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

Google's Services Converge in the New iGoogle

Google's Services Converge in the New iGoogle:
Is this Google Reader? It's actually an iGoogle feed in canvas view, which happens to borrow Google Reader's interface. If you click on the drop-down, you can access all your Google Reader subscriptions.

Is this Gmail? It's the Gmail gadget in canvas view, but you get almost all the features available in Gmail's standard interface.

Is this Gmail Chat? It's the chat feature from Gmail integrated in iGoogle's sidebar so that you can chat with your contacts while reading your feeds, watching videos, answering your mail or checking the weather.

The new version of iGoogle, currently available for a small number of randomly-selected users and for developers, will bring together all the Google services in a single fluid interface. At some point, iGoogle was a part of an initiative called Fusion that allowed users to combine content from across the web. The next major iteration of iGoogle goes further and it lets you actually access the full content, monitor the updates and share them with your friends.

Quick tip to access the new iGoogle:
- go to google.com/ig
- paste this in the address bar:
javascript:_dlsetp('v2=1');
- to go back to the old version, paste in the address bar:
javascript:_dlsetp('v2=0');

Google Docs in Full Screen

Google Docs in Full Screen:
If you need more space to edit your documents in Google Docs or if you want to read a document, there's now a full-screen mode that hides the menus and the toolbar. Just select View > Full-screen mode or type Ctrl-Shift-F to go into full-screen mode. Unfortunately, the same shortcut is also used by the Web Developer extension to display element information, but you can change it in the options.

Since you no longer have access to the menus, it's useful to know the keyboard shortcuts and to remember that Esc brings you back to the normal mode.

If you publish a document and you want to display it in fixed-with page view, just append &pageview=1 to the http://docs.google.com/View?docid=d0n7b3_3v1l&pageview=1

To hide the footer automatically added by Google, append &hgd=1 to the URL:http://docs.google.com/View?docid=d0n7b3_3v1l&hgd=1

Gmail and Google Calendar to Add Offline Support

Gmail and Google Calendar to Add Offline Support:
It seems that this year Google's most popular web applications will work offline. After Google Reader and Google Docs, two other services will integrate with Gears. Andrew Fogg saw a preview of the integration at Google's offices and found that Gmail and Google Calendar will add offline support in approximately 6 weeks.

In the past months, Google accidentally enabled the option in Google Calendar and some users saw the dialog illustrated below: "To view and edit the next 3 months of your Google Calendar when you're not connected to the Internet, click OK."

Screenshot licensed as Creative Commons by NOTICIAS-TIC.

Andrew also found out that Google will add SyncML support for Gmail contacts next month. He thinks this is "related to the sync that they worked on with Apple for 3G iPhone". SyncML is a standard for data synchronization supported by a lot of companies. "SyncML is most commonly thought of as a method to synchronize contact and calendar information between some type of handheld device and a computer (personal, or network-based service), such as between a mobile phone and a personal computer."

Update: Andrew Fogg deleted the tweets referenced in the post, but I have a screenshot.

Portable Gmail Contacts

Portable Gmail Contacts:
If you use Gmail, many Google services have access to your contacts list and you can easily add addresses using autocomplete or from a contact picker. But what happens when you need to enter an email address on a site that's not from Google? Many news sites have options to send a link to your friends and sometimes this is more convenient than loading Gmail and pasting a link to the article.

Google Contacts Autocomplete is a Greasemonkey script that brings your Gmail contacts everywhere you go on the web. When you start to type the name of your friend or his email address, the script shows a list of suggestions.

For now, the script only provides suggestions for a single email address, but I'm sure this could be easily fixed. Unlike Gmail, the script sorts the suggestions alphabetically, not by affinity.

Google Docs Templates

Google Docs Templates:
It's so difficult to start with a blank document, especially when it should have a standard format. Now you can use one of the 309 templates from the new Google Docs directory as a starting point for your timesheets, resumes, invoices, photo albums or party invitations.

"A template gives you a quick start towards creating a document, spreadsheet, or presentation. Each template has boilerplate content and preset design styles that are meant to be reused. (...) You can then edit the document, replacing boilerplate text and images with your own," explains Google.

The option to use a template is available in Google Docs when you click on New > From template and the list of templates that you've recently used can be found here.

While Google doesn't explicitly offer an option to create your own templates, you can save them as regular documents and use File > Save as new copy (Copy spreadsheet) to create duplicates. If you publish a spreadsheet, append &newcopy to the URL to obtain a template link.

Almighty Google

Almighty Google:
The Vacationeers have some new futuristic videos that show an omniscient Google which is already a part of people's lives. After the creepy video about Google Street View, the comedy group explored some other Google services.

Google SMS can sometimes offer free dating advice:

My Maps can anticipate your actions and add placemarks in advance:

Google Moon might show some things that you aren't supposed to know, like the fact that NASA never landed on the Moon.

{ via Jess Lee }

Google's "Edit Search Results" Experiment

Google's "Edit Search Results" Experiment:
Google tests an enhanced version of last year's experiment that allowed users to hide search results and to move some results at the top of the page. The new experiment adds an option to comment on a search results and to view everyone's edits.

