one or more clicks and go directly to the page you want to visit, especially if your query is imprecise.


{ via Google Blogoscoped }

A Dashboard for Google Docs

A Dashboard for Google Docs:

Google Docs has recently added an option to save advanced searches. Besides showing the list of saved searches in the sidebar, Google Docs creates an iGoogle-like page with containers that include results for each of your saved searches. You can reorder the containers using drag and drop and select the maximum number of results.


Depending on the way you use Google Docs, the dashboard is a great opportunity to group related documents, see a list of recently published documents, display the content of a folder or the documents shared with you by a collaborator.


To create a new container, click on "Show search options", build your query and click on "Save this search". A simple example of container shows all the documents from the "School" folder that have been shared with you:


The customized views can be edit or deleted from the sidebar. While the dashboard can't be configured as a start page, bookmarking http://docs.google.com/#home is a fast way to access it.

Google Docs to Add PDF Storage

Google Docs to Add PDF Storage:

After allowing people to collaborate on documents, spreadsheets and presentations, Google Docs will support a new file type: PDF. Judging from Google's code, PDFs will have a distinct section and won't be imported as Google Docs documents.


An icon for PDFs has been available for a while and when you visit http://docs.google.com/#pdfs, Google Docs informs you that there are no PDFs in the list of documents.

Google has a pretty good PDF viewer in Google Book Search and Google Patent Search, so I expect to see some limited editing features added to the PDF viewer before repackaging it as a Google Docs application. Fortunately for Google, no other competing services provide a decent online PDF editor.

"Since becoming one of the original Gmail and Google Docs users way back in the beta-beta days, it has been a continuing source of confusion and irritation to me that we STILL can't even upload PDFs to Google Docs. (...) For those of us with laptops and iPhones it would rock to offload as much as possible onto the web and having sharing capabilities with our clients and colleagues for ALL our docs, not just a select few. In the professional, business, and government communities, PDFs are the transmission document of choice," commented JAVA4DIVA in a thread from Google Docs group.

FeedBurner's New Home

FeedBurner's New Home:
FeedBurner announced in April that it will migrate all its users to Google Accounts. But there's an interesting side-effect: Google will no longer use feedburner.com, opting to use some new subdomains on google.com. It seems that FeedBurner's new home will be feedburner.google.com, a site that announces you can use FeedBurner to "analyze, publicize, optimize, and monetize your feeds". For now, you can't log in or create a new account at feedburner.google.com, but this should change when FeedBurner starts the migration process.


The feeds hosted by FeedBurner will also move from: http://feeds.feedburner.com/name to http://feeds.feedburner.google.com/name, as you can see for this feed. FeedBurner's redirects will start with http://feedproxy.google.com/ , another new Google subdomain.


Google didn't change the branding, but it's clear that FeedBurner will be integrated in many Google services and its identity will slowly dilute.

Searching from the Address Bar

Searching from the Address Bar:
While many people replaced their browser's address bar with Google's search box, there's also a way to use the address bar as a search box. If you don't type a valid web address, Firefox sends your query to Google and you are redirected to the top search result (for navigational queries like [honda]) or to the list of search results.


But you are not limited to Google, you can invoke any search engine from the address bar by associating a keyword that should precede your query. In Firefox and Opera, right click on almost any search box and select "Add a keyword for this search" (Firefox) or "Create search" (Opera) to be able to use the search engine from the address bar. For example, I can associate "gbs" with Google Blog Search, so I can search for the latest blog posts about iPhone by typing [gbs iphone] in the address bar.


Adding shortcuts one by one can be cumbersome, so it would be nice to use an existing list of shortcuts. YubNub, whose tagline is "a (social) command line for the web", has a huge list of shortcuts to search engines, dictionaries, translation services and many other sites. That means you can go to yubnub.org and type the name of a shortcut, followed by one or more parameters. YubNub integrates with many browsers and can be added as a search engine, but I think it's better to add it in the address bar and replace Google as a fallback option. If YubNub doesn't recognize your command, you'll get the list of Google search results.


To add YubNub in Firefox's address bar, open a new tab, type about:config in the address bar, enter keyword.URL in the filtering box, double click the entry and paste: http://www.yubnub.org/parser/parse?default=g2&command=


Instead of adding tens of search engines to your browser, you can just use the built-in shortcuts from YubNub: g for Google Search, gim for Google Image Search, gbs for Google Blog Search, gm for Google Maps, gs for Google Scholar, trends for Google Trends, wiki for Wikipedia, define for Dictionary.com, autotr to translate a web page in English and many others. You can create your own command or find one you like in the list of the most used commands.


