Google Operating System

Google Closes Many Services Posted: 15 Jan 2009 03:15 AM PST Google decided to close many services that were either redundant, not very successful or unrelated to Google's core business. After Google acquired YouTube, Google Video morphed into a video search engine, but you could still upload videos. Unlike YouTube, Google Video didn't have a limitation for the duration of a video. "In a few months, we will discontinue support for uploads to Google Video. Don't worry, we're not removing any content hosted on Google Video -- this just means you will no longer be able to upload new content to the service," mentions Google Video Blog. Google Notebook, one of the best Google services, is also about to be discontinued. "Starting next week, we plan to stop active development on Google Notebook. This means we'll no longer be adding features or offer Notebook for new users. But don't fret, we'll continue to maintain service for those of you who've already signed up." After launching SearchWiki, Google Search removed the integration with Google Notebook and the integration with Google Bookmarks turned out to be a bad idea. The project was probably discontinued because it couldn't become a part of a more significant service, but it's disappointing to close a project that gained a lot of visibility and could become a clipboard for many Google services. Jaiku, the microblogging service acquired by Google, will migrate to Google App Engine and will no longer be actively developed. "As we mentioned last April, we are in the process of porting Jaiku over to Google App Engine. After the migration is complete, we will release the new open source Jaiku Engine project on Google Code under the Apache License. While Google will no longer actively develop the Jaiku codebase, the service itself will live on thanks to a dedicated and passionate volunteer team of Googlers. With the open source Jaiku Engine project, organizations, groups and individuals will be able to roll-their-own microblogging services and deploy them on Google App Engine. The new Jaiku Engine will include support for OAuth, and we're excited about developers using this proven code as a starting point in creating a freely available and federated, open source microblogging platform." Other services that will be discontinued include Google Catalogs, a database of mail-order product catalogs last updated in 2006, Dodgeball, a mobile social network acquired by Google in 2005 that stagnated after its founders left Google, and Mapshup Editor, a project that will be replaced by the more powerful Google App Engine. "Google engineers have long been at the top of the heap when it comes to the Google pecking order. Now, neither products nor engineers seem to have a protected status, as Google goes into the grim economic times predicted for 2009," writes Danny Sullivan. Google closed 3 new offices, slowed down hiring and no longer encourages wild experiments. "Matt [Cutts] insisted that the early spirit of freedom and experimentation was still there in the culture. But when I pressed him on whether even Google could afford that luxury in harder times, he admitted that people like him now had perhaps to be a little more focussed on the bottom line. But he said the one day in five spent on personal projects was not being discarded," reported BBC News. { via SEL. Thank you, Kevin. }

Google Shared Storage Posted: 14 Jan 2009 04:59 PM PST In 2007 Google added an option to pay for additional storage for Gmail and Picasa Web. The prices have changed since then: for $20/year you get 10 GB instead of 6 GB, for $75/year you get 40 GB from 25 GB, for $250/year you get 150 GB instead of 100 GB and $500/year is the price for 400 GB, up from 250 GB. Google's offer doesn't look very good if you compare it with the storage offered by Yahoo Mail and Flickr. Yahoo Mail promises to offer "unlimited storage" if you don't abuse the system. "The purpose of unlimited mail isn't to provide an online storage warehouse. Usage that suggests this approach gets flagged by our anti-abuse measures." Flickr is less generous: you can only upload 100 MB of photos each month if you have a free account. Picasa Web Albums offers 1 GB of storage for free, but a Flickr Pro account costs $25/year and you get "unlimited storage". Google's offer would make sense if you could use the storage in a service like GDrive, but uploading photos and storing more attachments in Gmail is not enough. There's no defined limit for uploading videos at Google Video, but you need to pay if you want more than 1 GB of storage at Picasa Web Albums. Google offers a way to purchase more storage space to use with some of its products (currently Gmail and Picasa Web Albums). This extra storage acts as overflow when you run out of free storage space in either product. If you've filled your free storage (5 7.2 GB and counting for Gmail or 1 GB for Picasa Web Albums), you'll automatically use your purchased space to store more pictures and messages up to your new storage limit. Your shared storage space will be used by whatever product needs it. Picasa's free storage is for photos only, and Gmail's is just for Gmail messages, but the shared storage can be all photos, all messages, or a mix of both. You can't set aside shared storage space for one product - it will be used by any product that's over its free storage quota on a first-come, first-served basis.