According to the FAQ, "your comments and the webpages you add, promote, or delete, along with the user nickname for the account you're logged in with, may be viewed by other Google searchers also in the experiment." Google mentions that this is "an experimental feature served to a random selection of participants and may be available for only a few weeks".
Screenshot licensed as Creative Commons by quasarkitten.

Google explains that the motivation behind this experiment is to test if "giving searchers increased control over their search results improves the overall user experience". Google currently personalizes the list of search results using information from a user's search history, but this experiment lets you create your own list of annotated results and share it with the world.

In a recent post from Google Blog, Amit Singhal said something very interesting:

No discussion of Google's ranking would be complete without asking the common -
but misguided! :) - question: "Does Google manually edit its results?" Let me
just answer that with our third philosophy: no manual intervention. In our view,
the web is built by people. You are the ones creating pages and linking to
pages. We are using all this human contribution through our algorithms. The
final ordering of the results is decided by our algorithms using the
contributions of the greater Internet community, not manually by us. We believe
that the subjective judgment of any individual is, well ... subjective, and
information distilled by our algorithms from the vast amount of human knowledge
encoded in the web pages and their links is better than individual subjectivity.

Update. Justin Hileman has more screenshots that show some other features: you can search everyone's edits and there's a list of search edits for each user. "This whole thing looks like an experiment into crowdsourced search results," concludes Justin.

Update 2. The page where you should see your search edits: http://www.google.com/reviews/w.

Google Demoes Video Search with Speech Recognition

Google Demoes Video Search with Speech Recognition:
Google released a demo for a speech-to-text technology that allows you to search inside a video's content. You can add an iGoogle gadget that is restricted to a small number of political videos from YouTube. Since the gadget is actually an iframe, you can also go to the original page.

"Using the gadget you can search not only the titles and descriptions of the videos, but also their spoken content. Additionally, since speech recognition tells us exactly when words are spoken in the video, you can jump right to the most relevant parts of the videos you find," explains Google.

EveryZing uses speech-to-text technology to search for audio and video across the web. The site has a separate section for YouTube videos, but the coverage is unimpressive.

Find the Email Addresses from a Page with Google Toolbar

Find the Email Addresses from a Page with Google Toolbar:
Google Toolbar has a useful feature called AutoLink which detects the content from a page that follows some predefined patterns and adds links to pages that offer more information. AutoLink detects US addresses, UPS tracking numbers, International Standard Book Numbers (ISBN) and Vehicle Identification Numbers (VIN) and links to relevant pages from sites like Google Maps, Amazon or CarFax. Despite its name, AutoLink adds the links only after you click on the Google Toolbar button and also shows the links in a drop-down menu.

The latest version of the Google Toolbar for IE (Google Toolbar 5) adds two new patterns: email addresses and URLs. If you click on AutoLink, Google Toolbar will transform into links all the email addresses and the web addresses from a page. You can click on the button again to highlight the content that has been detected, but a better idea is to see all the results in a drop-down.

According to the privacy policy, "AutoLink works by sending Google page text (such as addresses or ISBN numbers) for which AutoLink information is available." I noticed that Google Toolbar sends the address of the page to Google's servers, probably for detecting physical addresses, since everything else can be performed locally.

In 2005, when AutoLink became a part of Google Toolbar 3, many people complained that Google changes the content of web pages, but they ignored that users need to click on a button to add the links. It's also worthwhile to mention that you can change the services that are linked using this feature and that Google doesn't make money from referrals.

Google Suggest Preparing for Global Launch?

Google Suggest Preparing for Global Launch:
Google France's homepage tests a query suggestion feature based on Google Suggest. The feature seems to be enabled only for the homepage and there's a setting that lets you disable it. In March, other people noticed Google Suggest enabled by default at Google.com.

Launched in 2004 as part of Google Labs, Google Suggest is available in many interfaces and in some international Google sites:
* Google Labs
* Google Experimental Search
* Google Toolbar for IE and Firefox
* Firefox 2+ search box
* Google's homepage for iPhone
* Google China, Google Korea, Google Russia, Google India
* YouTube

You can even use the suggestions in your applications thanks to the unofficial JSON API:
http://www.google.com/complete/search?hl=en&client=suggest&json=t&jsonp=CALLBACK_FUNCTION&q=QUERY

Similar suggestion features are already available at Yahoo and Ask.com. Yahoo's suggestion feature called Search Assistant is more advanced as it displays popular queries that contain your keywords, not just queries that start with your text.

Gmail Superstars

Gmail Superstars:
One of the 13 features added to Gmail Labs in May is Superstars, an extension of Gmail's starring system. Instead of using a single star to flag all the messages, you can choose between 12 icons.

After enabling Superstars in Gmail Labs and clicking on "Save changes", go to the settings and select the icons you want to use. The exclamation mark is useful to flag important messages, quotes could show that a message needs a reply, while the info icon could be used for messages that contain valuable information.

