Google Personalized Homepage added comments, ratings and recommendations for gadgets, but also themes.
Picasa Web Albums has community search, an API and upgraded the free accounts to 1GB.
Google Notebook has a new design and is no longer in beta.
Google Talk Gadget can be added to any site, including Google's Personalized Homepage.
There's a new version of Google Desktop that adds instant preview, malware warnings and an updated sidebar.
Google Pack includes an upgraded screensaver that shows photos from the web.
There's a new version of Google Mobile Search and Google tests a new search engine.
Read more:
All the posts from March
Saturday, March 31, 2007
Google Writer
Google launched in October 2005 a feed reader, which became popular a year later. The company also offered publishing tools like Blogger, Page Creator and Google Docs, but even if they make your job easier by letting you focus on the content, you still have to come up with the text and the ideas.
Google Writer is a new application planned to be launched soon at Google Labs. It will integrate with many other Google services and guide you while writing a blog post, an essay or a news article.
Let's say you have a blog about Google, you wake up in the morning and wonder what to write. Now you can go to Google Writer, create a new project, enter some keywords and a small description and choose the default output (Blogger). Now when you create a new article inside this project, Google Writer gives you suggestions about the hot topics of the day, insightful articles about Google, news and popular queries that include "Google".
After choosing the topic, Google Writer suggests a title, some key quotes from other blogs and some interesting sites, images, and videos about the topic to facilitate your research. You can choose those that interests you and let Google Writer create some context around the quotes. Google Writer has a big database of n-grams from web pages and it's able to create grammatically-correct sentences. It also learns your writing style from the previous articles, it knows your favorite authors, sites and your interests.
Now that you have the basis of the article, Google Writer suggests some concepts or portions of the text you should write about or expand. Google Writer has a smart autocomplete that learns from the web and is adapted to your style. It's also able to summarize text, to show interesting content from the web related to a text fragment and previous articles on the same topic.
At launch, the tool will only support Internet Explorer and Firefox, and will be invitation-only. Google intends to expand the tool for other online activities like sending mail, instant messaging, so you can dedicate more time to other important things, like writing cool applications. I asked Google if the creativity will disappear with tools like this that build a text on top of some aggregated fragments, but I only got a strange mail:
"The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.
powered by Google Writer"
The Viral Marketing of an April Fools Launch
Probably the best press release written by Google was on April 1st 2004, when Google launched Gmail.
Launching a product on April 1st had its risks (most people thought it was a hoax) and its advantages (the hoax turned out to be a real mail service, so real that some wanted to pay to get a Gmail address), but it was an excellent viral marketing. From CNN Money:
Google made fun of its search technology, the contextual ad system, their work environment and products. What do you think they'll do this year?
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. - April 1, 2004 UTC - Amidst rampant media speculation, Google Inc. today announced it is testing a preview release of Gmail – a free search-based webmail service with a storage capacity of up to eight billion bits of information, the equivalent of 500,000 pages of email. Per user.
The inspiration for Gmail came from a Google user complaining about the poor quality of existing email services, recalled Larry Page, Google co-founder and president, Products. "She kvetched about spending all her time filing messages or trying to find them," Page said. "And when she's not doing that, she has to delete email like crazy to stay under the obligatory four megabyte limit. So she asked, 'Can't you people fix this?'"
Launching a product on April 1st had its risks (most people thought it was a hoax) and its advantages (the hoax turned out to be a real mail service, so real that some wanted to pay to get a Gmail address), but it was an excellent viral marketing. From CNN Money:
Google's one gigabyte of storage claim led to some speculation about the Gmail announcement being a hoax since it took place on April Fool's Day. Google has pulled April Fool's jokes on the tech community before, including jokes about pigeons being the driving force behind Google's search technology and that Google was looking to start a new research center on the moon.
In addition, the press release about Gmail was fairly goofy(...). But Jonathan Rosenberg, vice president of the products group at Google, said the Gmail announcement was legitimate. He did concede that the company did get caught up in the spirit of April Fool's Day in its press release.
Google made fun of its search technology, the contextual ad system, their work environment and products. What do you think they'll do this year?