Transit Layer in Google Maps Posted: 14 Jan 2009 03:41 PM PST Google Maps already shows information about public transportation when you get directions, but now you can see more transit data in a new layer. To enable the layer, click on "More..." and select "Transit" if the option is available. Google Maps blog lists the cities where the new layer has been enabled and some of them aren't covered by Google Transit yet. "Whereas the main Google Transit product has the goal to provide full schedule information and routing, the objective of the Transit Layer is to overlay lines visually on Google Maps. Think of a virtual metro map on top of Google Maps -- even when we don't have itinerary planning available, we want you to be able to see public transit options that are available." Here's the full list of cities where you can see the transit layer: Belo Horizonte, Berlin, Bordeaux, Brasilia, Cairo, Capetown, Caracas, Chicago, Copenhagen, Dallas, Dortmund, Duisburg, Düsseldorf, Ekaterinburg, Essen, Frankfurt, Genoa, Guadalajara, Hamburg, Helsinki, Johannesburg, Kazan, Köln, Lille, Lisbon, London, Lyon, Madrid, Marseille, Medellin, Mexico City, Melbourne, Monterrey, Montreal, Munich, Naples, Nizhniy Novgorod, Oslo, Paris, Perth, Portland, Porto, Porto Alegre, Prague, Pretoria, Recife, Rennes, Rio de Janeiro, Samara, San Francisco, Santiago, Sao Paulo, Seattle, Strasbourg, Toulouse, Tunis, Vienna, Warsaw.

Send and Archive: a Multi-Action Gmail Button Posted: 14 Jan 2009 03:01 PM PST You receive a message in Gmail's inbox and after sending a reply, Gmail shows your conversation and a list of options: "back to Inbox", "Archive", "Report spam", "Delete", "Older" and more actions. Most of them don't make any sense in this specific context, but they're kept for consistency. You'll probably go back to the inbox and read the next message, but if you like to have a clean inbox you'll also archive the message you've just replied to. A new feature available in Gmail Labs lets you automatically archive a message after sending a reply. The default button becomes "Send & Archive" and it will perform the following actions: * send the message * archive the conversation * go back to inbox "More often than not, as I reply to a message I also want to archive it so I can enjoy the satisfaction of a pristine inbox. Having clicked "Send" followed by "Archive" a few million times, I started to wish there was a way to just click once and accomplish both actions at the same time," explains Pal Takacsi, who added the small new feature. Another multi-action button that would make many people happy could combine labeling conversations and archiving them. What other smart buttons would you like to see?

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Google Operating System

Google Quick Search Box for Mac Posted: 13 Jan 2009 04:01 PM PST Last year, Google released a mobile app for iPhone that lets you search many data sources from a single location: web pages, local businesses, contacts. A similar application is now available for Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard and it's called Quick Search Box. Nicholas Jitkoff, Quicksilver's creator, is one of the developers. The application is a powerful box that works as a program launcher, address bar, Google search box, desktop search box, calculator and weather gadget. The source code includes modules that integrate data from Google services like Google Bookmarks, Gmail and Picasa Web, so the application has the potential to become the central point for accessing Google. "For the last year, we have been working on a new, open-source quick search box. Today, we are releasing our first developer preview for the Mac. This Mac version is much more experimental than its iPhone sibling, Google Mobile App, and through it you will be able to see many of the areas we are exploring: contextual search, actions, and extensibility. It is by no means feature-complete, but is a very good indication of things to come," explains Google. { Licensed as CC-Noncommercial by phnk. } Quick Search Box is also a feature of Google Desktop, but it's unfortunate that Google didn't integrate more data sources. My favorite Windows Vista feature is the ubiquitous search box. Some interesting alternatives are Launchy, an extensible application launcher for Windows and Linux, and Mozilla Ubiquity, an experimental project that makes web applications more useful. All of them are powerful command-lines that expose information from your computer or the web.

Gmail Is Different. Here's What You Need to Know Posted: 13 Jan 2009 02:24 PM PST Most people find Gmail confusing because they don't understand basic features like labels, archiving, filters. So you'll hear them asking for folders or wondering how to remove messages from the inbox. This knol written by gravi_t, an active member of the Gmail group, does a good job at explaining the features that make Gmail different. Imagine this: - each email is a piece of paper - labels are post-it notes, sticky notes - there are default labels, like "Inbox", "Sent items", "Trash" ("Bin"), "Spam" - you can also create labels (i.e. sticky notes) This means that - unlike in other email services - you do not put the emails into folders. You actually attach labels to the emails. Only one copy of your emails: - you only just have ONE existing copy of your emails - no matter how many labels (post-its) you stick on them - you can attach as many labels to this one copy as you want, just as you can stick a lot of post-it notes to the same one piece of paper This is why your email disappears from everywhere when you delete it; because deleting the email means deleting the "piece of paper"!! The knol is licensed as Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial and Google should use some of its content in the "welcome" message. Tip: To find when you created a Gmail account, go to "All mail", click on "Oldest" and you'll see the first messages you've received. You'll need this information to get access to a compromised Gmail account. { Thanks, Anonymous. }