To star messages faster, enable keyboard shortcuts in the settings. "The superstars will rotate when you press the 's' keyboard shortcut or when you click successively," explains Google. "Rotating through the superstars only works when you click (or hit 's') successively. If you pause for a second, then the next click will turn off the superstar. It's designed this way so that if you never click successively, then you'll just get the original on/off toggle behavior."

If you want to find the messages that have a certain kind of star, use one of the following queries:
has:yellow-star (or l:^ss_sy)
has:blue-star (or l:^ss_sb)
has:red-star (or l:^ss_sr)
has:orange-star (or l:^ss_so)
has:green-star (or l:^ss_sg)
has:purple-star (or l:^ss_sp)
has:red-bang (or l:^ss_cr)
has:yellow-bang (or l:^ss_cy)
has:blue-info (or l:^ss_cb)
has:orange-guillemet (or l:^ss_co)
has:green-check (or l:^ss_cg)
has:purple-question (or l:^ss_cp)

You can enable the Quick Links labs feature to save some of these queries so that they are always accessible with a single click. Just search for has:blue-star or any other value and click on "Add Quick Link".

Find YouTube Videos from a Location

Find YouTube Videos from a Location:
When you upload a video to YouTube, one of the optional fields lets you enter the place where the video was recorded. Now you can restrict YouTube's search results to videos from a certain location. Just click on the "advanced" link next to the search box, type your query, enter the location and click on "show map" to adjust your location.

YouTube automatically detects locations from queries, so it's not necessary to use the advanced search options. A search for [live szeged] displays a small box with four geocoded videos that can expanded to see all the results.

Another way to find YouTube videos recorder in a country or city is to add the YouTube mapplet to Google Maps. In some cases, you can just search for a location, select "Explore this area" and then click on "More videos" to enable the mapplet.

{ via Search Engine Land }

Web Address Mapping for Google Sites

Web Address Mapping for Google Sites:
If you use Google Sites as part of Google Apps, you can now map the sites to your domain. Instead of having to link to ugly URLs like http://sites.google.com/a/domain.com/wiki, you'll be able to customize the addresses and replace them with subdomains like: http://wiki.domain.com. "The new location can be your domain home page or any sub-domain in your domain, and can be set up on the Web Addresses tab of the Sites service settings in your Google Apps control panel," informs Google Sites Blog. You can find more details in the help center, which notes that private sites are redirected to the standard URLs.

Many people expected something different from Google Sites and the name doesn't help the service too much. Google Wikis would have reflected the true intention of the service. "A wiki is a website designed for collaboration. Unlike a traditional website where pages can only be read, in a wiki everyone can edit, update and append pages with new information and without knowing HTML. Wikis are great for all types of collaboration, from writing documents and managing projects to creating intranets or extranets," explained JotSpot's intro tour.

Wikis created with Google Sites allow a very limited amount of customization and you can only embed content from trusted sources like YouTube or Google Docs. One of the causes for the lack of customization is that the wikis are hosted at google.com, instead of a separate domain like googlesites.com, and a script could easily compromise your Google account.

Google News Tests New Design

Google News Tests New Design:
Google News experiments with a lively and visually-rich design that shows images, videos, quotes, but also interesting and popular stories. There's a "featured photo" section that uses images from AFP, The Associated Press, Reuters, marking the first time when Google News promotes stories just because it has the permission to show associated images.

If you are logged in, the new interface personalizes all the sections, not just the front page, and you can switch to the non-personalized version to see the differences.

The homepage shows a list of "developing stories".

The Sci-Tech section, with more photos.

Front-page sections can be minimized and look like iGoogle gadgets.

Google News clusters prominently display the main title.

The footer is more lighthearted. "All the news that's fit to crawl. Auto-generated from over 4500 news sources, void where prohibited."

In June, Google News blog announced the new design, without getting into details. "Over the course of the next few weeks, you may notice a few changes to Google News... or maybe not. You see, we'll be running some experiments on the look and feel of our site, based on an accumulation of user research and feedback, as well as the evolving state of online journalism."

{ Thnaks, Santosh. }

Lively (Google's 3D Chat Rooms)

Lively (Google's 3D Chat Rooms):
Google's Niniane Wang, who previously worked on rendering clouds, rain and snow for Microsoft Flight Simulator, realized that text comments are pretty boring. "A while ago, I looked around the social web and wished that it could be less static. Sure, you can leave a comment on a blog or write a text blurb on your social networking profile. But what if you want to express yourself in a more fun way, with 3D graphics and real-time avatar interactions?" explains Niniane.

That's how Lively started and we first heard about it last year, when it was tested by some students from ASU. At that time I associated the project with Google Earth, but there's no connection with this application for now.

Lively's goal is to help people "express [themselves] with and without words, and to do this in the places [they] already visit on the web." You can create rooms, decorate them, choose avatars and interact with other people from the room using words or actions. Each room has a permalink and can be embedded in a web page.

To use Lively, you need to download a client that only works in Windows XP/Vista and has plug-ins for Firefox and IE, log in to a Google account and get a Lively ID (Google recommends to choose something different from your Google username). Then you can choose a name and an avatar that can be customized later.

