:: 2imprez-A Ethical Hacking Guide ::: April 2008

Google Analytics for Blogs

Google Analytics for Blogs:

Two years ago, Google bought Measure Map, a very intuitive analytics software for blogs designed by Jeffrey Veen. Since then, Google Analytics suffered a redesign and included some interface elements from Measure Map. It seems that the transition is about to end soon as Google Analytics will integrate Measure Map's functionality: blog stats.

Measure Map users received an email that instructed them how to access the new version of the software.

Convert your Measure Map account to Google Analytics

We're giving our earliest users of Measure Map an opportunity to use our new service, built on the powerful Google Analytics platform and continuing to use the interface you're familiar with.

1) Create an account at Google Analytics.

2) Install the Google Analytics tracking code on your blog.

3) Tell us the URL of the blog you're using. (Option: This is a Blogger blog. If so, we'll put a "Stats" tab on your Blogger dashboard.)

It's clear that the standalone Measure Map is history and all of its features will be added in a new Google Analytics section for blogs with information about comments, links from other blogs, popular posts and, hopefully, real-time stats. FeedBurner is also a good candidate for integrating with Google Analytics and providing the big picture of your blog's traffic.

Another good news is that Blogger users will finally have a stats panel that can be accessed directly from Blogger's interface. Hopefully, Google will also include options like showing the number of views for each post or adding a list of the most popular posts in the sidebar.

iGoogle Artist Themes

iGoogle Artist Themes:
"Now you can put the work of world-class artists and innovators on your personalized Google homepage." Google added a gallery of iGoogle themes dedicated to fashion designers (Oscar de la Renta), musicians (Coldplay, Beastie Boys), actors (Jackie Chan), sportsmen (Lance Armstrong), photographers (Yann Arthus-Bertrand), choreographers (Mark Morris), cartoonists (Robert Mankoff), illustrators (Camilla Engman), architects (Cameron Sinclair) and more.

It's a great way to discover interesting people or to decorate iGoogle with the work of people you love. And I'm sure many companies will start to create themes to maintain the brand loyalty.

"As you may know, iGoogle has always provided you with great tools to access and arrange the content you want on your homepage. Just like a person's book or music collection is an extension of their personality, a user's iGoogle page is also a reflection of their loves and interests, both in terms of content, and now, visually," says Julian Sonego on Google Australia Blog.

In an unexpected move, Google promotes the gallery on the homepage using a graphic designed by Jeff Koons and an invitation to check the new feature: "What happens when great art mixes with your homepage?".

Google Combines Driving Directions with Street View

Google Combines Driving Directions with Street View:

Google Maps finally made Street View imagery useful by integrating it with driving directions. If you try to find driving directions in one of the 42 US cities that have Street View images, Google will include these images for each intersection. "It's not always easy to find your way around an unfamiliar place. To help with this, we've been hard at work integrating Street View into the driving directions feature of Google Maps so that now you can preview your route before hitting the road," says Google Lat Long Blog.

This sample for Google Maps API shows an even cooler connection between Street View and driving directions.

FeedBurner Moves to Google Accounts

FeedBurner Moves to Google Accounts:

After Google bought FeedBurner in June 2007, we didn't hear too many new things about FeedBurner. A post from February detailed the benefits of the future Google integration: connecting with other Google services, better performance and new features. "Why not build new services and integrate at the same time? (...) Our perspective is that the time you lose trying to continuously merge an updated legacy codebase with a new rewrite causes you [to] be in a world of never actually getting the integration done because you're constantly working on merge problems."

It seems that the Googlizied FeedBurner will be brought to life soon. FeedBurner Blog announces that "in the coming weeks, upon visiting http://www.feedburner.com/, selected publishers will have the opportunity to sign in using their Google Account". That means you will be offered the option to choose a Google account as a new home for FeedBurner. The posts mentions that the integration with other services will be added gradually and it's easy to anticipate the relaunch of AdSense for feeds or a new tab in AdWords.

The most visible side-effect of the Google ownership is that the premium accounts and MyBrand are free, so you might save at least $96/year. In the past 11 months, FeedBurner doubled the number of users and now has "882,989 publishers who've burned 1,570,012 feeds".

At some point in Google Video's history, you could browse videos by genre directly from the homepage, but you can still use the genre: operator without any other keyword to see popular videos from a certain category, like TV shows.

New in Google Docs: Insert Videos, Edit CSS

New in Google Docs: Insert Videos, Edit CSS:
There are so many updates at Google Docs, that you'll need many hours to explore them and start to use them.

You can now access your browser's contextual menu by pressing Shift while right-clicking. This might be useful if you want to search the text from a document online or to use other features included in your browser.

If you don't want to convert a document to PDF and print the generated file, the option to print the document as a web page is back in the File menu. For simple documents, this should be a better option.

For better customization, Google Docs lets you define CSS styles for your documents: Edit > Edit CSS. Those who know CSS will find it faster to define styles and use them in the HTML code. The most important limitation is that you can't use images that are not hosted by Google Docs in your CSS rules. This page shows you how to add watermarks, repeating backgrounds, styled headers, image borders using CSS.

