Undocumented Emoticons in Gmail Chat

Undocumented Emoticons in Gmail Chat:

Emoticons are a simple way to disambiguate text messages and to add a human touch using a minimum amount of characters. While Gmail Chat supports many emoticons, the full lists of emoticons that can be used is much bigger. TKHere tried various combinations and found some undocumented emoticons in Gmail Chat:

In the screenshot above, you can see a diabolic creature (}:-)), a crab (V.v.V), a wince(>.<), a broken heart

These emoticons only work in the new version of Gmail and can be disabled in the chat section from the settings (note the cool permalink).

Meanwhile, the Japanese Gmail started to support emojis, pictograms popularized by i-mode mobile phones. "These images can be used as placeholders or icons to identify a link or other elements in your page. There are emoji of common use such as airplane or a train and there are some that may indicate emotions, sun, moon phases and more," explains The Wireless FAQ.

Chat With Your Site's Visitors Using Google Talk

Chat With Your Site's Visitors Using Google Talk:

Google Talk's gadget was a nice addition, but you couldn't use it to chat with unknown people or with the visitors of the site, like in Meebo Me. Now you can do that using the new chatback badges. You only need to add some code to your site and anyone could click on the generated badge to chat with you.

"A Google Talk chatback badge allows others to chat with you even if they haven't signed up for Google Talk or a Google Account. You can put the badge in your blog or website, and people who visit those pages can chat with you. The badge will display your online status (whether you're available to chat or not) and, optionally, your status message."

If someone clicks on the badge, a special version of the Google Talk gadget will open and he will be able to chat with you.

The conversations are private and only one-to-one, so other visitors won't be able to read them. For some strange reason, they're not even added in Gmail's chat section. Unfortunately, being constantly interrupted by other people is not very pleasant, so you can disable the link from your badge by setting your status to "busy" or by signing out of Google Talk.

Google's Lock-in

Google's Lock-in:

Hal Varian argues in the latest post from Google's main blog that "if you look at Google's business, the competition is only a click away. Users can trivially switch search."

While it may seem easy to change your search engine, the reality is that it's difficult. Google is the default search engine in Firefox, Opera, Safari and it becomes the default search engine if you install any Google software and stick with the default options. Google is the default search engine in many people's minds and it's also a name synonymous with searching on the web. Google is the default homepage in Firefox and many people choose it because it loads fast. Google replaces the address bar and it's no longer a web site, it's part of the browser.

Because it's deceivingly simple, people don't treat Google as any other web site. Google is a core feature of their browsers and don't realize they could change it. Even when they find out that Google could be replaced with Yahoo, Live Search, Ask.com, people don't change it because they've already created a connection with Google, learned its tricks and accepted its flaws.

You first accept Google as a browser feature, start to rely on it for things that are important to you. When you learn about possible replacements, you'll start to judge them using Google as a standard and they'll mostly likely fail.

Google camouflaged into a browser feature, into a word, into the default gateway to to the web.

YouTube Down For Almost an Hour

YouTube Down For Almost an Hour:
Believe it or not, YouTube has been inaccessible in any corner of the world for about an hour. Among other consequences, all the sites that embed YouTube videos will load much slower and you won't be able to play the videos. OpenDNS has an explanation for this: "Youtube.com is down right now because Pakistan Telecom has decided to (accidentally probably) hijack their IP address space which means that nobody in the world can reach Youtube." The Pakistani government blocked the access to YouTube "because of content deemed offensive to Islam".

If you know more about this, tell us in the comments.Update: the site seems to be back.

Question Shop

Question Shop:
There are so many questions and so little time to find answers for them. Before there was Google and other search engines, people relied on friends, family or books to solve their mysteries.

In 1924, a company from New York launched a question answering service: people asked questions by phone and received their answers after a short while.

Offering to answer any reasonable question telephoned to its office, a firm dealing in general information is said to have set up business in New York City. Subscribers to the service are permitted to put as many queries to the "question shop" as they desire. Each patron is given a code name and, it is reported, can receive aid from the station at any hour of the day or night. It is also claimed that eighty per cent of the queries do not require more than two minutes for an answer.

This reminds me of Kevin Fox's imaginary Google circa 1960.

Invisible Mode in Gmail Chat

Invisible Mode in Gmail Chat:
Gmail Chat added a new status option: invisible. Now you can be logged in to Gmail Chat and see if your contacts are online, but they won't be able to see you're online.

If you simultaneously use Gmail Chat and any other flavor of Google Talk (the gadget or the desktop application), you won't be able to change your status to invisible because they don't support the new feature yet. The feature was first added to Gmail Chat because it's the most used interface for Google Talk, but it's unpardonable to have three separate interfaces with different features.

Note that feature is only available in the new version of Gmail, supported in Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 2. I wonder if less people will disable Gmail Chat or the feature will become less useful.

Get GrandCentral Invites

Get GrandCentral Invites:
Following the footsteps of Gmail, GrandCentral becomes more available to the world by connecting the invites to Blogger. If you're in the US, you can now get a free invite to GrandCentral, the Google service that centralizes all you phone numbers and adds new features on top of them (the service is free, at least for now). "GrandCentral provides an innovative web-based voice communications platform that helps you manage all your phones and phone numbers through one simple interface. You get a single phone number that forwards to all of your phones, giving you one number for life."