Lively's client also includes support for Google Desktop gadgets and developers can create their own objects with custom interactions.

Many people compared Lively with Second Life and IMVU. "In 2005, [Google] made a secret bid to buy IMVU. The company turned Google down. The search giant did manage to hire one of IMVU's five founders, Mel Guymon," writes Venture Beat. Mel Guymon, who is now Google's Head of 3D Operations, says that "Google making a play validates the space like no one else. We're basically saying this is a real space and everyone is doing this. (...) The implementation of it takes the best of the space, rich avatars and a large catalog of virtual goods, which by the way is free, and have it be a part of your existing social network, which is the big wave right now. That's really the silver bullet."

Lively has the potential to attract some of the people that use social networks and want a fun way to express themselves, but having to download a client that uses a lot of resources, slows down your computer and crashes often is a big downside.

Google Calendar Buttons

Google Calendar Buttons:
I don't know if there are many useful buttons for Google Toolbar, but there's a Google Calendar button that offers a lot of features for its size.

1. You can use it as a shortcut for Google Calendar. Just click on the button, instead of trying to find Google Calendar in the list of bookmark or typing the first letters of its URL in the address bar.

2. Click on the small arrow next to Google Calendar's logo to see a list of upcoming events from your main calendar. If you select an event, you'll be able to read the description and make some changes.

3. Add events to your main calendar by typing the text in Google Toolbar's search box and then clicking on the calendar button. Unfortunately, Google doesn't add the event to your calendar, it only prefills a form with information from your request.

4. You can also add events by selecting some text from a web page and clicking on the calendar button (alternatively, right-click and select Send to > Google Calendar). Google Calendar to parse a lot of complicated text, including the one illustrated below:

For a visual representation of your calendars, you can add the Google Calendar gadget to the toolbar. The gadgets shows events from any number of your calendars and doesn't open a web page when you add an event.

Find Who Has Access to Your Gmail Account

Find Who Has Access to Your Gmail Account:
After years of testing, Gmail has finally added a very useful security feature: tracking open sessions. If you log in to Gmail from more than one computer and you forget to sign out, you'll be able to see the list of locations where your account can still be accessed.

Until now, the only solution when you forgot to log out from Gmail after using a public computer was to change your password. Otherwise, anyone could access your account without knowing the password. Now you can sign out remotely from all the locations where your Gmail account is still open.

If you click on "Details" in Gmail's footer, you'll find a lot of interesting information about your sessions. "The top table, under Concurrent session information, indicates all open sessions, along with IP address and access type -- which refers to how email was retrieved, for example, through iGoogle, POP3 or a mobile phone. The bottom table, under Recent activity, contains my most recent history along with times of access. I can also view my current IP address at the very bottom of this window, where it says This computer is using IP address...".

This could be useful if you want to find whether someone else has access to your account: you'll be able to find the IP address and the date of the most recent activity in your account.

Gmail's blog mentions that this feature is currently being rolled out in the new version of Gmail, so you may not see it right now. Google AdSense, PayPal and orkut are three other services that show the time of your last login so you can protect against abuse, but Gmail's new feature is much more advanced.

Among the things you can do to protect your Gmail account, it's a good idea to sign out after reading your email, not to select "remember me" when you log in from a public computer and to choose a good password that should remain secret.

Google Maps Tests Walking Directions

Google Maps Tests Walking Directions:
Google Maps tests a new feature: walking directions. You can already get driving directions and, for a small number of locations, Google Maps has transit directions, but these directions are not always useful if you don't use a car or a bus.

Google suggests to "use caution when walking in unfamiliar areas", since the "walking directions are in beta". Chris, who sent this tip, spotted the feature for New York, but it's likely that Google randomly selected a small number of users to try the new feature and send feedback.

{ Thank you, Chris. }

Google Results in Firefox's Address Bar

Google Results in Firefox's Address Bar:
Ryan Wagner from CyberNet News developed CyberSearch, a Firefox extension that lets you see Google results in the address bar. The extension adds new functionality to Firefox 3's address bar, which already shows bookmarks and other pages from your web history.

By default, CyberSearch is a little inefficient: it performs web searches as you type in the address bar and it shows Google's search results after the local results obtained by Firefox.If you type one or two letters, it's likely that the address bar will only show suggestions from your local history. For more precise queries, you should mostly see Google results. In the example below, I only had to type [new sci] to directly access New Scientist.

If you usually type your queries in Firefox's address bar, you know that sometimes Firefox sends you to the top result for your keywords (e.g.: enter [new scientist]), while in most cases you're sent to the list of search results (e.g.: the ambiguous [scientist]). CyberSearch is redundant for many navigational searches since the top results is the only one that matters and Google sends you to the top result anyway.