Presentations can now include videos, obviously only from YouTube, but at least you can find videos directly from Google Presently. "Videos can help you make a point, command the attention of your audience, or even add humor to your presentation," points out Google Docs Blog. Unfortunately, when you export your presentations as PPT, YouTube videos are replaced with still frames.

To write some text that might guide you while presenting, use the new speaker notes feature. "These notes will be visible to you and your viewers in presentation mode or when you print your slides."

Google Docs Blog also mentions that everyone who uses the English interface should be able to view and edit documents offline. "When we first announced offline access several weeks ago, it was limited to viewing and editing word processing documents. Now, we've added view-only offline access to spreadsheets and presentations as well.

Google's New Social Network: iGoogle

Google's New Social Network- iGoogle:

The Google-owned social network orkut, while extremely popular in Brazil and India, has failed to find similar success in the US. With the launch of OpenSocial, an API for writing social gadgets, it was clear that iGoogle will play an important role in Google's second attempt to socialize. After all, OpenSocial applications are iGoogle gadgets with a social component.

Following orkut's model, iGoogle opened a sandbox for developers who write OpenSocial gadgets. The sandbox is probably a test for the next iteration of iGoogle: the personalized homepage turned into a social network. "The integration of OpenSocial with gadgets gives you an opportunity to enhance your content for users by incorporating social features. For example, a books gadget could display what a user's friends are reading, allow users to request to borrow books from friends' libraries, and show users books that their friends recently rated. As users share content with their friends, your gadget will naturally build a broad audience for distributing content and driving traffic," explains the new developer site for iGoogle gadgets.

iGoogle has tens of million of users, 50% of the users are from the US and it was one of the fastest growing Google products in 2006 and 2007. It's also the homepage for many Google users who want to personalize their experience by adding a theme and fresh information from the web. The new social component will not affect all the gadgets, so you'll still have gadgets for mail, weather or news, but some of the gadgets could share information with your friends.
There's also a new canvas view that will show an expanded version of the gadgets, an integration with Google profiles and a newsfeed that shows your friends' recent activities.

Hopefully, the social component of iGoogle won't be too prominently promoted and people will be able to continue using the personalized homepage without dealing with friend invitations and viral gadgets. iGoogle will try to be the social connection between Google services, but this is a difficult mission for Google, a company that has never managed to build a successful social site.

Google Phishing Warning

Google Phishing Warning:
After flagging search results that distribute malware, Google will also show warnings for web pages used for phishing. Most of these pages are active one or two days before they are taken down by hosting providers, but some of them could be indexed by search engines. While the latest versions of Internet Explorer, Firefox and Opera have anti-phishing protection, a new security layer still have some usefulness.

"Warning - phishing (web forgery) suspected. The site you are trying to visit has been identified as a forgery, intended to trick you into disclosing financial, personal or other sensitive information," mentions the page displayed by Google instead of the search result.

Google also has a Safe Browsing API "that enables client applications to check URLs against Google's constantly updated blacklists of suspected phishing and malware pages." The API is used by Firefox and Google Desktop.

Search for Mapped Web Pages in Google Maps

Search for Mapped Web Pages in Google Maps:
Google Maps added the map view available at Google Experimental Search. Google extracts the most important locations from web pages and lets you see the search results on a map. To restrict your search to web pages, you need to click on "Show search options" and select "Mapped web pages" from the new drop-down. Google displays the most relevant web pages that include locations from your current map view, but you can change the location in your query using the operators near or in: for example, [Beethoven near Germany] or [Beethoven in Europe].

This is an entire new way to search the web by changing the focus from general information to geographical information. You could use it to search for people, companies, organizations, events, traditional food or anything that could be connected to a location.

Web pages include a lot of useful information that isn't properly used by search engines: addresses, phone numbers, dates, opinions, characteristics, quotes, examples. All of these could be used to create connections between people and some important dates, between products and people's opinion about them, between concepts and examples. Web search engines could answer to complex queries like "the general opinion about iPhone in the first week after its launch" by using the information available on the web and cleverly extracting attributes and connections.

Google WHOIS OneBox

Google WHOIS OneBox:

Google shows a special OneBox when you search for "whois", followed by a domain name: for example, [whois google.com]. The OneBox shows the date when a certain domain was created and date when it will expire. It seems that the only provider of information for this OneBox is Domain Tools.

Google launched a similar feature four years ago, but it was removed really fast because it scraped data from Network Solutions without permission. "Google quietly launched a service allowing visitors to look up data on domain name owners from public databases - collectively known as Whois - run by registrars worldwide. Although largely unpromoted, the service generated enough traffic to surpass Network Solutions' (NSI's) daily Whois use limits, which aim to stop spammers and other undesirables from harvesting information about its customers."

This is not the only direct answer displayed at the top of Google's search results: there are many OneBoxes that show maps, stock quotes, weather information, local time, books, definitions or facts.

Update: after 3 or 4 page views, DomainTools shows this message "You have reached your daily lookup limit as an guest user. Please login or register". Maybe Google should partner with companies that have less restrictions.