Bloggers can add a widget that allows readers to call them without knowing their phone numbers. Readers enter their phone numbers and GrandCentral makes the connection by calling both parties. "When you add GrandCentral's WebCall button to your blog, your readers can easily call your phone or leave voicemails without ever seeing your telephone number. You can screen calls, either accepting them or sending them to voicemail, and you can even block unwanted callers altogether."

You can receive voicemail notifications by email or SMS, access your voicemail from a mobile phone or from a computer and embed the messages into a site. It's almost like your phone numbers become a part of Gmail, a service that aggregates all the communication tools you use in a single easy-to-access place. GrandCentral is not yet a part of Gmail and it only works in the US, but the integration is inevitable.

If you already use GrandCentral or you're in the US and you can get an invite, what do you think about the service?

The Unnerving Microsoft

The Unnerving Microsoft:
In an aggressive post from the Official Google Blog, David Drummond argued earlier this month that "Microsoft's hostile bid for Yahoo! raises troubling questions. (...) Could Microsoft now attempt to exert the same sort of inappropriate and illegal influence over the Internet that it did with the PC? While the Internet rewards competitive innovation, Microsoft has frequently sought to establish proprietary monopolies -- and then leverage its dominance into new, adjacent markets."

Apparently, these ideas are shared by Google's co-founder Sergey Brin, who declared in an interview that Microsoft's bid is not welcome for the Internet. "The Internet has evolved from open standards, having a diversity of companies. And when you start to have companies that control the operating system, control the browsers, they really tie up the top Web sites, and can be used to manipulate stuff in various ways. I think that's unnerving." According to WordNet, "unnerving" means "formidable, redoubtable, inspiring fear", so probably the word means "worrisome" in the context.

In the past years, Google was upset that Microsoft decided to make Live Search the default search provider in IE7 and Windows Vista didn't provide a way to integrate third-party desktop search tools like Google Desktop in the operating system. Microsoft will certainly try to increase its online presence by leveraging its software + services strategy and by making it easy to access its online services from applications that are presented as upgrades, but we should not forget that Google also uses its homepage to promote services and bundles its toolbar with popular applications.

Get Email Notifications for Google Groups Threads

Get Email Notifications for Google Groups Threads:
Many people visit Google's discussion groups at groups.google.com when something goes wrong in Gmail, Google Reader or any other Google product. The forums are conveniently linked from the support pages and people noticed that email is not the best way to get feedback from Google.

Google Groups doesn't provide an option to be notified when someone replies to one of your topics. Furthermore, when you join a group created for a Google service, the email notifications are disabled by default. There is an option to receive notifications for individual threads, but it's very hard to find it. You have to go to thread you've just created, click on the Options link displayed next to the title and select "Email updates to me". This way, you'll be able to read the answer in your mail client, without having to go to Google Groups and find your post.

Unfortunately, the notifications are sometimes delayed, but Google doesn't provide reliable alternatives. You could manually check the posts from your profile or add an iGoogle gadget that also displays the number of new message from each thread.

API for Static Maps

API for Static Maps:
For those who don't need all the complexity of Google Maps API or can't use JavaScript in a specific context (for example, in a mobile website), there's a new Static Maps API. Similar to the recently-launched API for charts, this API lets you generate maps by simply loading images with a list of special parameters.

The URL below lets you load a map centered on Munich by providing the latitude and longitude of the location:

http://maps.google.com/staticmap?center=48.23930899024907,11.162109375&markers=48.139127,11.580213,red&zoom=7&size=500x300&key=KEY_VALUE
To use the API, you still need a domain-specific key generated from Google's site and the usage limit is 1000 unique image requests per user per day. If you don't want to read the documentation, there's a wizard that generates the URL for you, but it only adds a single marker to your map.

The new API is a good solution if you want to automatically create static maps from a list of locations, but it's limited to web pages, so you can't use it in a software. You should also know that the images can only be displayed on a page from the web site used to generate the API key. Google uses a similar API to generate static maps when you search for locations or local businesses.

Cleveland Clinic to Test Google Health

Cleveland Clinic to Test Google Health:
More than a year after Google started developing a service for storing and managing health records, Cleveland Clinic will be the first test a pre-release version of the service. From a prototype revealed last year, we could see that Google Health intends to help you make more informed decisions about your health by putting you in control of your health information.

Cleveland Clinic will start to test the service on at least 1,500 patients. "It will test secure exchange of patient medical record data such as prescriptions, conditions and allergies between their Cleveland Clinic PHR to a secure Google profile in a live clinical delivery setting. The ultimate goal of this patient-centered and controlled model is to give patients the ability to interact with multiple physicians, healthcare service providers and pharmacies. (...) The pilot will eventually extend Cleveland Clinic's online patient services to a broader audience while enabling the portability of patient data so patients can take their data with them wherever they go — even outside the Cleveland Clinic Health System."

The big benefits are that health records become portable, more accessible and more useful, while still being stored securely. Despite the benefits, people might not feel comfortable with storing sensitive data online.

According to New York Times, Google Health will be publicly available after the pilot ends, in around two months.

Microsoft launched in October 2007 its own health service called HealthVault that has similar goals with Google's initiative, while partnering with a number of important medical institutions. It's not the only existing service for managing personal health records online, but their use didn't become widespread, not even in the US.