But there's a way to trigger the list of search results only when you need it: start your query with the special keyword "goog". Enable keywords in the options (Tools > CyberSearch Options), where you can add your own keywords that trigger results from specialized search engines like Google News or restrict the results to a single domain. For example, I added the keyword "gos" that shows Google results from this blog:

To only show search results when you start your query with a special keyword, go to Tools > CyberSearch Options, and check:

[x] Enable keywords
[x] Show only search results when a keyword is recognized
[x] Don't perform a search unless a keyword has been typed

It's difficult to determine if a result are useful without reading some snippets from the web page, so CyberSearch is great when you want to re-find specific pages from familiar sites.

This extension is based on Searchery and the same idea is used in Inquisitor, a Mac application recently acquired by Yahoo.

Other ways to search more effectively from your browser:
* Outsource Firefox's keywords to YubNub
* Tips for Google Toolbar
* Link to a page using Google AJAX Search

Second-Class Google Citizens

Second-Class Google Citizens:
Every time Google releases a new feature for Gmail, Calendar, Google Docs etc. people who use Google Apps are left wondering whether they'll get the new feature. Sometimes they have to guess addresses, like for the new mobile Google Talk. They are supposed to figure out that the Google Apps version of: http://talkgadget.google.com/talkgadget/m is http://hostedtalkgadget.google.com/a/YOURDOMAIN.COM/talkgadget/m.

Besides having to deal with delayed updates and mysterious addresses, Google Apps users usually have at least one standard Google account and it's difficult to switch between the two parallel worlds. I noticed that when you go to Google Sites and you're logged using both a Google account and a Google Apps account, you are asked to choose one of them:

Maybe Google could somehow integrate Google accounts with Google Apps accounts so you can access all the services and get all the new features. The services that are part of Google Apps should have a customized interface and functionality, while the other services should only interact with them so you can, for example, share Google Reader items with your Google Talk contacts.

Google Talk for iPhone

Google Talk for iPhone:
Google has finally launched a mobile version of Google Talk, but it's optimized for iPhone's browser. You can access if you go to google.com/talk on an iPhone/iPod Touch or using this permalink: http://talkgadget.google.com/talkgadget/m (shorter URL: http://tinyurl.com/4vnfcd).

This Ajax version is based on Google Talk's Flash gadget, but it doesn't include tabs, group chat, options to add contacts and send email. What you can do is to update your status, search your contacts and chat with people that are online.

Besides this mobile interface, Google also has a mobile app for Blackberry. That means if you don't have a Blackberry, an iPhone or at least a WebKit mobile browser, you have to find a third-party service.

eBuddy is a service that offers both a basic mobile interface for Google Talk and a mobile application that lets you chat faster with your friends. eBuddy doesn't connect only to Google Talk, it's a multi-network IM client that works with MSN, Yahoo and AIM. Unfortunately, I couldn't find any information regarding the way eBuddy stores or uses your credentials and seeing that eBuddy sends the password in plain text is worrisome.

Another mobile application that lets you chat with your Google Talk contacts is Fring, but it only works on Symbian and Windows Mobile devices. As usually, make sure you trust the service before entering the username and password of a Google account.

Google Street View in France

Google Street View in France:
As a special present for the upcoming Tour de France, Google added Street View imagery for Tour de France's routes. The coverage is really limited, but Google will extend it in the next months, when Street View will be available in many European countries (UK, France, Germany, Spain, Italy and others).

Wikipedia has some details about this year's edition of the largest cycling race in the world. "The event will take place from July 5 to July 27, 2008. Starting in the French city of Brest, France, the tour will enter Italy on the 15th stage and return to France during the 16th, heading for Paris, its regular final destination, which will be reached in the 21st stage."

{ via Zorgloob, a French blog about Google }

Mobile Google Maps with Voice Search

Mobile Google Maps with Voice Search:
An obvious use of the GOOG-411 service is to add speech recognition to Google's mobile mapping application. Microsoft already has voice support in Live Search for Windows Mobile and that's an important differentiating factor when you are on the go and you need a quick answer.

Google started to test Google Maps with voice search for three Blackberry Pearl models: 8110, 8120, 8130 and only for the US. Instead of typing when you want to search for a local business, hold the left-side key, say what you want to find and then release the key. Google Maps Mobile will display the search results on the map.

"Similar to other voice-recognition technologies, the accuracy of voice recognition will improve over time as more people use the voice search feature," says Google Mobile Blog. In fact, the main reason why GOOG-411 has been developed was to obtain data to train Google's speech recognition algorithms. "Whether or not free-411 is a profitable business unto itself is yet to be seen. I myself am somewhat skeptical. The reason we really did it is because we need to build a great speech-to-text model ... that we can use for all kinds of different things, including video search," explained Marissa Mayer from Google.

Speech recognition could greatly facilitate the way we interact with mobile phones and it's not hard to imagine that voice search will be the main way we'll use search engines in the future. This will change the way people formulate queries and processing natural language will become increasingly important. Microsoft's acquisition of Powerset, a so-called semantic search engine, could improve the way Live Search handles complicated queries, even though it's difficult to scale the computationally-intensive process of parsing text to the web and to all languages.