Yet Another Google Video Redesign

Yet Another Google Video Redesign:
Google Video redesigned its homepage and now only includes a list of "hot" videos. "The Google Video home page allows you to browse and play hot videos directly from the home page, making it easier for you to discover popular, interesting videos from across the web. The hot video list is compiled by looking at a variety of signals including videos that most shared, viewed and blogged about."

The video watch page has also been redesigned and it's more flexible: you can hide the right sidebar, minimize the list of related videos and use pagination to read a long list of comments.

Videos from third-party online video sites are still displayed in an annoying frame, but Google Video's bar has been moved at the left of the page to leave more room for the videos.

The search page has two new options for displaying results: in a grid and in TV view, that lets you watch videos while also being able to see the list of results. An interesting new option in the advanced search page lets you search only closed captioned videos. Another good thing is that you can now watch videos inline for some new video sites: DailyMotion, Revver, Guba, Crackle, not just for YouTube and Google Video.

The updates make Google Video more user-friendly and easier to use, even if mixing a video search engine with a video hosting site makes the user experience confusing.

Watch Restricted YouTube Videos

Watch Restricted YouTube Videos:
I've noticed that an increasing number of YouTube videos are restricted to a limited number of countries, probably because the company that uploaded them doesn't have global distribution rights or because it wants to use different marketing strategies in other countries. Even if YouTube says that "this video is not available in your country", you can actually see it using a very simple trick: replace http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEOID with http://www.youtube.com/v/VIDEOID (VIDEOID is the 11-characters video identifier).

Example of video blocked outside US (Madonna - 4 Minutes): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9ciR9qR1dU To see it, paste this in the address bar: http://www.youtube.com/v/I9ciR9qR1dU

Update (one day later): YouTube fixed the player and you can no longer bypass the country restrictions using this trick.

The same trick works if you don't want to log in when you get this message: "This video or group may contain content that is inappropriate for some users, as flagged by YouTube's user community. To view this video or group, please verify you are 18 or older by logging in or signing up.

"http://www.youtube.com/v/VIDEOID sends you to the player used by YouTube when you embed the video into a web page and this player doesn't perform country verifications and can't detect if you're logged in.

Google Maps Predicts Traffic Conditions

Google Maps Predicts Traffic Conditions:
Google Maps can now predict traffic information for any day of the week and time of the day, based on past conditions. By default, if you click on the Traffic button in a supported area from the US, Google Maps shows real-time traffic information. "Comprehensive traffic data is available in over 30 major US metropolitan areas (including Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, and others), with partial coverage available in many more," according to Google Maps help center. There's also a traffic layer in Google Earth and Google Maps Mobile, but these applications don't include yet traffic prediction.

Subscribe to Authenticated Feeds in Google Reader

Subscribe to Authenticated Feeds in Google Reader:
Google Reader is one of the many online feed readers that don't support authenticated feeds. This special kind of feeds requires a username and a password before displaying the content to protect sensitive information. An example of authenticated feed is Gmail's feed for unread messages, but you'll also find password-protected feeds for internal bug reports, private email distribution lists, etc.

FreeMyFeed wants to solve this problem by creating feeds that don't require authentication. The site acts as a proxy between the original feed and your feed reader, while promising that your credentials are safe. "Usernames and passwords are never stored on the server. The usernames and passwords are only parsed to retrieve your RSS feed and then are discarded." Rob Wilkerson explains that the credentials "are encrypted using a rotating algorithm and included in the new URI."

It's not a good idea to enter your username and password in any other place than the site where you created them, but FreeMyFeed could be useful for feeds that are not tied to important accounts. Make sure you don't share any item from the generated feeds.

Google News Quote Finder

Google News Quote Finder:
Google News can now detect quotes in news articles and attribute them to their authors. If you search for people like Eric Schmidt, Pope Benedict XVI, President Bush, Angela Merkel or Fernando Alonso, Google News will display a relevant quote and a link to other quotes from recent news articles.

You can search inside the quotes, sort them by date, restrict them to the last day or the last week. Unfortunately the links to quote listings aren't very descriptive (here's one example) and there's no option to find the quotes related to a news cluster. By default, Google sorts the quotes by relevance and gives more weight to the quotes that are used often.

YouTube Search Enhancements

YouTube Search Enhancements:
YouTube's search algorithms are increasingly smarter and borrow a lot of things from Google search: advanced operators, spelling corrections, related searches, query expansions. YouTube detects duplicate videos and shows the most popular copy in search results, followed by a link to the other videos. There's also an enhancement for videos that are split in two or more parts: YouTube displays a list of links to all of the episodes.

Google Earth 4.3 Adds New Navigation and Street View

Google Earth 4.3 Adds New Navigation and Street View:
The latest version of Google Earth brings a lot of interface changes and new features. There's a redesigned and improved navigation control that lets you change the perspective much faster. Here's the description from Google Earth's help center:

"1. Click the north up button to reset the view so that north is at the top of the screen. Click and drag the ring to rotate your view.

2. Use the Look joystick to look around from a single vantage point, as if you were turning your head. Click an arrow to look in that direction or continue to press down on the mouse button to change your view. After clicking an arrow, move the mouse around on the joystick to change the direction of motion.