Google as a Symbol of Excellence
When you want to say that a company is a leader in a field or has the best products, you say it's the Google of that field. If you search for "* is the Google of *", you'll find a lot of services and companies compared to Google.
* Krugle is the Google of programming code
* Baidu is the Google of China
* YouTube is the Google of Video
* Michael Arrington is the Google of Web 2.0 (?!)
* Gamespot is the Google of Videogames
* Nero is the Google of burning software
* Winamp is the Google of MP3 players
* Technorati is the Google of blog searching
* Flickr is the Google of photo sharing
* Bloglines is the Google of RSS readers
* Amazon is the Google of online book retailers
* ImageShack is the Google of free image hosting
* TailRank is the Google of memetrackers
* Skype is already the Google of VoIP
* Pandora is the Google of music
* Honda is the Google of automakers
* imdb is the Google of movies
* MySpace is the Google of social networks
* iTunes is the Google of the podcasting world
* Lonely Planet is the Google of guidebooks
{ Idea from a post written by Chris DiBona. }
* Krugle is the Google of programming code
* Baidu is the Google of China
* YouTube is the Google of Video
* Michael Arrington is the Google of Web 2.0 (?!)
* Gamespot is the Google of Videogames
* Nero is the Google of burning software
* Winamp is the Google of MP3 players
* Technorati is the Google of blog searching
* Flickr is the Google of photo sharing
* Bloglines is the Google of RSS readers
* Amazon is the Google of online book retailers
* ImageShack is the Google of free image hosting
* TailRank is the Google of memetrackers
* Skype is already the Google of VoIP
* Pandora is the Google of music
* Honda is the Google of automakers
* imdb is the Google of movies
* MySpace is the Google of social networks
* iTunes is the Google of the podcasting world
* Lonely Planet is the Google of guidebooks
{ Idea from a post written by Chris DiBona. }
Friday, March 30, 2007
Patent for Behavioral Targeted Ads in Games
After acquiring AdScape, a company that produces ads for video games, Google has a new patent that reveals some interesting ways of targeting ads to gamers.
Some context:
"In-game advertising is becoming extremely popular. This trend is expected to continue since the 18 to 34 year old male demographic in the U.S. is watching less TV and spending more time playing video games than ever before. The video game industry is becoming a media force on par with the television and motion picture industries. Consequently, ad agencies and game producers are collaborating to introduce more ads into video games. Presently, in-game ads are used to advertise real products and services in a manner analogous to product placement in movies and television shows. For example, a decal on a virtual race car may advertise a product or service. (...) Unfortunately, ads placed in various video games are typically determined while the game is developed and are therefore relatively static. Further, the ads are typically targeted to a broad demographic group. Consequently, in-game ads are often not as relevant and useful as they could be. "
The patent suggests a system that takes into account user's interaction with the game, its decisions and preferences.
Basically, you're living in a virtual world where your behavior is tracked and used to deliver ads that fill some predetermined spots. Behavioral targeted advertising is already used on the web by some ad networks, but the information that is tracked is much more limited (the sites you visit, the length of visit). In games, you have access to subtle details (game's choices could become a personality test). I wonder if gamers would accept such a system.
{via SEO by the Sea.}
Some context:
"In-game advertising is becoming extremely popular. This trend is expected to continue since the 18 to 34 year old male demographic in the U.S. is watching less TV and spending more time playing video games than ever before. The video game industry is becoming a media force on par with the television and motion picture industries. Consequently, ad agencies and game producers are collaborating to introduce more ads into video games. Presently, in-game ads are used to advertise real products and services in a manner analogous to product placement in movies and television shows. For example, a decal on a virtual race car may advertise a product or service. (...) Unfortunately, ads placed in various video games are typically determined while the game is developed and are therefore relatively static. Further, the ads are typically targeted to a broad demographic group. Consequently, in-game ads are often not as relevant and useful as they could be. "
The patent suggests a system that takes into account user's interaction with the game, its decisions and preferences.