Taking Features Away From Users

Taking Features Away From Users:
Ryan Singer wrote an interesting post titled "Features are a one-way street". The main idea was that "once your user base has grown beyond a certain point, you cannot take features away from them. They will freak out. Whether the feature is good or bad, once you launch it you've married it."

Google is a company that launches many features and services "in beta", tests them for a while and then decides whether it's a good idea to continue developing them. Some of the Google Labs projects were successful, while others were discontinued or they were integrated in other experiments.

In a talk about innovation, Marissa Mayer mentioned an idea that came from Eric Schmidt: "don't kill projects, morph them". I don't know how many people miss Google Voice Search, a service that allowed you to search Google with a phone call, or Click-to-Call, a simple way to call businesses for free directly from Google Maps, but both services are the predecessors of GOOG-411. The cool Google Deskbar was partly integrated in Google Desktop, the SOAP Search API was replaced by a REST API, Google AdSense Referrals was superseded by the DoubleClick Performics Affiliate Network, while a replacement for Google Answers is being tested in Russia and China.

Other products were discontinued without offering a replacement: Google Video Store, the photo sharing service Hello, Google Browser Sync or the "Send to SMS" feature from Google Toolbar and from Google Send to Phone.

For Google, features aren't a "one-way street" and you never know when a functionality you start to rely on is removed for unknown reasons. That's why I think Google should label experimental features more prominently and it should do a better job at communicating the reasons why a service is dropped.

Google Docs Stats

Google Docs Stats:
If you publish documents at Google Docs and link them from web pages, you may wonder how many people actually view them. Google helps you find this information by placing a Google Analytics tracking code that can be connected to your account.

How to get traffic stats for your documents?
Just go to Google Analytics, create a new profile for http://docs.google.com and get the tracking code for that profile. You only need a small piece of the tracking code: the value displayed in bold below, which should be different for your account.

var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-84813-6")

Once you have that value, go to Google Docs Settings, enable "Track visits to my documents using Google Analytics" and paste the value in the input box for "Google Analytics tracking code".

What happens after enabling the integration with Google Analytics?
After a couple of hours, you should see some traffic data in your Analytics account:

You'll also find a confirmation that the visitor traffic is tracked with Google Analytics after you publish a document:

The list of Google services that integrate with Google Analytics includes: Google Sites, Project Hosting, iGoogle gadgets and hopefully the support will be extended to other services.

{ via Blogoscoped Forum }

The Best Firefox Extension for Google Bookmarks

The Best Firefox Extension for Google Bookmarks:
If you use Google Toolbar for Firefox only because you like the bookmarking feature, there's a much better option: GMarks. While there are other extensions that provide an interface for Google Bookmarks, John Marshall's GMarks adds a lot of value to Google's basic bookmarking service.

GMarks can display the bookmarks almost the same as Firefox's native bookmarks: in a separate menu and in the sidebar. There's also a dropdown that can be added to Firefox's toolbars. The sidebar is useful when you want to perform full-text searches in your bookmarks without having to visit Google's site, while the GMark menu has an excellent option for managing bookmarks. If you click on "Organize bookmarks", you'll be able to import bookmarks, edit or delete bookmarks and create Gmail-like filters. For example, you can automatically add the label Google for any bookmark from this blog.

The extension can show the number of bookmarks for each label, a list of recent bookmarks and the most frequently visited bookmarks. To bookmark a page, use the familiar shortcut Ctrl+D or the GMarks menu.

One of the most frequent user requests for Google Bookmarks is nested labels and GMarks uses a little trick to simulate hierarchical labels: separate the labels with >. For example, if you want to label a bookmark as Shopping and Comparison, where Comparison is a sublabel of Shopping, just enter Shopping>Comparison when you create the bookmark. Since Google Bookmarks doesn't support this feature, the labels will appear to be nested only in GMarks.

And the cool features don't stop here: the extension suggests labels based on the web page's title, you can hide the bookmarks that have certain labels and there's an option for integrating the starred items from Google Reader.

Since the last time when I wrote about GMarks, the extension added the most interesting ideas implemented by the "competition" and managed to become THE Google Bookmarks extension. If there's anything that could be added, maybe it would be useful to completely replace Firefox's bookmarking system by hiding all the interface elements related to the native bookmarks and replicating all the changes to Google Bookmarks locally.

{ Thanks, Dr. Azrael Tod. }

Mozilla's Weave Prototype Updated

Mozilla's Weave Prototype Updated:
After Google announced that Browser Sync will no longer be updated and will stop working at the end of the year, many people looked for an alternative. The closest project to Browser Sync is Mozilla Weave, a Firefox extension that synchronizes local data from your browser with a server so you can access your data from multiple computers. Unfortunately, Weave is still an experimental prototype, so it can be buggy and unreliable.

Weave 0.2 has been released today and it supports new data types: cookies, passwords, saved form data and sessions, in addition to bookmarks and browsing history. After installing the extension and restarting Firefox, you need to create an account and enter a key used for encryption.