3. Use the Move joystick to move your position from one place to another. Click an arrow to look in that direction or continue to press down on the mouse button to change your view. After clicking an arrow, move the mouse around on the joystick to change the direction of motion.

4. Use the zoom slider to zoom in or out (+ to zoom in, - to zoom out) or click the icons at the end of the slider. As you move closer to the ground, Google Earth swoops (tilts) to change your viewing angle to be parallel to the Earth's surface. You can turn off this automatic tilt (Tools > Options > Navigation > Navigation controls; Mac: Google Earth > Preferences > Navigation > Navigation controls)."

You can now display the sun by enabling View > Sun or clicking on the sun button from the toolbar. To create time-lapse views of sunsets and sunrises, click on the "play" button and watch the changes.

For some of the imagery, you can see at the bottom of the window an approximation of the date when it was taken. The Street View images from Google Maps are now available in a new Google Earth layer, which is not enabled by default.

Google Earth includes much more models in the 3D buildings layer for cities like: San Francisco, Boston, Orlando, Munich, Zurich. "Google has optimized the loading and performance of 3D buildings. When you first turn on the 3D Buildings layer near a city with models, you'll see simplistic versions of the buildings load up really fast, then they gradually get more solid and load more texture detail," explains the unofficial Google Earth Blog.

Google Earth 4.3 can be downloaded from earth.google.com. Windows users that don't want to install the application using Google Updater can try this direct link. You'll probably notice that the Windows setup is much smaller: the size has been reduced from 12.7 MB to 7.36 MB. Unfortunately, the new version seems to be less stable and it uses more resources, but it's still in beta.

For Google, Online Video = YouTube

For Google, Online Video = YouTube:

Whenever a Google product adds a feature related to video, YouTube comes into play. Google Talk's gadget lets you watch YouTube videos, orkut lets you add videos from YouTube and Google Video, personalized maps can include videos from the same two Google-owned services, content producers that want to add their videos to Google News need to host them at YouTube and now local business owners can add videos to their Google Maps listings, but only if they are hosted at YouTube.

"In addition to using Google Maps to get local business details, read reviews, and check out photos, I can now also get a sneak peek with embedded videos. Local business owners can easily add YouTube videos along with other content such as business details, photos, and descriptions to their listings. To do so, simply upload your videos to YouTube and ensure that the 'embed' option is turned on," explains Google LatLong Blog.

Online video is more than YouTube and Google Video, but Google seems to ignore this. Even if YouTube's US market share is 73.18% (according to Hitwise), it's unreasonable to think that YouTube should aggregate all the videos that are available online. Google should encourage diversity and choices, instead of selecting the most convenient options.

Google Updater, the New Installer for Google Software

Google Updater, the New Installer for Google Software:

Last year, I posted that Google intends to install all its applications through Google Updater, the central component of Google Pack. At that time, only some people were redirected to the integrated installer, but this behavior has become a standard practice.

Because some of the files from Google Earth were corrupted, I had to uninstall it. When I went to Google Earth's download page, Google informed me that I have to install Google Earth with Google Updater.

Google Pack's help center gives some reasons why it should be convenient to use the Updater, but most of them help Google promote other software. "The Google Updater makes the software installation process more convenient in several ways. First, it installs software easily with just a few clicks. Also, once the Google Updater is installed, you can choose to have a system tray icon notify you when new software becomes available. Finally, the Google Updater provides you with a central place from which you can download more Google software, as well as other software we think you'll enjoy." (my emphasis)

Probably the only reason why I use my computer is to install Google software and this updater finally helps me get things done. If I want to install Google Earth, it's obvious that I should be informed if Google launches other applications and I should be able to install them with a single click. Hopefully, in the next iterations of the Updater, the click will be eliminated and the new software will be installed automatically after analyzing my interests.

I installed Google Earth using the updater and the setup was launched in the background, with the default settings. Google Updater is installed as a system service that starts automatically, places an icon in the system tray and constantly pings Google to see if there are any updates for the Google software installed on your computer. By default, the application installs the updates automatically and can be uninstalled.

Google still offers the chance to install applications without the updater, but the page that points to the direct links is too difficult to find and has an inappropriate title. I'll repost the links here, for convenience.

Google Desktop for Windows:
http://desktop.google.com/index.html?rd=f

Google Earth for Windows:
http://earth.google.com/tour/thanks-win4.html

Google Toolbar 4 for IE:
http://toolbar.google.com/service/tbdl?hl=en&tbdata=T4

This practice is not Windows-only. Google's Mac software is installed only with the updater. "Google Updater is the installer for Google products on the Mac. You can use Google Updater to see which Google software you have installed and to see other Google applications you might be interested in. Google Updater helps keep your software up-to-date by installing updates when they become available. And you can use Google Updater to uninstall Google Software." Probably the most outrageous part from the Mac FAQ is the answer to the question: how do I uninstall Google Updater? "To uninstall Google Updater, you first have to uninstall other Google software on your computer. You can't uninstall Google Updater while you have Google software on your computer because we need it there to keep your software up-to-date."