Update:

Google Blog mentions that Google Health uses GData and standard medical information formats. "Patients participating in the Cleveland pilot give authorization via our AuthSub interface to have their electronic medical records safely and securely imported into a Google account. (...) Cleveland is just the first of many healthcare providers that will securely send medical records and information via Google APIs at your request. We've been hard at work collaborating with a number of insurance plans, medical groups, pharmacies and hospitals."

Gmail 2.0 and User Happiness

Gmail 2.0 and User Happiness:
When Gmail released an update to its code base in October 2007, many people complained that it loads very slow and it's buggy. Since the new version was initially released only for the US interface, I suggested to go back to the older version by changing the language to British English. This will no longer work since Gmail will soon be released internationally. Meanwhile, I noticed that Gmail 2.0 loads much faster and it's almost as reliable as the previous version.

Some people are still having problems with Gmail 2.0. Geemo complains at Gmail's discussion group: "it usually takes several attempts to even get my mailbox to load and when it does load the mail links sometimes are unclickable. This is supposed to be an improvement!? Also, I always have to switch to Older Version EVERY TIME I need to send an email in order to get the address book auto-fill to work (It comes up in New Version but none of the address suggestion can actually be selected). (...) Is there a way to set my account to only work in the "older" setting? Or should I just move back to Yahoo? "

I enjoyed the reply to this post:

I share your feelings, and wish I could offer you more than just plain sympathy. Till February 13, we could suggest to users (and personally, I did) how to remain with the "old interface", forgoing only the pleasure of coloured labels and the pain of twenty acknowledged but unresolved issues, besides many more unacknowledged, random, quirky, and unresolved ones ... cf. these Groups.

However, from February 13 as he says, the happy Robby Stein, Associate Product Marketing Manager, has put paid to our escapist timidity in not venturing boldly out to embrace the "new interface" by rolling it out to everyone ... except to the Croatian, Icelandic, Hebrew, and Arabic speaking people, the only ones who -- in my opinion -- are truly blessed for now for not being rolled under or over by this "new interface".

I should not comment on whether you should move back to Yahoo! But with indications that either Microsoft or AOL or any other equally diabolical entity picking up Yahoo!, I would feel that learning Croatian, Icelandic, Hebrew, or Arabic may prove to be a smarter thing to do.

The migration to Gmail 2.0 is inevitable, assuming you use a supported browser, but it's not clear if this upgrade is perceived as an improvement. Unlike desktop applications, web apps can suddenly update to a new version you don't like and you can't remove.

A Great Online Document Viewer Gets Even Better

A Great Online Document Viewer Gets Even Better:
Scribd, a site that built a community around sharing documents online, launched an improved Flash viewer for documents. iPaper allows you to view PDF files, Word documents, PowerPoint presentations, Excel spreadsheets in a lightweight widget, but also do other things like zooming, searching inside a document, sharing or printing.

"The primary design goals of iPaper were that it be fast, light and easy to use. At 100 KB the iPaper application is about 1/1000th the size of Adobe's Acrobat Reader software, making it an incredibly fast way to view documents," explains Scribd. While the viewer lacks some features from Adobe Reader, most notably a way to copy text, it renders documents at a high quality, preserving the layout and the pagination.

Similar to YouTube, you need to upload your document, wait until it's converted to Scribd's internal format (that shouldn't take more than a minute) and embed the code into your site. Scribd lets you upload multiple documents at a time and it displays useful stats: the number of views, search queries that led to your document, a visitor map and more.

The site also launched a platform "that allows anyone to bring the iPaper experience to their own website." You could add some code that replaces the links to PDF or Office documents with links to Scribd's viewer, without having to convert the documents manually.

All in all, Scribd has one of the best online PDF viewers and could complement Google Docs, which lacks very good document viewers, shared spaces and a community.

Read this doc on Scribd: Your Day on Google Docs

The Most Frequently Used Features in Microsoft Office

The Most Frequently Used Features in Microsoft Office:
Online office suites like Google Docs are often criticized because they have a very basic feature set, but the advanced features from software packages like Microsoft Office are rarely used. Jensen Harris, Group Program Manager of the Microsoft Office User Experience Team, published in 2006 a list of the most used features in Microsoft Word 2003, according to data collected from the users who opted for the Customer Experience Improvement Program:

1. Paste (11% of the usage)
2. Save (5.5% of the usage)
3. Copy
4. Undo
5. Bold

These five commands account for 32% of all the command usage in Microsoft Word 2003, as they are used very often.

"Paste is also far-and-away the number one command in Excel and PowerPoint, accounting for 15% and 12% of total command use, respectively. Beyond the top 10 commands or so, however, the curve flattens out considerably. The percentage difference in usage between the #100 command ("Accept Change") and the #400 command ("Reset Picture") is about the same in difference between #1 and #11 ("Change Font Size")," according to Microsoft's data.

Google Docs auto-saves documents so you don't need to press the Save button, while the undo feature has a powerful complement in revisions. On the other hand, because of the security restrictions from browsers, copy/paste doesn't work very well (but there are workarounds).

So instead of adding advanced features, Google Docs should focus on the most frequently used features and try to make them easier to use, while addressing the main goal: "enabling people to manage and collaborate on the documents and spreadsheets they rely on in their personal and professional lives, no matter where they are or when they need to access them".