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Google Operating System

Copy Google Documents to Your Account Posted: 10 Jan 2009 08:45 AM PST Someone sent me the link to a document published using Google Docs, but I didn't have the permission to edit the document. I wanted to save the document to my Google Docs account, but none of the options offered by Google allowed me to do that. One of the ways you could create a duplicate for the document is to replace http://docs.google.com/View?docid=AAAAA with http://docs.google.com/DocAction?action=copy&docid=AAAAA where AAAAA is the document ID. To automate the process, I created a small user script that adds an option to duplicate the document. The script works in: * Firefox, if you install Greasemonkey * Chrome, if you install the latest pre-beta version * Opera (no add-on required) * Safari, if you install GreaseKit * Internet Explorer, but you need to install a plug-in like IE7Pro Here's a sample document to try it. After installing the script, open the document, scroll to the bottom of the page and click on "Copy to my account". Another idea is to upload the document to Google Docs, but you need to edit the URL to remove the footer and add the .html extension. Replace http://docs.google.com/View?docid=AAAAA with http://docs.google.com/View?docid=AAAAA&hgd=1&.html Related: Download published documents and spreadsheets Tips for linking to Google presentations

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Google Operating System

New Google Favicon Posted: 09 Jan 2009 03:15 PM PST Google changed its favicon last year and many people said that the new one was ugly. Probably this the reason why Google decided to use another favicon starting from today. The new favicon uses all the colors from Google's logo, while keeping the same lowercase "g". Marissa Mayer's description from last year is very appropriate. "We wanted something distinctive and noticeable (...). We wanted something that embraced the colorfulness of the logo, yet wouldn't date itself." Adam Howard, a reader of this blog, thinks that the new favicon "looks like a mini paint-by-numbers". Here are all the three Google favicons, starting with the new one, followed by the simple favicon added last year and the initial Google favicon, which is still my favorite: Update: Marissa Mayer tells the story of the new favicon: "Back in June, we rolled out a new favicon — the small icon that greets you when you access Google on your URL bar or your bookmarks list — and we encouraged our users to submit their ideas for this important piece of Google branding. We were impressed by the volume of submissions we received, and today we are happy to introduce a new Google favicon inspired by those submissions by our users. André Resende, a computer science undergraduate student at the University of Campinas in Brazil, submitted the design that inspired our new favicon: . His placement of a white 'g' on a color-blocked background was highly recognizable and attractive, while seeming to capture the essence of Google." { Thanks, Daniel, John and Adam. }

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Google Operating System

Google Chrome 2.0 Pre-Beta Posted: 09 Jan 2009 02:24 AM PST Google Chrome's development is high-paced and version numbers are not very significant, but it's weird to see a pre-beta release of Chrome 2.0, four months after Chrome 0.2. There are many new things in Chrome 2.0: * form autocomplete, one of the most obvious missing features from the initial release * full-page zoom, which resizes images and embedded objects too, not just text. It's important to know the keyboard shortcuts: Ctrl - to zoom out, Ctrl + to zoom in and Ctrl 0 to go back to the normal view. * autoscroll by middle-clicking on a page and indicating the direction * profiles are a great way to separate Chrome's settings in different categories: you could create a work profile with its own homepage, bookmarks and browsing history and profile for your personal projects. The great thing about Chrome is that you don't have to close the browser to change your profile: just open a new window in a separate profile. * support for Greasemonkey scripts (or user-scripts). To enable this experimental feature you need to right-click on Chrome's shortcut from your desktop, select Properties and add --enable-user-scripts in the Target field. While you're in the Properties dialog, click on "Open File Location" and create a folder named User Scripts in the user data directory, where you'll need to manually save scripts. * other important improvements: updates to WebKit and the V8 JavaScript engine, a better implementation for SafeBrowsing (malware/phishing protection), new code for the HTTP network protocol. How to get the new version? 1. If you don't have Google Chrome, install it from google.com/chrome 2. Subscribe to the developer preview channel. This is required even if you've previously subscribed to the channel. 3. Wait until the new version is downloaded (you may force the updatie by opening the "About Google Chrome" dialog). "The Dev channel is where ideas get tested (and sometimes fail). The Dev channel can be very unstable at times, and new features usually require some manual configuration to be enabled. Still, simply using Dev channel releases is an easy (practically zero-effort) way for anyone to help improve Google Chrome." If you don't like the new version, you can always downgrade to the most recent stable version by reinstalling Chrome.