Maybe Google should focus less on "we" and more on "you". Most Google software already has an option to auto-update and this could be easily added to the applications that don't have it. If the installers are too confusing, Google could simplify them and remove the unnecessary steps. I don't want to imagine what would happen if each application installed a system service for auto-update and used your network connection to constantly check for new updates.

Update: Apparently, I was lucky because I used Firefox to install Google Earth. If you use Internet Explorer, Google also offers you the chance to install Google Toolbar and to set Google as the default search engine.

Google Starts to Index the Invisible Web

Google Starts to Index the Invisible Web:

Google Webmaster Central Blog has recently announced that Google started to index web pages hidden behind web forms. "In the past few months we have been exploring some HTML forms to try to discover new web pages and URLs that we otherwise couldn't find and index for users who search on Google. Specifically, when we encounter a

element on a high-quality site, we might choose to do a small number of queries using the form. For text boxes, our computers automatically choose words from the site that has the form; for select menus, check boxes, and radio buttons on the form, we choose from among the values of the HTML. Having chosen the values for each input, we generate and then try to crawl URLs that correspond to a possible query a user may have made. If we ascertain that the web page resulting from our query is valid, interesting, and includes content not in our index, we may include it in our index much as we would include any other web page." For now, only a small number of websites will be affected by this change and Google will only fill forms that use GET to submit data and don't require personal information.

Many web pages are difficult to find because they're not indexed by search engines and they're only available if you know where to search and what to use as a query. All these web pages create the Invisible Web, which was estimated to include 550 billion documents in 2001. "Traditional search engines create their indices by spidering or crawling surface Web pages. To be discovered, the page must be static and linked to other pages. Traditional search engines can not see or retrieve content in the deep Web -- those pages do not exist until they are created dynamically as the result of a specific search."

Anand Rajaraman found that the new feature is related to a low-profile Google acquisition from 2005.

Between 1995 and 2005, Web search had become the dominant mechanism for finding information. Search engines, however, had a blind spot: the data behind HTML forms. (...) The key problem in indexing the Invisible Web are:

1. Determining which web forms are worth penetrating.
2. If we decide to crawl behind a form, how do we fill in values in the form to get at the data behind it? In the case of fields with checkboxes, radiobuttons, and drop-down menus, the solution is fairly straightforward. In the case of free-text inputs, the problem is quite challenging - we need to understand the semantics of the input box to guess possible valid inputs.

Transformic's technology addressed both problems (1) and (2). It was always clear to us that Google would be a great home for Transformic, and in 2005 Google acquired Transformic. (...) The Transformic team have been been working hard for the past two years perfecting the technology and integrating it into the Google crawler.

It's not clear what are the high-quality sites used by Google for the new feature, but this list includes some good options. Along with Google Book Search, Google Scholar, Google News Archive, this is yet another way to bring to light valuable information.

Download YouTube Videos as MP4 Files

Download YouTube Videos as MP4 Files:
An interesting side-effect of YouTube's recent push for higher quality videos is that most videos can be downloaded as MP4 files directly from YouTube. Until now, you could only get FLV files from your browser's cache or using one of the many websites that let you download YouTube videos. In fact, to download the MP4 files, you need to use the same URL like for FLV files and append "&fmt=18":

http://www.youtube.com/get_video?video_id=ID&t=SIGNATURE&fmt=18

ID is the video's identification value, SIGNATURE is a value that prevents you from downloading the file just by knowing the ID. You could create this URL by looking at the source code of a YouTube page, but it's much easier to automatically generate it.

One way is to save the following link as a bookmarklet by dragging it to your Links bar (in Firefox, Opera) or right-clicking and adding it to your favorites (in Internet Explorer):

Get YouTube video

If you didn't manage to add the bookmarklet, this post has more detailed instructions.

When you want to download a YouTube video, click on the bookmarklet and you should see a new option below the embeddable code.

Because YouTube doesn't send the right MIME type, you shouldn't click on the download link. Right-click and select "save link as" or "save target as" and enter a proper name for the video. Make sure to use the .mp4 extension when you enter the filename.

Having to click on the bookmarklet is annoying, so this Greasemonkey script is a better alternative because it adds the download link automatically. It requires the Greasemonkey extension for Firefox or a similar plug-in for userscripts. Opera has built-in support for userscripts, so you only need to go to Tools > Preferences > Advanced > Content > JavaScript options, select the directory where you will put your script and copy the script to that directory.

YouTube's MP4 files have a resolution of 480x360, stereo sound and can be played with applications like VLC, MPlayer, iTunes, QuickTime. Not all YouTube videos can be downloaded as MP4 files and the fallback format is FLV.