Translate Text From a Web Page Inline

Translate Text From a Web Page Inline:
gTranslate is a Firefox extension that lets you select some text from a web page and translate in another language. For short texts, you can read the translation in Firefox's contextual menu, but in most cases you'll have to click on the short preview to read the full translation. One of the most useful features is replacing the original text with the translation in text boxes. For example, you can write a reply to a post from Google Groups or compose a Blogger post in a language and instantly translate it to another language.

gTranslate uses Google Translate to perform the translations, so it supports the same language pairs.

Google's Glossary Search Engine

Google's Glossary Search Engine:
It may not have a separate address or stand-alone identity, but Google's glossary search engine is a simple way to look up a word or a group of words in many of the glossaries available online. There are many definitions for "glossary", but one of the best is: "an alphabetical list of words or expressions and the special or technical meanings that they have in a particular book, subject, or activity." (source)

It's difficult to create a comprehensive dictionary with all the words from a language and all of their meanings, so specialized glossaries explain the terminology from a domain (for example: philosophy). There are many glossaries available online, but it's not easy to find all of them using a general-purpose search engine.

Launched in 2002 as a labs project, Google's glossary search engine restricts the index to glossaries and other resources like Wikipedia or WordNet, while allowing you to find all the definitions of a word or expression. To use it, add the define: operator in front of your query: for example, type define:isometry in Google's search box.

The search engine works for 9 languages: English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Chinese, Russian. You can change the language at the bottom of the page.

So when should you use the define operator? If you search for:

* obscure words

* specialized terminology

* acronyms and abbreviations

An interesting alternative is OneLook, which supports pattern matching and reverse queries, but it only shows links to the definitions.

Add Full Web Pages to iGoogle

Add Full Web Pages to iGoogle:
If you don't find appropriate iGoogle gadgets for your favorite web sites, there's a way to create tabs that include these sites in iframes. Michael Bolin, from Google, created a gadget that loads almost any web page. Before adding the gadget, it's recommended to create a new iGoogle tab, but don't forget to uncheck the "I'm feeling lucky" option that populates the tab with gadgets. If you add the gadget to an existing tab, all the current gadgets will be hidden and they'll be visible again after you delete it.

The gadget loads by default Google Calendar's homepage, but you can change the URL from the settings: click on the small arrow from the gadget's title bar and select "Edit settings".

Another useful gadget has a rich text editor and you can use it to create content or to paste code from other pages (like Yahoo Video's embeddable code).

iGoogle should have more bare bones containers that can be filled with user's content: HTML code, web pages, dynamic images or structured data and add them to the gadget creator page.

Gmail's Humble Beginning

Gmail's Humble Beginning:
Paul Buchheit, Gmail's first engineer, writes about the first steps in the evolution of Gmail.

I wrote the first version of Gmail in one day. It was not very impressive. All I did was stuff my own email into the Google Groups (Usenet) indexing engine. I sent it out to a few people for feedback, and they said that it was somewhat useful, but it would be better if it searched over their email instead of mine. That was version two. After I released that people started wanting the ability to respond to email as well. That was version three. That process went on for a couple of years inside of Google before we released to the world.

And even when it was released, Gmail stayed in a closed beta for more than a year. After almost four years since the release, Gmail constantly adds new features and it's still in beta ("There's no good reason in the world for Gmail to still have the beta tag. It was supposed to have gone away a long time ago," says Paul).

Paul Buchheit, who left Google and currently works for a startup with other ex-Googlers, thinks it's important to release applications in an incipient phase to get feedback from users.

So what's the right attitude? Humility. It doesn't matter how smart and successful and qualified you are, you simply don't know what you're doing. (...) What is the humble approach to product design? Pay attention. Notice which things are working and which aren't. Experiment and iterate. Question your assumptions. Remember that you are wrong about a lot of things. Watch for the signals. Lose your technical and design snobbery.

Gmail got a delete button after many months of requests from users, even if Gmail's philosophy was "archive, don't delete". Gmail will also add some functionality from folders to its labels, most likely drag and drop.

The key step is to build a product that's interesting enough to a attract an audience and learn from people who use the product. "The sooner you can start testing your ideas, the sooner you can start fixing them," explains Paul.

Your Gmail Adds New Features

Your Gmail Adds New Features:
What do these texts have in common?

"Looks like when you're on Google Reader and click a feed that leads to an external page, it now opens within Google Reader as opposed to opening in a new window. Not sure if this feature was rolled out for everyone or if it's still in testing. It opens up in a 'Preview' pane and you can click a button to open other posts up in Google Reader as well." (The Army of Gnomes)

"I opened my Gmail to find quite the surprise this morning – there's now a Feeds link the in the left nav, and reader opens up into the mail space. It's a little awkward, but pretty cool." (mail from a reader)

"Maybe we missed it but gmail.com has a new feature that was unanticipated. When you right click on a gmail email, you get a preview of the email. Just one more way to view all of that wonderful email." (NoHeat)

All the three texts talk about what seem to be new features in Gmail and Google Reader. The new features are actually introduced by Greasemonkey scripts or extensions, but people sometimes forget they installed them. Since the add-ons directly modify web pages, you'll see something else than most other people.

Custom Views in Google Calendar

Custom Views in Google Calendar:

Google Calendar has an option to define custom views: you can replace the "next 7 days" with other intervals like the "next 3 days" or "next 2 weeks". In the settings you'll also find an option to make your custom view the default.

Another way to change the current view is to use the small calendar from the left sidebar. Click on the small arrows to change the month and select a date to see the corresponding events. To see the events from a date range, click on the start date and drag it to the end date. Note that this only works for short periods of time.