Unlike Browser Sync, Weave doesn't synchronizes data in real-time. "After the initial data transfer is completed during setup, Weave connects to the server periodically when it accumulates enough changes that need syncing or when enough time has passed since the last sync (at least once every 20 minutes if any data has changed). Weave also syncs when you start Firefox, when you quit it, and when you click on the "Sync Now" button in the Weave menu or the preferences."

It's worth mentioning that browser data sync is just one of the components that will be included in Weave. "As the Web continues to evolve and more of our lives move online, we believe that Web browsers like Firefox can and should do more to broker rich experiences while increasing user control over their data and personal information. Weave is the Mozilla Labs' project to develop a coherent framework and platform for deeply integrating online services with the browser."

Opera users can already synchronize bookmarks and notes using a feature included in the latest version of the browser. If you only need to synchronize your bookmarks, migrate to an online bookmarking service like del.icio.us, Google Bookmarks, or install plug-ins like Foxmarks (Firefox), Zinmko (Firefox / IE), that synchronize bookmarks and provide a web interface where you can access and share your bookmarks.

Adobe Helps Search Engines Find Flash Files

Adobe Helps Search Engines Find Flash Files:
Adobe announced that it provided some its Flash technology to Google and Yahoo in order to improve the indexing of SWF files and especially Flex applications. "Although search engines already index static text and links within SWF files, RIAs and dynamic web content have been generally difficult to fully expose to search engines because of their changing states."

To solve this problem, Adobe decided to share Flash Player technology that allows search engines to walk through a SWF file and simulate user interactions. "We've developed an algorithm that explores Flash files in the same way that a person would, by clicking buttons, entering input, and so on. Our algorithm remembers all of the text that it encounters along the way, and that content is then available to be indexed," explains Google's Webmaster Blog. The indexing algorithm, which is already live, has some important limitations: it ignores Flash files loaded using JavaScript and it separately handles external resources loaded by Flash files.

I couldn't find too many Flash sites that are fully indexed by Google, probably because we need to wait until Google updates its index.

Google Photos

Google Photos?
Launched in 2006 as an online extension of the Picasa photo management application, Picasa Web Albums didn't become very popular, as Flickr continued to grow. Besides lacking a community of photography enthusiasts and leaving out a lot of basic features like stats or adding a photo to favorites, Picasa Web Albums is not a great name and many might not even know that Google has a photo sharing service.

There are many references in Picasa Web's code which show that the service will change its name to Google Photos. The navigation bar already uses "Photos" as an anchor text, there's a Google Photos Screensaver and the service's blog is titled Google Photos Blog.

Other upcoming features referenced in the code include content licensing options, uploading photos by email and tagging people in your photos.

YouTube's Search Module

YouTube's Search Module:
Probably as an alternative to the list of related videos displayed in a sidebar, YouTube experiments with a search box placed below the video's description. The search box doesn't load a new page to show the results, as you can see in the screenshot.

You can search for things mentioned in the video or create a small playlist of related videos by adding some of the results to YouTube's Quicklist. Maybe in the future YouTube will open the sidebar modules to developers so you can add useful information related to the current video: music lyrics, popular playlists that include a video or videos recorded on the same location.

Export Data from Google's Services

Export Data from Google's Services:
Google mentioned in many occasions that it doesn't want to trap users' data and some of its services have started to provide import/export options. Here are some of the ways to export your data from Google's services:

* iGoogle lets you download the list of gadgets, feeds, themes and their corresponding options if you go to the settings page and scroll down to the "Export / Import" section. The resulting XML file can be imported to another Google account and those who are familiar with XSLT could covert iGoogle's data file to OPML, so you can subscribe to the feeds in Google Reader or any other feed reader.

* Google Calendar has options to export your calendars one by one as iCal files, but it's much easier to export all the calendar you created by going to: http://www.google.com/calendar/exporticalzip.

* Google Docs lets you export your documents as an archive of HTML files and images. To export your files, restrict the Docs list to documents, select all the files and choose "Save as HTML (zipped)" from "More actions". Zoho can already import your documents and there's a Greasemonkey script that helps you download all the files from Google Docs, not just the documents.

* Blogger added in the experimental version available at draft.blogger.com an option to export the posts and comments from your blogs as an Atom feed. Hopefully, developers will write scripts that convert Blogger's feeds to the formats accepted by other blogging services.

* Google Bookmarks can be exported as a HTML file, but for some reason browsers can no longer import the bookmarks. The web history or search history can be exported as a RSS feed: http://www.google.com/history/lookup?q=&output=rss&num=1000 (replace 1000 with the number of items you want to export).

* Gmail lets you export your contacts as CSV or vCard, but Google automatically adds all the people you send a reply in the list of contacts.

It would be nice to export all your data from a single page, so you can delete a Google account or switch to a competing service without losing your data.

Google Talk As a Social Network

Google Talk As a Social Network:
I know it seems hard to believe, but your Google Talk contacts will become... your Google Friends. Everything started last year with an innocent addition to Google Reader: automatically broadcasting your shared items to your friends. If you use Google Reader, you probably noticed that you're subscribed to the shared items from your Google Talk contacts. Many complained that their Google Talk contact list includes many people that are not necessarily friends. "I have business contacts, school contacts, family contacts, etc., and not only do I not really have any interest in seeing all of their feed information, I don't want them seeing mine either," explained a Google Reader user.