If you decide to perform all your searches from the address bar using YubNub, the search results pages will appear to load slower since YubNub has to process your command and redirect you to the appropriate service.


With browsers like Firefox 3 or Opera 9.5 that offer intelligent auto-complete for the address bar, it's clear that the address bar will start to become more useful. Merging the address bar with the search box seems a logical evolution, but no browser found the right way to integrate them properly.

Interesting Ways to Use Google Chart API

Interesting Ways to Use Google Chart API:
College @ Home lists 50 ways to use Google Chart API, a simple API for dynamically generating charts. Plot functions, visualize the evolution of the number of subscribers to a FeedBurner feed, display the results of a poll, transform HTML tables into charts and much more. Of course, you can also use Google's charts just for fun.


If you only need to create a few charts, generators like Chart Maker, Google Chart Creator, Chartpart let you create charts without reading the documentation. To use Google Charts programmatically, check this list of wrappers for Java, C#, PHP, Python.

{ Thanks, Fiona. }

Google and Euro 2008

Google and Euro 2008:
Google shows a special OneBox with the latest results from Euro 2008, the European Football Championship. The OneBox is displayed only if you use the localized Google sites from the participating countries. You can search for [euro 2008] to see the next two matches or [euro 2008 country_name] for the most recent scores.


There's also a page titled 23 days that links to a map of the stadiums and an iGoogle gadget with live results, standings and news.


And if the increasingly frequent Google doodles still mean something to you, the Euro 2008 doodle marked the first day of the championship.

Experimental Gmail Features

Experimental Gmail Features:

As promised last week, Gmail added a labs section to showcase some new experimental features created by Google engineers.

Gmail Labs allows you to try out experimental new features in Gmail and
send feedback to us so we can improve them. If you're going to brave the Labs
world, it's important to keep the following things in mind about these
features:
* They may break at any time
* Similarly, they may disappear temporarily or permanently
* They may work so well that they graduate and become regular
features

The labs section is available as a new settings tab in the English version of Gmail (you could change your language to see it) and it includes 13 new features: some are very useful, other are just for fun. You need to enable each one to see it in action, but unlike Google Experimental Search, you can enable more than one experimental feature at a time.


Here are some of the most useful new features:
* quick links - a new module displayed below Gmail Chat that lets bookmark Gmail views. For example, you can search for something and then click on "add to quick links" to save the search in the sidebar. This can also be used to bookmark important conversations or settings sections. I suggested in an earlier post some useful Gmail queries.


* super-stars - if you use Gmail's star for different things (flag important conversations, flag conversations for follow-up) and you want to differentiate them, you now have more icons for starring messages. Just click on the star repeatedly to toggle between the different states. The feature is very limited because you can't search for messages that were starred with a different icon.


* custom keyboard shortcuts - if you find the current shortcuts offered by Gmail strange and unintuitive, you can remap them. After enabling this feature, a new Settings tab will let you choose the shortcuts for some of the most useful actions. For example, you can replace the "!" shortcut with the more intuitive "S" for marking messages as spam.


* mouse gestures should be familiar to Opera users. You can move your mouse in a direction and associate this movement with an action. Here's what you can do in Gmail: "hold right-click and move the mouse left to go to a previous conversation, move it right to go to the next conversation, and move up to go back to the inbox view."


The other 9 features are less interesting, but some people could still find some use for them:


* show avatars in Gmail chat
* view messages in fixed width font
* place the signature before the quoted text (many Gmail users complained about this in the past)
* random signature from a feed (you can use Google to find some feeds)
* custom date formats
* hide your friends' status messages in Gmail chat
* Snake - that's right, you can now play "Old Snakey" inside Gmail.

* email addict - 15 minutes of break from Gmail for those who need to do other things than reading their mail
* hide unread count - you'll no longer see in the sidebar the number of unread messages from your inbox, the spam folder or other labels.


All in all, there are some useful features and Google promises to monitor people's interest and add the most popular features in the standard Gmail. Hopefully, users will be able to write their own plugins and submit them to a library of Gmail features.


Google insisted that these new features were written by Google engineers in theri 20% time, so they're far from being polished. "There is a code review vetting process to make sure it doesn't break, but no user interface analysis or product analysis. It just has to be functional code to push out. Features can literally modify anything in the Gmail code base," mentions TechCrunch. If something goes wrong, you can temporarily disable Gmail Labs and enter in safe mode by visiting http://mail.google.com/mail/?labs=0.