Note that YouTube's terms of use require you "not to access User Submissions or YouTube Content through any technology or means other than the video playback pages of the Website itself, the YouTube Embeddable Player, or other explicitly authorized means YouTube may designate," so these scripts could break YouTube's policies. The scripts only download files that are used by YouTube's player, so you may also find the videos in your browser's cache.

orkut Mobile

orkut Mobile:
orkut, Google's social network, added a lot of features in the past year to be more competitive and to become more popular outside Brazil and India. Google Trends shows that the interest for orkut is declining, but it's likely that some people no longer search for "orkut" since Google India and Google Brazil added the service to the navigational bar in December 2007. orkut has around 120 million users, up from 50 million users in April 2007, but Brazil (53.99% of orkut users) and India (16.91%) continue to be the countries where orkut is popular, followed by the US (15.13%).

orkut was one of the few Google services that didn't have a mobile interface, but now you can access orkut mobile at m.orkut.com. The simplified interface shows the most recent scraps, updates from your friends, a link to your profile and a search box for orkut users. The mobile interface lets you write scraps, get birthday reminders and respond to friend requests. You can also use shortcuts to access the most important sections of the page.

There's also a new version of orkut for low bandwidth that displays less pictures. orkut will automatically switch to this new version depending on your connection, but you can opt to use it in the settings.

Collaborate on To-Do Lists and Notes in iGoogle

Collaborate on To-Do Lists and Notes in iGoogle:
iGoogle added a new feature that lets you share gadgets with your contacts and allow them to edit the content from your gadgets. For example, if you share the To-Do list gadget with your friends or co-workers, they'll receive an invitation to add the gadget to their iGoogle pages and every time someone makes a change it will be propagated to all the instances of your shared gadget.

For now, the list of collaborative gadgets includes: to-do lists, notebooks, crossword puzzles, birthday reminders, but we'll see more interesting ideas as gadget developers can easily add this new feature.

"It's now possible for multiple instances of a gadget - on the home pages of different users - to access the same user-preference data, the part of the gadget state that is hosted by iGoogle. (...) It's a simple sharing model - last write wins, and a reload is required to see changes made by others."

To share a gadget, click on the small arrow from the title bar and select "Share this gadget". For most gadgets, you can invite your contacts to use them and optionally send your settings, but collaborative gadgets have a different dialog:

Google Notebook Exposes More Exporting Options

Google Notebook Exposes More Exporting Options:
Google Notebook updated the editing toolbar and to make it look more consistent with Google Docs. There are also new exporting options:

* you can export to HTML any notebook, not just public notebooks

* notebooks that include addresses can be visualized on a map and converted into a personalized map

* public notebooks already had feeds, but it's much easier to subscribe to the feeds by clicking on "export as RSS" in the Tools menu (ironically, Google uses the Atom format). This should be useful to track the changes in collaborative notebooks.

Google Notebook integrates with a lot of Google services: you can find a "Note this" option next to Google's search results, there's an option to import some text from public domain books in Google Book Search, Google Bookmarks are added to a special notebook, you can export a notebook into Google Docs to create a document or to save it as PDF, the latest version of Google Toolbar for IE integrates with Notebook, there's an iGoogle gadget and a cool integration with Blogger thanks to the hAtom microformat. Google Notebook is actually a web clipboard, a bridge between web applications and I expect to see options to identify structured content, bookmark videos, events, contact details, code snippets and more.

Create YouTube Playlists Dynamically

Create YouTube Playlists Dynamically:
YouTube Fast Search is a cool web application that uses YouTube's API to create a way to both play videos and search for new videos at the same time. You can build a playlist from search results and add new videos to the playlist without interrupting it. The interface is similar to the one from MSN Video, but you can also edit the playlist and enlarge the video. Too bad that there's no option to save the playlist to your YouTube account or to import an existing playlist.

YouTube has the option to add videos from search results to a Quicklist and then play all the videos from the list, but you need to switch from the view mode to the search mode.

Viewfinder - Integrate Photos in a 3D World Model

Viewfinder - Integrate Photos in a 3D World Model:
Viewfinder is an interesting technology that wants to bring photos to a software like Google Earth and display them as part of the satellite imagery.

"Geotagged photos, geographically indexed on a world map, either manually or via GPS, are an increasingly popular phenomenon. However, current implementations treat maps, and particularly 3D models, in fundamentally different modalities than photographs. The result is that photos tend to hover like playing cards, seemingly suspended over the world, remaining 2D objects in a 3D environment, and negating the transformative experience that we think should occur when combining images and a 3D world. (...) It's possible to place a photo in a 3D model in such a way that it appears seamlessly aligned with the model."

Google has already bought Panoramio, a Spanish photo sharing site that selected around 3 million geotagged photos to be added in a Google Earth layer. In October last year, Flickr had more than 42 million geotagged photos. All these photos could be used to compose a more accurate representation of the world. Combining this with projects such as Microsoft's PhotoSynth should result in new exciting ways to explore the world.

User Interface Updates at YouTube

User Interface Updates at YouTube:
YouTube updated the design of its video watch pages by adding tabs for actions and showing statistics in a new container. The "Favorite" tab is the only one connected to an immediate action and it should be removed, while the favorite videos could be generated based on ratings. Hunter Walk, product manager at YouTube, says that the sharing options "are now contextual to the logged in user, so for example, if you use Digg a lot but not Facebook, Digg will be elevated to a persistent top-level display instead of Facebook".

The search results page has also been updated and the option to sort results by popularity is back. To restrict your search to one or more categories or to a certain language, check the new advanced search.