But how does someone become your friend in Google Talk? You can send or accept an invitation, but there's another option enabled by default: "Gmail automatically determines which contacts you'll be able to talk to without having to invite each other," based on how frequently you mail each other. And since Gmail contacts include all the people you've ever replied to, you'll end up with a new Google Talk friend after replying 2-3 times to someone's messages.

Here's a screenshot from the recently launched Google Friend Connect, a service that brings social features to ordinary web sites. As you can see, Google Talk is listed next to Facebook, orkut and hi5.

The invisible social network needed a way to expose information about its users, so you can now create a Google Profile. There's even a shortcut for accessing your profile: http://www.google.com/s2/profiles/me.

But without a place where you can share interesting stuff with your friends, Google Talk would be just a virtual social network. iGoogle, the site where you can aggregate all the things you find important, will become Google's main social site when the new version of iGoogle will be released. Among other features, the new iGoogle will add a Google Talk widget, support for OpenSocial applications and a gadget that shows updates from your friends. iGoogle's gadgets and presumably some Google services will be able to push updates to an activity stream that will be shared with your friends, which happen to be the Google Talk contacts. That means your GTalk contacts will be informed when you share a post in Google Reader, when you upload photos in Picasa Web Albums or post a review in Google Maps.

This is actually the Maka-Maka project revealed last year in a confidential Google video that has been accidentally published. "The new central place for social activities will create feeds for all or your events (activity streams) and share them with your contacts," I mentioned in that post.

That means Google Reader's sharing feature was just a rehearsal for a much bigger release that will make the hidden Google Talk social network more visible.

Major Update for Google's Blogger

Major Update for Google's Blogger:
It's raining with features in the experimental version of Blogger, available at http://draft.blogger.com/. To try these new features, it's a good idea to visit Draft Blogger and temporarily enable "Make Blogger in Draft my default dashboard" at the top of the page.

Probably the most important new feature is the inline commenting system, that lets you post comments without opening a new page. This year, I tried using a pop-up window for the comment form, but it's still inconvenient to post comments. The new option, which can be added in the Draft Blogger by going to Settings > Comments > Comment Form Placement, uses an iframe to display a textarea and a list of authentication options:

I added the inline comment form to the template, so you can try it. For now, you can't preview the comment before posting it and I haven't figured out how to add the option to delete your comment.

Another extremely useful new feature lets you import and export your posts and comments. "Now you can export all of your posts and comments into a single, Atom-formatted XML file for easy backup. You can then import the posts back into Blogger, either into an existing blog or into a new one." The option is available in the Draft Blogger by going to Settings > Basic. Please note that the exported XML file can be quite large: for example, this blog's entire archive has 10.2 MB.

Blogger has a new post editor that borrows a lot of new tricks from Google Page Creator. You can move the images inside a post and dynamically choose between different sizes of the image. The new editor is smart enough to no longer replace newlines with tags when you add tables, lists, styles, scripts and objects. There's also an improved preview option that uses your template to style your content. Unfortunately, the new editor lacks many features currently available: auto-save, spell checking, video upload and the toolbar for editing HTML.

Blogs that use the new layouts can add star ratings to get feedback from readers, but I'm not sure if this is a useful feature. There's also an option that integrates Blogger with Google Webmaster Central: you can automatically add all your Blogger blogs with a single click.

This is one of the biggest updates to Blogger and many of the new features are long overdue. If everything goes well, all these features will soon be available in the standard Blogger interface.

{ Thanks, Brad Linder. }

A Media Server from Google

A Media Server from Google:

A surprising Google Desktop gadget released by Google enables you to share your media across devices. "Google Media Server uses an open technology known as Universal Plug n' Play to stream media to consumer electronic devices. The UPnP specification allows for a variety of hardware (gaming consoles, set-top boxes, photo frames) to communicate and access media from your home PC."

The Windows-only gadget lets you share all the media content indexed by Google Desktop or just the files from some of your folders. Google Media Server can also share some of your Picasa albums (from your computer or from Picasa Web Albums) and the videos uploaded to YouTube.

Google's application requires to authorize the devices that are allowed to access your files, but there's an option to allow any device to access the Media Server.

Google Desktop's blog mentions PlayStation 3 as an example of UPnP-enabled device. Google Media Server's team says that "the only way to connect the XBox 360 to a UPnP server, was to have a service that is only found on Microsoft services (used for registering for DRM content) and for the server itself to be claimed to be made by Microsoft. Legal would not allow us to pretend to be Microsoft (although there are other servers out there that do)."

This is a very interesting way to use Google Desktop: streaming media files that are stored online and on your computer. A recent YouTube blog post mentioned a list of devices that enable you to access YouTube from your living room and Google Media Server is another step in this direction.

If you manage to connect the application to one of your devices, post your feedback in the comments and use the Media Server Group to ask for help.