Public Transit Directions in Mobile Google Maps

Public Transit Directions in Mobile Google Maps:
The latest version of Google Maps for Mobile includes an option that was already available in Google Maps: directions for public transportation. Google's coverage has been continuously expanded in the past months to many US states, Japan, Austria, Switzerland, important cities from Canada, Italy, France, UK and Australia. Google Maps is one of the applications that is very useful when you are on the go and this new feature is a good alternative to the existing driving directions.

"This version of Google Maps for mobile even has a few tricks not yet available on the desktop version of Google Maps. For instance, you can find the last transit trips of the day (to figure out how late you can stay at the party) and more easily browse through earlier or later trips," suggests Google Mobile blog.

You can download the latest version of the mobile Google Maps for Blackberry and Java-enabled phones by visiting www.google.com/gmm on your mobile phone or by following the instructions from Google's site.

Richer Local Search Results in Google Maps

Richer Local Search Results in Google Maps:
Google Maps shows enhanced local search results. Compared to the previous format, Google Maps lets you find more information about the local businesses without having to click on each result. You can see a thumbnail, an excerpt from the most recent review and a link that encourages to post your own review. This format was already used in the text view, but probably few people noticed it.


Excerpts from reviews are included in local search OneBoxes as well, but Google chooses different reviews. Judging from these changes, I think businesses will start to upload images to the Local Business Center and will encourage their customers to post reviews to Google Maps or other sites.

Google Talk Adds Invisible Status

Google Talk Adds Invisible Status:


Some Google applications need a lot of time to add even the most basic features. Gmail Chat added the invisible status in February and now this feature is also available in the Google Talk gadget and in Google Talk Labs Edition. Don't ask about the classic Google Talk client, which was last updated in January 2007.

In a previous post, many people argued that it's not wise to add the invisible status because the instant messaging becomes less useful as more people become "invisible". "It's like one-way spying. If you're going to be online to see if your friends are online, at least have the respect to show other people that you're online. What happens if both you and your friend want to talk to each other, but are both on invisible? You'll never discover that you're online," commented Jyvyn.

One solution for this problem could be to show different statuses, depending on your contacts. "What would be most helpful would be some sort of 'group block' or 'group invisible'. I have a number of work contacts that use g-chat so I need to be on and available, but often I am interrupted by friends wanting to chat and I have to ignore them or interrupt my work to explain I can't talk. If I could add all my work contacts to a group, and show my status to them as online, while showing everyone else away, invisible, or even offline - now that would be useful," said nauthiz693.

Integrating Gmail's contact groups with Google Talk is an obvious next step, but this might require many months of coding. After all, adding the invisible status is probably the second most notable feature added by Google Talk this year, after the chatback badges.

{ Thanks, Carlos. }

No More Video Plus Box in Google's Results

No More Video Plus Box in Google's Results:
Google used to have a feature that allowed you to watch videos from YouTube and Google Video inside the search results. Launched in May 2007, the video plus box was a quick way to play videos without having to load the entire page of a video hosting site. For some reason, Google only limited the plus box to its own video sites (YouTube and Google Video), while showing thumbnails and metadata for other sites.

Yahoo Search added a similar feature in October for YouTube, Metacafe and Yahoo Video, but now the plus box is nowhere to be found in Google's results:

Instead of making the feature available for other video sites, Google decided to remove it altogether. Hopefully there's a better explanation than increasing the number of page views for YouTube and Google Video, as Google usually puts the user first.

iGoogle Tooltips for Reading Feeds

iGoogle Tooltips for Reading Feeds:
When hovering over a feed gadget, iGoogle displays the content of each post in a tooltip so you can read it without having to visit the web page or to expand the post. Since Google uses the title attribute, tooltips don't preserve the original formatting, may be truncated and they also have issues with special characters.

iGoogle tooltip in Internet Explorer 7

Other personalized homepages like Netvibes and My Yahoo show a snippet from the post in a custom overlay and open a reader to display the full content. Loading multiple instances of the Google Reader gadget for different folders is a good alternative for iGoogle's feed modules, especially if you subscribe to many feeds.

{ Thanks, Stephen. }

YouTube Annotations

YouTube Annotations:
YouTube added a new feature for video creators: annotations. "Video Annotations are a new way for you to add interactive commentary to your videos. Use them to add background information about the video, create stories with multiple possibilities (viewers click to choose the next scene) or link to related YouTube videos, channels, or search results from within a video."

You can add annotations by going to the list of uploaded videos and clicking on "Edit annotations" or by visiting one of your videos while you are logged in. There are three types of annotations that can be added while playing the video: speech bubbles, notes and spotlights, as you can see in the screenshot above.