Google Calendar has two useful shortcuts that let you easily move between periods of time: p (previous date range) and n (next date range). To see the events from a certain month in the past, click on "Today", go to the month view and repeatedly press p. Alternatively, type a date in the search box and click on "Search my calendars".

Publish Blogger Posts to Future Dates

Publish Blogger Posts to Future Dates:
Sometimes you want to take a week off from your blog, but it's difficult to stop posting and keep your readers and search engine bots waiting for new posts. One way to handle this is to write a number of posts in advance that are automatically posted while you are away.

Blogger didn't offer this feature, so the only workaround was to use a service that schedules email delivery (like LetterMeLater) and Mail-to-Blogger. But Blogger constantly improve and adds a lot of interesting features, especially lately. Blogger in Draft tests a scheduled posts feature that changes the way Blogger publishes posts: if you publish a post with a future date, Blogger will delay the publishing until that date.

"Publishing a post in the future is pretty simple: in the post editor, reveal the Date and Time fields using the Post Options toggle and enter a post date and time that is in the future. When you then click the Publish button, your post will become scheduled. When the date and time of the post arrive, your post will be automatically published to your blog." This only works from Blogger in Draft, but the feature will soon be available from the regular interface. For those who want to see all the new Blogger features before they're released to everyone, there's a Greasemonkey script that redirects you to Blogger in Draft.

Video Ads in Google's Search Results Pages

Video Ads in Google's Search Results Pages:
A small bit of news from New York Times took a lot of people by surprise: Google experiments with video ads in the search results pages. The intention was announced last year, when Google launched Universal Search, a new format that integrates images, videos, books and other types of content in the main search results and also provides additional information for some web pages. For example, Google shows a thumbnail, the duration and the rating next to videos, while providing the option to play the video inline. This is a big shift from the regular format that only included ten blue links and some small snippets.

Obviously, Google will introduce video ads conservatively, without disrupting the entire experience. The ads will continue to be mostly text, but they'll include the option to play a short video. Google's Marissa Mayer "said, however, that the company would explore adding small thumbnail photos to the video ads as well. And a spokesman said the company is considering testing other formats that may include ads with images."

"The big insight of Google wasn't text ads; it was that the ads should be conducive to the format. We were doing text-based search that was all textual. Visual ads don't work in that format. With universal search, something is getting shaken up a bit on the bottom part of the page. The ads on the top part of the page should match," thinks Marissa Mayer.

Google already experiments with local ads that include maps, addresses and driving directions, mimicking the search results connected with local information. In July 2007, Google's promotion for Bourne Ultimatum included the option to watch a movie trailer inline.

"For us, ads are answers as well" is the phrase that sums up these changes and reflects how difficult is to keep the balance between organic search results and ads. "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," clarified Daniel Dulitz in a Slashdot thread.

If you spot a video ad in Google's search results, take a screenshot and post a link to it in the comments.

Valentine's Day at Google

Valentine's Day at Google:
For Valentine's Day, Google prepared some special logos and design changes. Here's the kitschy Google Docs with custom icons and a prominent "Happy Valentine's Day!" at the top of the page (it reminds me of Slashdot's pink theme for April Fools' Day 2006: OMG!!! Ponies!!!).

There's an interesting doodle on the homepage:

...and YouTube has a commonplace logo:

Over the years, Google changed its logo and even linked to a Java animation. Last year, Gmail removed the invitations and Google surprised everyone with a doodle that seemed to miss a letter.

If you spot something different with Google's sites today, post it in the comments.

10 Similarities Between YouTube and Yahoo

10 Similarities Between YouTube and Yahoo:
YouTube continues to be an independent company and has very little in common with the rest of Google's services. In fact, YouTube has more in common with Yahoo than Google:

1. YouTube's homepage includes content selected by editors, like Yahoo.

2. Both homepages are very cluttered.

3. Signing up for a YouTube account requires to enter a lot of information, including your country, your gender and the date of birth.

4. Both sites include a display ad on the homepage, unlike any other Google site.

5. Yahoo hosts images and other resources at yimg.com, while YouTube hosts them at ytimg.com.

6. YouTube is the only successful community site owned by Google, while Yahoo has a lot of social sites.

7. Both sites show undisclosed ads: YouTube promotes videos from its partners, while Yahoo uses features such as search shortcuts to show ads.

8. YouTube and Yahoo have similar welcome messages: "Hi, Your-Name!" and show the number of messages on the homepage.

9. Yahoo and YouTube use subdomains for the localized versions (e.g.: mx.youtube.com, mx.yahoo.com).

10. They were/are part of unpopular acquisitions.

Add a Blogroll to Blogger

Add a Blogroll to Blogger:
Blogger in Draft (a pre-release version of Blogger) added an interesting widget that lets you display the latest posts from your favorite blogs. It's an enhanced blogroll that displays the recently updated blogs and snippets from the most recent posts.

You can manually add the blogs by entering their URLs or you can select from your Google Reader subscriptions. To add the widget to a Blogger blog, you need to go to Blogger in Draft, click on the Layout section corresponding to the blog and add the "Blog List" page element. You can't add the widget for blogs that still use the classic templates, like this blog.

Google Reader already lets you create a blogroll from any public tag, but Blogger's widget is more customizable.

In other Blogger-related news, the comment page make it more obvious that you can sign in using an OpenID and Blogger enabled pagination for posts with more than 200 comments.