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Google Operating System

GrandCentral in Spain? Posted: 06 Jan 2009 05:43 PM PST Spanish news site Expansión reports that Google plans to launch GrandCentral in Spain. GrandCentral is a service acquired by Google in 2007 and its main purpose is to centralize voice communications. "GrandCentral provides an innovative web-based voice communications platform that helps you manage all your phones and phone numbers through one simple interface. You get a single phone number that forwards to all of your phones, giving you one number for life." Right now, GrandCentral works only in the US and you need to get an invitation to use it, but Spain is the first candidate for GrandCentral's international expansion. Here's a sightly improved automatic translation from Spanish: "The company wants to offer international calls via the mobile phone and advanced voicemail, separately from the offers of other mobile operators. Google requires that users subscribe to voicemail, a service provided over the Internet. When a mobile user does not answer the call, the voicemail automatically activates. Once you have subscribed to this service, you can also make international calls through the voicemail number. (...) Google wants to avoid the legal hurdles and the investment required to get a carrier license, a model considered inflexible and incompatible with its approach, always based on open standards." Apparently, voice calls are free, but they're linked to the voicemail service. The more calls you receive, the more you can call other people for free. Some related articles: * Google can be a mobile phone operator in Spain * GrandCentral comes to Spain { Thanks, John K. }

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Picasa for Mac Posted: 05 Jan 2009 03:11 PM PST Picasa borrowed a lot from Mac's elegance and simplicity, but it was only available for Windows (and emulated in Linux). Mac users can now finally install a native version of Picasa from picasa.google.com/mac/ and enjoy one of the most easier to use software for photo management. From the press release: Picasa for Mac makes it easy to manage large photo collections and helps users make professional-looking edits without any technical knowledge, including: * A drag-and-drop photo collage tool that gives users control over layout and content * A retouching brush to wipe out scratches and blemishes - and repair old photos * A slideshow movie maker that uploads users photo montage videos to YouTube with a click * Smart auto-cropping that guides users on how to zoom in on their subject * And, auto red-eye removal. Many of us take pictures so that we can show them to the people we care about. Picasa for Mac integrates seamlessly with Picasa Web Albums, Google's free photo-sharing site, which offers features like name tags - the ability for users to automatically organize and share their photos based on the faces in each picture. If you have a Mac and you manage to install Picasa, tell what you think in the comments. { via Blogoscoped Forum and Tony }

Blended Google Mobile Ads Posted: 05 Jan 2009 12:04 PM PST Google Mobile Search started to display short text ads in the middle of the search results page. The mobile interface mixes web search results, news, images and local businesses, but Google displays the ads after the list of regular web results. Google separates the ads using a different background, but it's weird to see the ads mixed with search results. Here's an example for the query [love] as displayed in Opera Mini: Sergey Brin said in an interview from 2004: "One thing that's important to us is the distinction between advertising and pure search results. We make it clear when something is paid for. Our advertising is off to the side and in a couple of slots across the top. Ads are clearly marked. There's a clear, large wall between the objective search results and the ads, which have commercial influence."

On Gmail's Success Posted: 05 Jan 2009 10:37 AM PST Paul Buchheit, the ex-Googler who created Gmail, remembers how difficult was to convince people that Gmail has the potential to become successful. We starting working on Gmail in August (or September?) 2001. For a long time, almost everyone disliked it. Some people used it anyway because of the search, but they had endless complaints. Quite a few people thought that we should kill the project, or perhaps "reboot" it as an enterprise product with native client software, not this crazy Javascript stuff. Even when we got to the point of launching it on April 1, 2004 (two and a half years after starting work on it), many people inside of Google were predicting doom. The product was too weird, and nobody wants to change email services. I was told that we would never get a million users. Once we launched, the response was surprisingly positive, except from the people who hated it for a variety of reasons. Nevertheless, it was frequently described as "niche", and "not used by real people outside of silicon valley". Financial Times reports that Gmail has about 100 million users and the growth rate is still significant: "[Gmail] has been gaining ground in the US over the past year, with users growing by more than 40 per cent, compared to 2 per cent for Yahoo and a 7 per cent fall in users of Microsoft's webmail." Even though the competing mail services improved their offerings and storage is no longer an important differentiator, Gmail still offers an unmatched user experience. After using Gmail, you'll no longer understand why Yahoo Mail places the "Send button" above the message, why Yahoo Mail thinks it's more important to show news and weather information instead of your inbox, why Yahoo Mail still charges for features that are available for free in Gmail, why Hotmail shows a large banner at the top of the page or why you can't auto-forward mail to a non-Hotmail account. Gmail made so many right choices that it's easy to ignore some of its quirks, downtimes or bugs. As David Pogue said back in 2004, "Even in its current, early state, available only to a few thousand testers, Gmail appears destined to become one of the most useful Internet services since Google itself. Gmail is infinitely cleaner, faster, more useful, more efficient, less commercial and less limiting than other Web-based e-mail services." The perception about Gmail changed a lot over the years, even though Gmail didn't remove controversial features like contextual ads or conversations. From the paranoid "Google reads your mail" or the cool factor of having a Gmail invite, Gmail became successful by continuing to improve and to exceed people's expectations. Gmail's homepage from 2004

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