YouTube's personalized homepage lets you reorder the sections so you can place the featured videos at the top, but it's still less usable than the classic YouTube homepage.

Yahoo Tests Google's Search Ads

{ Image licensed as Creative Commons by Patrick Woodward. }

Yahoo Tests Google's Search Ads:

In what may be the beginning of a new partnership, Yahoo announced that it will display Google ads next to its search results in a limited experiment. "The test will apply only to traffic from yahoo.com in the U.S. and will not include Yahoo!'s extended network of affiliate or premium publisher partners. The test is expected to last up to two weeks and will be limited to no more than 3% of Yahoo! search queries."

Yahoo explores new ways to defend itself against Microsoft's assault. "While there has been some limited interaction between management of our two companies, there has been no meaningful negotiation to conclude an agreement. We understand that you have been meeting to consider and assess your alternatives, including alternative transactions with others in the industry, but we've seen no indication that you have authorized Yahoo! management to negotiate with Microsoft." - an extract from a letter sent by Microsoft to Yahoo's Board last week.

While switching to Google's search ads means admitting the defeat, Yahoo could use this strategy temporarily. Yahoo has a lot of interesting projects in the mobile space, in search and communication, so the future looks better without Microsoft, a company with a different culture.

"If this test — potentially within the three-week window Microsoft set up to launch a proxy fight — pans out and Yahoo also manages to come through with a first-quarter report on Apr. 22 that looks stronger than the current low expectations of analysts, suddenly Yahoo will have some leverage it didn't have before. If the quarter tanks, though, advantage goes back to Microsoft," anticipates Business Week.

Update: Some interesting new developments. WSJ reports that "Yahoo Inc. and Time Warner Inc.'s AOL are closing in on a deal to combine their Internet operations". Google already provides search ads for AOL, so Yahoo's test with Google ads is just "a way for Google to test how well Yahoo monetizes", to quote Danny Sullivan.

Backup Your iGoogle Page

Backup Your iGoogle Page:
iGoogle, previously known as Google's personalized homepage, offers two options to backup your gadgets and feeds at the bottom of the settings page.

There's an option to backup the iGoogle page on Google's servers. While this may seem pointless, it's useful to backup your page before adding gadgets that might create problems.

The second option is to download an XML file that includes all the tabs, layouts and themes, the feeds, gadgets and their settings. The XML file can be imported in any iGoogle page, so this is a good way to migrate the page to a different Google account. You can also download the XML file to change the settings in a text editor and then upload the new version.

Export Google Presentations to PowerPoint

Export Google Presentations to PowerPoint:
Google Presentations (or Presently) finally added a feature that prevented most people from using it: exporting the presentations to a format that could be imported in Microsoft Office or OpenOffice. Now you can save your presentations as PPT and open them in your favorite desktop applications when you're offline or send them to other people. You can still export the presentations as PDF, a great format for printing.

Here's the list of formats supported by the three Google Docs applications:

	Writely (documents)	Trix (spreadsheets)	Presently (presentations)
Microsoft Office formats	import, export	import, export	import, export
OpenDocument	import, export	import, export	---
PDF	export	export	export
RTF	import, export	---	---
HTML	import, export	export	---
TXT	import, export	import, export	export

Some other features that should be available soon in Presently: inserting tables, adding YouTube videos and viewing presentations offline.

Advanced Search and Custom Views in Google Docs

Advanced Search and Custom Views in Google Docs:
Google Docs added an option to perform advanced searches. You can now restrict your search to the file's name or its content, select the sharing type, search only inside a folder or only for files modified in the past week. The interface is not very intuitive and it's very similar to Gmail's advanced search. Fortunately, you can save the search and create a new view that's accessible from the sidebar or from the small drop-down placed next to the search box.

The saved searches are actually custom views that could help you find documents faster. Create custom views for published documents, documents that are shared with you, starred spreadsheets or for documents last opened in the past 7 days.

Custom views could be a great addition to Gmail, while Google Docs lacks the powerful operators from Gmail. The list view from Google Docs looks more and more like a file explorer and should be used for any kind of files, not just for documents, spreadsheets and presentations.

Google App Engine: Write Your Own Google Apps

Google App Engine: Write Your Own Google Apps:
Google's applications could be useful and interesting, but they are just a small fraction from all the applications you may need. That's probably the reason why Google decided to open its infrastructure to third-party applications and released Google App Engine.

Google App Engine gives you access to the same building blocks that Google uses for its own applications, making it easier to build an application that runs reliably, even under heavy load and with large amounts of data. The development environment includes the following features:

* Dynamic webserving, with full support of common web technologies
* Persistent storage (powered by Bigtable and GFS with queries, sorting, and transactions)
* Automatic scaling and load balancing
* Google APIs for authenticating users and sending email
* Fully featured local development environment

For now, there are a lot of limitations: only the first 10,000 users who register at http://appengine.google.com/ will be able to test the new service, you need to write your applications in Python (more languages will come) and the quotas are enough only for small to medium projects. "During this preview period, applications are limited to 500MB of storage, 200M megacycles of CPU per day, and 10GB bandwidth per day. We expect most applications will be able to serve around 5 million pageviews per month. In the future, these limited quotas will remain free, and developers will be able to purchase additional resources as needed." The limitations are reasonable if you think this is only a preview release and Google wants to get feedback from developers before the official launch.