Google Toolbar and 404 Error Pages

Google Toolbar and 404 Error Pages:
I find it very strange that people have abnormal reactions when Google does something. People have an incorrect perception of the "don't be evil" mantra and like to say that Google doesn't respect it every time Google does something debatable. I didn't hear too many people complaining that Internet Explorer replaces default 404 error pages with its own page, but when Google Toolbar does that, it suddenly hijacks web sites.

Let's take a look at a simple example of a site that doesn't have a custom 404 error page (they're very hard too find these days, so most sites won't fall in this category). If you try to go to news.speeple.com/sunflowers, here's what you see in IE7: a page with useful suggestions like "Retype the address" or "Go back to the previous page".

This is actually a page created by Internet Explorer and you can disable it in the advanced settings, by unchecking "Show friendly HTTP error pages". Here's the page returned by the server, which is displayed in most browsers (Firefox, Opera, etc.):

The latest version of Google Toolbar has a feature disabled by default that replaces IE's error pages with more useful suggestions: the site's homepage or subdomain, some search queries that could help you locate the right page. The idea is that you probably clicked on a bad link or the page was relocated without using a redirect. In this case, Google's query segmentation is not perfect, but it usually does a pretty good job at transforming a URL into an useful query. To obtain the suggestions, the toolbar sends the URL to Google's servers, so this feature has privacy implications. More exactly, the suggestion page is obtained from:

http://linkhelp.clients.google.com/tbproxy/lh/fixurl?sourceid=navclient &hl=en&sd=com&error=http404&url=http://news.speeple.com/sunflowers

Google Toolbar only displays that page for default error pages (that have less than 512 bytes), DNS errors and connection failures. The feature can be enabled from Google Toolbar's settings by checking "Browse by name in the address bar", a feature that also performs searches when you enter keywords in the address bar.

So which of the three pages is more helpful for someone who ends up on a non-existing page from a site that didn't bother to create a custom 404 error page?

Street View Update: 12 New Cities

Street View Update: 12 New Cities:

About every two months, Google Maps adds 6-7 new cities to Street View. In May 2007 the service was launched with images for 5 cities, two months later 4 new cities were added, in October Google added 6 cities, while in December a record of 8 cities were added to Street View.

This month, Google added 12 new cities from the US: Juneau (Alaska), Boise (Idaho), Salt Lake City (Utah), San Antonio (Texas), Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill (North Carolina), Manchester (New Hampshire), Kansas City (Missouri), Milwaukee (Wisconsin), Albany, Schenectady (New York). It's interesting to see that the 12 cities are distributed uniformly and the total number of cities is now 35.

When do you think Google will add all the important cities from the US and the rest of the world? Shouldn't Google outsource this job to other companies or at least accept photos from users and use technology like Photosynth to combine them?

Bonus question: can you find the formula for an integer sequence that has the first 5 values: 5, 4, 6, 8, 12?

Designing Google's Logo

Designing Google's Logo:
Wired has an article about the design of Google's logo and its iterations. "Ruth Kedar, the graphic designer who developed the now-famous logo, shows the iterations that led to the instantly recognizable primary colors and Catull typeface that define the Google brand. Kedar met Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page through a mutual friend nine years ago at Stanford University, where she was an assistant professor."

In the process, Ruth used a lot of symbols: from a pattern that suggests the infinite to interlocking rings that symbolize the power of search to transgress cultures, from a happy magnifying glass to sheer playfulness. "By taking out the magnifying glass, Kedar opens up the logo to signify that Google can become much more than just a search engine. By playing with the angles and colors of the letters, she tries to make clear that Google isn't a square corporation."

Ruth Kedar explains that she chose the Catull typeface because "Catull borrows elements from traditional writing instruments such as the quill and the chisel with a modern twist. Search, by nature, is an activity that requires we look into the past. Therefore Catull's historical ties seemed appropriate, as did the bridging between the old analog world and the new emerging digital era."

As you can see, the simple and cheerful Google logo hides a lot of interesting ideas and it's still relevant to the company, even if it's no longer just a search engine.

Before adopting a professional logo, Google used a logo created by Sergey Brin in GIMP. "Tinkering one day with a graphics program called GIMP, Sergey created a color rendering of the Google letters with an exclamation point at the end, mimicking Yahoo! He seemed quite proud of the new logo, which was composed of kindergarten-style block letters in primary colors. But it wasn't the look that meant the most to him. He was pleased that he had been able to teach himself how to use GIMP, free software that was tricky to employ," writes David A. Vise in The Google Story.

Google Shows the Indexing Date for Each Search Result

Google Shows the Indexing Date for Each Search Result:

If you use Google's advanced options to restrict the search results to a certain period of time, you'll find that Google shows the date when each web page has been first indexed (in many cases, this is a good approximation of the date when a web page has been created).

As previously mentioned, you can edit Google's URL to customize how fresh the search results should be. For example, if you append &as_qdr=y9 to Google's search URL, you'll restrict the results to web pages first indexed by Google in the last 9 years. Since this restriction should include all web pages from Google's index, you can use it to display the timestamp next to each search result (e.g.: a search for iPod).

Maybe in the future Google will display the date next to each search result, it will try to approximate the date when a page has been created, allow users to filter results from certain periods and sort the results by date.