Here's a live example of interactivity that can be added to a YouTube video (also notice the updated embeddable player that looks the same as the player from YouTube's site). The following short video:

can be transformed into a much more engaging content with clickable annotations that point to other videos. For now, only video creators can add annotations, but it would be nice to allow any user to comment on a specific moment from a video (a la Viddler) or to add funny speech bubbles.

{ Thanks, Dan. }

Google Upgrades Site Search for Businesses

Google Upgrades Site Search for Businesses:
One thing that's great about Google is that its paid services are constantly updated with new features, but users don't have to pay more. For example, when it was launched in February 2007, Google Apps Premier Edition didn't include Google Sites, a presentation app, message recovery, email migration and Gmail accounts had 10 GB of storage. For the same $50/user/year, Google Apps Premier Edition offers a lot more features, so the incremental cost of significantly upgrading a product is very low.


Google Site Search, a service previously known as Custom Search Business Edition, falls in the same category. Google offers a hosted alternative for small businesses that want a powerful site search, but don't need all the features offered by Google's expensive search appliances, which are mostly useful for intranet search. Google Site Search is based on the Custom Search platform, but is fully customizable through XML feeds, includes support and doesn't have ads (they're actually optional).

One of the major problems with Google Custom Search was that it used the same index as Google's web search engine, so the site search was just a restriction of Google's web search results. Google realized that people were unhappy with these limitations and decided to create a separate Custom Search index. "We're now maintaining a CSE-specific index in addition to the Google.com index for enhancing the performance of search on your site. If you submit a Sitemap, it's likely that we will crawl those pages and include them in the additional index we build."


The most important new feature offered by Google Site Search is an enhanced indexing, but Google is quick to mention that this doesn't affect Google's main index. "Any additional pages in the Google Site Search index aren't included in Google's index and won't impact a site's behavior in the Google search results."


The other 3 additions to Google Site Search offer simple ways to influence search results. You can upload a dictionary of synonymous to improve Google's query expansion, it's also possible to give more weight to recent web pages or to pages from a specific section.


Unlike many of its competitors, Google Site Search still can't index password-protected pages and it doesn't let you decide how often to index your site's pages, but the price is hard to beat: starting from $100/year for 5,000 documents.


If you don't need support or advanced customization, Google Custom Search is still free. There's also a competition for winning a subscription to Site Search and Google T-Shirts: the only condition is to submit the address of a site that doesn't have search features (quickly remove the search box!).

Explore Places Using Panoramio Look Around

Explore Places Using Panoramio Look Around:
Panoramio, a Spanish photo hosting service acquired by Google to enhance Google Earth and Google Maps, added an interesting feature called "look around". In areas with a high density of images, you can interactively move from one image to another one. "The most interesting places to look around are squares, towers or any location where people took photo in many different directions. Having many overlapped photos means that you can move very far away from the starting point, almost like a real walk," explains Eduardo Manchón, from Panoramio. "Photos of details get embedded inside wide perspectives and allow a nice zoom-in effect. [It] depends very much on the place, but around 10-20 photos should be enough to get the look around."


Frank Taylor, from the unofficial Google Earth Blog, compares "look around" with Microsoft PhotoSynth, an interesting technology that reconstructs three-dimensional spaces from large collections of photos. Panoramio's feature is less impressive and can't recreate 3D spaces that let you seamlessly move between different perspectives, but I wouldn't be surprised if Google integrates it with Street View and Google Earth.


The list of places you can explore using the new feature includes: the top of Empire State in New York, the last floor of Eiffel Tower, the Red Square of Moscow, Brandenburg gate in Berlin and Taj Mahal. Just click on "look around" below the photo and move your mouse inside the new image to choose the next perspective.

Google Shows Real-Time Stock Data

Google Shows Real-Time Stock Data:


Starting from today, Google shows real-time price data for all NASDAQ stocks, informs Google Finance Blog. Google partnered with CNBC, Wall Street Journal, Xignite and managed to convince NASDAQ that providing free access to real-time stock data is the right thing to do. "With universal access to the Internet and the real-time nature of the web, investors need real time data, and now they don't have to pay for it," said Adena Friedman, Executive Vice President at NASDAQ.

Until today, the information was delayed at least 15 minutes and you had to subscribe to financial sites like Bloomberg to get real-time data. "It's important to have up-to-date market data. It's equally important that that data stay up to date. Consequently, we're enabling the streaming of quotes across Google Finance. Prices will update automatically, once per second, to reflect current market conditions," mentions Google.