The applications can be run locally using a SDK provided by Google or uploaded to a subdomain of appspot.com or to your own site. There's already a gallery of applications that includes a chat room for teams, a movie quote site, a Python shell and more.

Google previously released Mashup Editor, "an AJAX development framework and a set of tools that enable developers to quickly and easily create simple web applications and mashups", but the new App Engine lets you build more complex applications. Kevin Gibbs explained more about Google's intentions at Google App Engine Campfire One.

Google App Engine provides an infrastructure for running web apps. By that, I mean that we're focused, specifically on web applications: making them easy to run, easy to deploy, and easy to scale. App Engine is different than a lot of other things out there: App Engine is not a grid computing solution-- we don't run arbitrary compute jobs. We also don't give you a raw virtual machine. Instead, we provide a way for you to package up your code, specify how you want it to run in response to requests, and then we run and serve it for you. You don't reserve resources, or machines, or RAM or a number of CPUs, or anything like that. It's a fluid system, that runs your code in response to load and demand. (...)

App Engine is a complete system. We provide ways to run your code, serve your static content, a database, request and application logs, methods to push new releases of your code, and more. Ultimately, we are trying to provide a simpler alternative to the traditional LAMP stack. (...) Finally, the other key part of App Engine is that we're providing you access to Google's infrastructure. The APIs and systems we are providing to you are built off of the same distributed, scalable infrastructure we use to power Google's other applications, like Google Accounts, GFS, and Bigtable. We're giving you access to those powerful building blocks, and giving you the ability to write real code and real apps that make use of them.

Usually, if you lower the entry barriers for a system, people will use it more often and the probability of building something great increases. Google wants to reduce the complexities of creating web applications and give developers the opportunity to spend more time writing code and less time building the infrastructure and scaling the application. The same way Amazon Web Services reduced the costs of running a start-up, Google App Engine could accelerate innovation by letting developers focus on what's important.

Google App Engine - http://appengine.google.com/
Documentation - http://code.google.com/appengine
Featured applications - http://appgallery.appspot.com/

List of Web Applications That Use Google Gears

List of Web Applications That Use Google Gears:
After naming Google Gears the most innovative product of 2007, PC World is disappointed that very few important applications use Google's technology. Gears is still an early product, but most of the news articles that mention it talk about making web applications available offline, even if Google Gears is much more than that. An important point from PC World's article is that Google doesn't show a list of applications that use Gears before installing the plug-in, so users don't have too many reasons to try it. Here's a list of some important applications that use Google Gears:

* Google Reader- feed reader from Google- the Gears integration was added in May 2007- it lets you read the most recent 2000 posts offline, without having access to images and enclosures. You can also star posts or tag them.

* Remember the Milk- task management application- the second application Gears-enabled, six days after Google Reader- most of the functionality is available offline. "Not only can you access your lists, but you can add new tasks and notes, edit existing tasks (complete, postpone, prioritise, tag, and change due dates to your heart's content), use your own personal tasks search engine, create new Smart Lists, and more."

* Zoho Writer- online word processor- supports Gears since August 2007, with an important update in November and Windows Mobile support since March 2008- a number of recent documents can be viewed and edited offline

* PassPack- online password manager- launch date: September 2007- "With the Offline Version, you can download your data from your PassPack account, then access and manage it whenever you wish. This is not a read only version, you are free to make changes and save them locally. To synchronize your online and offline accounts, use the backup and restore functions."

* MindMeister- online mind mapping- launch date: November 2007- "The MindMeister Offline Mode allows users to work on their mind maps even when they're offline, i.e. not connected to the Internet. All changes will be saved locally and synchronized back into your MindMeister account the next time you go online," explains a help page.

* Buxfer- personal finance manager- the Gears support was added in January 2008 and was extended to Windows Mobile in March- the application has the option to store the authentication information offline. "You will have the convenience of not needing to login into your financial institution repeatedly, as well as the peace of mind that your private information is secure and completely under your control!"

* Autodesk Labs Project Draw - create diagrams online- launch date: January 2008- the application can run in the offline mode and synch files later when you reconnect

* Google Docs- online word processor- experimental launch for a small percent of users - March 2008- you can view and edit documents offline

* Picasa Web Albums Mobile- photo sharing- offline support for Windows Mobile 6 touchscreen devices, April 2008- you can view photo albums offline

Google Earth Brings You the News

Google Earth Brings You the News:
Google Earth added a very interesting layer that shows news from the New York Times that mention a certain place. Search for an address and you should see some small New York Times logos that hide previews from recent news articles.

Google LatLong Blog mentions that the layer is updated every 15 minutes, so it's probably the most up-to-date layer from Google Earth. "The New York Times offers geo-coded news, and Google Earth offers the platform for reading that news in a 3D browser. This is the first time we've endeavored to show news updated in real time, and we're very excited to work with this first-class publication to bring you the latest and greatest news."

It would be a great idea to port this layer to Google Maps and show the latest news from every place of the world.

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