Interesting Results from Google Blog Search

Interesting Results from Google Blog Search:

Even it still has problems with duplicate content and spam, Google Blog Search has an important advantage over other blog search engines: it actually finds the most important search results. This is the default option for displaying results and it's recommended to use it even if you only want to read fresh news, as you can change the time interval to "last hour" or "last 12 hours".

Google's blog search engine lacks a homepage that displays the most important posts from the blogosphere, but there's a way to find interesting posts without entering a query. For some strange reason, if you search for [label:keyword] or [view:keyword] (keyword can be anything you like), Google ignores your query and displays a list of blog posts. We can assume it's a list of blog posts relevant for any query.

Finding Places of Interest in Google Maps

Finding Places of Interest in Google Maps:

Google Maps has a very useful mapplet (what's a mapplet?) that shows places of interest from a list of categories. You can select the mapplet by going to the My Maps tab and clicking on Featured content > Places of interest.

Instead of searching for bars, restaurants, hospitals, shopping malls, you can select these categories in the left sidebar and see all the places that match your selection. Unlike the standard search results, the mapplet shows many more places and you can use it to see the picture: for example, to estimate the distribution of restaurants in a certain area. Google Maps lets you select more than one mapplet, so you can also activate the distance measurement tool, the Panoramio layer with beautiful photos or the popular community maps.

90+ Online Photography Tools and Resources

90+ Online Photography Tools and Resources:

Photos are everywhere on the web. From sharing with friends, to editing, printing, buying, selling, searching, remixing and free hosting, we’ve lined up a plethora of resources for photo friends.

For more informations:

http://mashable.com/2007/06/23/photography-toolbox/

60 Gmail Tools

60 Gmail Tools:

With Google announcing the ability to increase your Gmail storage capacity this week, we decided to delve into other ways to extend and enhance Google’s popular webmail service. Presenting: 60+ tools and resources for Gmail.

For more informations:

Code:
http://mashable.com/2007/08/10/gmail-toolbox/

INSTANT MESSAGING TOOLBOX: 90+ IM Tools

INSTANT MESSAGING TOOLBOX: 90+ IM Tools:

Instant messaging is said to be one of the most popular forms of Internet communication for teens today, beating out email thanks to the lack of spam and instant feedback. With SweetIM adding support for AIM today, we thought we’d take a look at how the IM market is shaping up. And for those who think 90+ IM clients are too many for anyone to handle, we wholly agree: that’s why a good number of these are actually tools to aggregate all your IM buddies in one place.

For more Details:

Code:
http://mashable.com/2007/08/07/instant-messaging/

Online Maps: 50+ Tools and Resources

Online Maps: 50+ Tools and Resources:

Mapping is a huge and growing sector, from social maps for sharing with friends, to mashing up Google Maps in every possible way. Trawling through all the mapping sites out there, we’ve compiled a list of the most interesting online mapping tools that some are referring to as “Maps 2.0″.

For more information:

Visit- http://mashable.com/2007/07/23/online-maps/

Facebook-150 Powertools

Facebook-150 Powertools:

Facebook is growing at a fast rate these days, with hundreds of new applications, scripts and Firefox add-ons driving that growth. We’ve picked out the leading browser extensions, desktop applications, Greasemonkey scripts and Facebook apps - more than 150 in all.

For More Details:

Code:
http://mashable.com/2007/07/31/facebook-powertools-1/

iGoogle's Settings Page

iGoogle's Settings Page:

Google's personalized homepage (a.k.a. iGoogle) has a settings page where you can change the language, your location and some things related to tabs (name, theme, layout). You still can't reorder the tabs or make some special changes that aren't available in the main interface.

The settings page would probably be more useful if it had support for batch operations like deleting multiple gadgets or moving all the gadgets that contain "Google" in the title to a new tab.

Local Sections in Google News

Local Sections in Google News:

There's a new type of section you can add to Google News: the local section. Type your location (or any other location) and Google will show you the most relevant news related to your location. Until now, you could create a custom section that showed the most important news that contained your terms, but the new location does a better job at identifying locations.

"While we're not the first news site to aggregate local news, we're doing it a bit differently -- we're able to create a local section for any city, state or country in the world and include thousands of sources. We're not simply looking at the byline or the source, but instead we analyze every word in every story to understand what location the news is about and where the source is located," mentions Google News Blog.

You can create as many local sections as you want by clicking on "Edit this personalized page" and selecting "Add a local section". It would be nice if Google News adds the layout options from iGoogle and makes it easier to rearrange the sections and add new content. Google could also display a lot of interesting content about a location (popular videos, photos, blog posts, events, community maps) in a special iGoogle tab.

Add Data to Google Spreadsheets Using Forms

Add Data to Google Spreadsheets Using Forms:

Google Spreadsheets has a new feature that lets you create a form to accept data. When you go to the Share tab, there's a new option to "invite people to fill out a form". The form is very simple and can be customized by changing the order of entries, their labels and the type of answers. It's also a nice way to get feedback people who wouldn't normally collaborate on a spreadsheet.

You can create forms from spreadsheets or using this URL. To keep track of your forms, add this gadget to iGoogle.

I created a form that lets you add your favorite Google service (the form has a public page that I embedded below) and here's the entire spreadsheet with all the answers.

A More Powerful Google Navigation Bar

A More Powerful Google Navigation Bar:

iGoogleBar is a Firefox extension that enhances Google's navigation bar by showing the number of unread Gmail messages (only from the inbox) and the number of unread posts in Google Reader. The extension also adds icons that open Google gadgets for each service so you can preview your Gmail inbox from Google Calendar or open a recent document from Google Notebook.