The real-time data is available at Google Finance (not yet in the charts), in the financial OneBox, but also at CNBC.com, WSJ.com, MarketWatch.com and Barrons.com. Google Finance shows stock prices in the title, so you can open Google Finance in a new window and minimize it to see the latest updates in the status bar.

Cool Features in Firefox 3

Cool Features in Firefox 3:
If you decide to upgrade from Firefox 2 to the first release candidate of Firefox 3, you'll notice an improved performance, less memory leaks, a revamped interface and some very interesting new features:


* select discontinuous text - press Ctrl while selecting different blocks of text, like you can do in Microsoft Office

* I've always liked about Notepad2 that you can select a text and open the Find dialog to search for your selection. Firefox 3 brings this feature to improve its already powerful find-in-page.

* in Google Toolbar 4, Google made bookmarking a very easy task: just press on the star button to bookmark a web page and press again if you want to add tags or edit the title. The latest version of Google's plugin complicated the feature a little bit, but Firefox 3 borrowed the initial concept and changed the way you bookmark web pages. Furthermore, you can now associate tags to bookmarks and find the most visited bookmarks.


* the address bar auto-completes URLs and page titles, while trying to prioritize web pages visited frequently and recently. "Dubbed the AwesomeBar, it lets you use the URL field of your browser to do a keyword search of your history and bookmarks. No longer do you have to know the domain of the page you're looking for — the AwesomeBar will match what you’re typing (even multiple words!) against the URLs, page titles, and tags in your bookmarks and history, returning results sorted by frecency (an algorithm combining frequency + recency). Not only that, but the drop-list results show you the page's favicon, the full title, the URL, and whether you have bookmarked and/or tagged the page in a richly formatted two-line display."


* disable plugins from the Add-ons dialog. That means you can now disable Flash or the Windows Media Player plugin directly from Firefox, without having to install extensions like FlashBlock.


* if the current web page uses OpenSearch to point to a search engine, Firefox shows a blue circle next to the search box. You can add the search engine to your list using only two clicks.


* you can add web applications as handlers for protocols like mailto. That means you can open all the mail links in Gmail without installing an extension if you follow these instructions. Hopefully, in the next version of Firefox you'll be able to also open other kinds of links in web applications (for example, open PDF files in PDFMeNot).


* set permissions for individual web sites: for example, you can disable images or cookies in some web sites you don't trust. Opera offers more fine-grained options in "edit site preferences", but you may still find useful the limited permissions from Firefox (Tools > Page Info > Permissions tab).


* another feature already available in Opera, full-page zoom, has been included in Firefox 3 to allow the scaling of images and other objects. To revert to the zooming feature from Firefox 2, enable View > Zoom > Zoom text only.


Even if Mozilla didn't release the final version, Firefox 3 RC1 is an almost-final version and could safely replace Firefox 2. There's also an unofficial portable version you can use before installing the application. While not all the extensions have been updated to include support for Firefox 3, you can easily disable the compatibility checking.


All in all, Firefox 3 added some cool features, but it didn't ignore fundamental issues like performance or a better back-end for web history and bookmarks. The new interface and the sometimes-not-so-awesome bar are two of the things that still have rough edges.

Google Invests in a Better Web

Google Invests in a Better Web:
Google I/O's keynote, titled "Client, Connectivity, and the Cloud", discussed the latest Google developer-orientated initiatives and their significance. Vic Gundotra, vice-president at Google, explained that Google wants to make it easier to develop web applications by transforming browsers into powerful clients and by making "the cloud" more accessible.


Gears is an open source plug-in that adds offline storage, a local database, asynchronous threads, and other features which could be used to create web applications that are closer to their native counterparts.


In the fragmented mobile space, Google bets on Android, an open mobile platform that includes a powerful browser and APIs that enable developers to create applications which take advantage of the connectivity.


Google App Engine lets you build web applications without having to worry about infrastructure, setting up servers and databases. Anyone can create a web application for free and pay for more resources, once the applications becomes popular.


Google APIs could be used to enhance web applications by integrating them with Google's services: you can get data from Google's apps or from the content indexed by Google.


Web Toolkit lets you use Java to create the front end for AJAX applications and translates your code into optimized JavaScript.


OpenSocial is an effort to make the web more social by providing a standard for creating social web applications.


Most of Google's solutions are open source software (Gears, Web Toolkit, Android) and steps toward creating standards (Gears, OpenSocial) that should move the web forward. Google says that its only incentive for building these tools is that enabling the development of more web applications brings more Internet users and, indirectly, more Google revenue. Some of that revenue is invested in other initiatives that fuel Internet's growth and the cycle continues.

Here's the full 90-minute keynote. Don't miss the cool Android demo at min. 26.