For example, in the screenshot below, I visit Google Docs, but I can see that there is a single new post in Google Reader, only two unread messages in my inbox and I can easily open a bookmark from Google Notebook.

Unfortunately, the new navigation bar is displayed after the page loads, it works only in Google's communication apps and it doesn't include the More dropdown. Another big drawback is that the extension is actually a Chickenfoot script that comes with its rendering engine, which is terribly slow. In fact, the extension's XPI file has 1 MB, almost the same as Google Toolbar for Firefox.

Google Offers Security Services for Mail Servers

Google Offers Security Services for Mail Servers:

Google acquired last year Postini, a company that offered hosted services for email servers. "Postini invented the software as a service approach to providing communications security and compliance, and holds two fundamental patents in the space, with more patents pending." Google integrated a small part of the offering in Google Apps Premier Edition: policy management, spam/virus filtering and 90-days message recovery.

Now Google offers the rest of the Postini services under the Google Apps umbrella, but without tying them with Google Apps Premier Edition and Gmail. Google Apps Security Services work with the most important email servers (Microsoft Exchange Server, Lotus Domino, Postfix, Sendmail, Macintosh OS X Server, Novell Groupwise) and offer three levels of protection, priced differently:

* message filtering: anti-spam, anti-virus, anti-phishing, and malware protection for inbound messages - $3/user/year

* message security: inbound and outbound mail filtering, email encryption, content policy management - $12/user/year

* message discovery: the same as above plus one-year message archiving, audit reports - $25/user/year

For educational institutions and non-profit organizations, the prices are much smaller: $1, $4 and $8.33/user/year. For all the services, Google provides 99.999% service level assurance.

Here's how the service works: you change the MX records to point your mail traffic to Google's data centers and all the bad traffic will be stopped before reaching your mail server. Google processes email in RAM and doesn't write the valid messages to disk.

Google provides multiple layers of protection against viruses. The service leverages its visibility to emerging threats by monitoring attacks against our customer base and - in real-time - blocks IP addresses that are issuing virus attacks. In addition, Google utilities multiple anti-virus protections including zero-hour heuristics, coupled with multiple commercial anti-virus engines to detect existing and emerging threats.

As with our virus protection, Google leverages visibility into billions of daily message connections to monitor spam attacks and blocks the most obvious spam. Our heuristic engine then filters the incoming mail traffic and captures any suspicious messages. This is all performed in real-time (processed in RAM memory in our data centers) without delays to your email delivery. With these capabilities, Google combines an extremely effective capture rate with an exceptionally low false positive rate.

Google says that Postini already has 40,000 customers and 14 million users and these affordable prices should increase the user base. Unfortunately, the association between these security services and Google Apps might confuse the potential clients and make them think that the services are only available for Gmail.

In fact, Gmail already includes anti-spam, basic anti-virus, anti-phishing and the corporate version of Google Apps includes content policy management and basic message archiving at no additional cost. Maybe Google will use the data obtained from Postini's services to enhance Gmail's security features.

Could Google Save Yahoo from Microsoft

Microsoft is taking over Yahoo! by Gnal. Licensed as Creative Commons Attribution.

Could Google Save Yahoo from Microsoft:

Even if it's hard to believe that Yahoo will accept it, there's a simple way to make Yahoo more profitable: drop its search advertising service and use Google AdWords. Google has a better technology for ranking ads, a bigger inventory and higher click-through rates. If Google accepts to offer Yahoo most of the earnings, it's likely that Yahoo's profits will make investors happy again.

According to Wall Street Journal, "Google Inc. Chief Executive Eric Schmidt called Yahoo Inc. CEO Jerry Yang to offer his company's help in any effort to thwart Microsoft Corp.'s unsolicited $44.6 billion bid for Yahoo, say people familiar with the matter. (...) Google could play a role in attempts by others to outbid Microsoft, or by Yahoo to remain independent. Google could potentially offer money, or guaranteed revenue in return for a Yahoo advertising outsourcing pact, under that scenario."

There are rumors that Yahoo already negotiates with Google the outsourcing of its search ads in Europe. This could be a good news for Google, who also provides ads for Ask.com.

In a harsh post from the official Google blog, David Drummond is worried that Microsoft's acquisition of Yahoo could jeopardize Internet's openness: "Could Microsoft now attempt to exert the same sort of inappropriate and illegal influence over the Internet that it did with the PC? While the Internet rewards competitive innovation, Microsoft has frequently sought to establish proprietary monopolies -- and then leverage its dominance into new, adjacent markets. (...) Microsoft plus Yahoo! equals an overwhelming share of instant messaging and web email accounts. And between them, the two companies operate the two most heavily trafficked portals on the Internet. Could a combination of the two take advantage of a PC software monopoly to unfairly limit the ability of consumers to freely access competitors' email, IM, and web-based services?"

It's not clear if Google is truly worried by this potential acquisition, since a Microsoft+Yahoo company would be very far from Google's dominant position in search and search ads*, while Yahoo's absorption would take a lot of time. Microsoft has already admitted that it can't compete with Google online by trying to acquire Yahoo and it chose a very bad moment in Yahoo's history to force the acquisition.

* According to Microsoft, Google gets 75% of worldwide revenues in search ads and has 65% search market share in the US and 85% in Europe.