The game play tracking operations may track game player input information. For instance, in most simulation games as in a Formula One racing game, a user may select a real world make/team of a car (e.g., Ferrari, Williams-BMW, McLaren-Mercedes, Renault, etc.), a particular driver (e.g., Michael Schumacher, Fernando Alonso, Rubens Barrichello, etc.) as well as the racing track desired to compete in (e.g., Monte Carlo/Monaco, Nurburgring/Europe, Indianapolis/USA, etc.), car color, type of tires, etc. (...) If a user selected a racing car from Dodge, the system may show a Dodge ad or something related.
Game state-based information may include information about the user's game-play. For example it may include, how fast the players are going through the levels, how familiar the players are with the game, what level are the players in (...), how long have the players been playing the game, how frequently the user plays various games, play-pause habits, game information stored to non-volatile memory, etc. (...) If the user has been playing for over two hours continuously, the system may display ads for pizza-hut, coke, coffee and other related goods.
The play characteristics of users, particularly in online RPG games (e.g., time spent chatting with other virtual players versus fighting, time spent bartering versus stealing, time spent exploring versus building, time spent trying new items versus completing levels, decisions made by players leading to certain situations (good versus bad, strategic versus short term), avoiding conflict (risk averse) versus being aggressive, cooperating and collaborating versus doing things alone, friendly versus hostile, etc.) may be particularly useful. User input information may be useful to help infer information about a user. Some other examples user information that may be inferred includes familiarity with a game(s), time spent playing a game(s), how fast is the user advancing and/or skill level, etc. Inferences drawn from such user input information may be made using known classification means such as neural networks, Bayesian networks, support vector machines, etc. Such inferred user information may be useful to help target ads. For instance, users that spend a long time bartering instead of stealing in a game may suggests that they are interested in the best deals rather than the flashiest items so the system may show ads reflecting value.
Basically, you're living in a virtual world where your behavior is tracked and used to deliver ads that fill some predetermined spots. Behavioral targeted advertising is already used on the web by some ad networks, but the information that is tracked is much more limited (the sites you visit, the length of visit). In games, you have access to subtle details (game's choices could become a personality test). I wonder if gamers would accept such a system.
{via SEO by the Sea.}
Thursday, March 29, 2007
Google Maps Shows Funny Directions
It's not the first time when Google Maps shows strange directions. This time, if you want to go from Stanford to Stockholm, Google recommends to "swim across the Atlantic Ocean" (only 3,462 miles).
Last month, Google Maps transformed a short walk into a journey of 18 minutes. "For most people, the journey from the Shelbourne Hotel at 200 Sussex Street to Google's Sydney headquarters across the road at 201 Sussex Street would be a 30-step, 30-second trip. But according to Google's new mapping service, the recommended route would see you take a 10.4-kilometre scenic detour that involves crossing the Harbour Bridge twice," reported Sydney Morning Herald in February.
In January, Digg uncovered that you had to make a lot of U-turns to get from Bensalem to North Brunswick. It turned out that Google's driving direction engine had a bug that created an infinite loop.
So next time take Google Maps' drive directions with a grain of salt.
{ via Blogoscoped }
Last month, Google Maps transformed a short walk into a journey of 18 minutes. "For most people, the journey from the Shelbourne Hotel at 200 Sussex Street to Google's Sydney headquarters across the road at 201 Sussex Street would be a 30-step, 30-second trip. But according to Google's new mapping service, the recommended route would see you take a 10.4-kilometre scenic detour that involves crossing the Harbour Bridge twice," reported Sydney Morning Herald in February.
In January, Digg uncovered that you had to make a lot of U-turns to get from Bensalem to North Brunswick. It turned out that Google's driving direction engine had a bug that created an infinite loop.
So next time take Google Maps' drive directions with a grain of salt.
{ via Blogoscoped }
API for Yahoo Mail
Yahoo launched a web service for Yahoo Mail that will allow developers to build applications around users' mail accounts.
Unfortunately, most of the applications that use the new API will be available only to Yahoo Mail Plus users. But the developers have a reason to be happy: if they build something exciting enough to convince users to pay for Yahoo Mail Plus, they'll get $10 for each user.
A simple example that works with any Yahoo Mail account is Flickr Association that displays Flikr images related to your messages.
We are thrilled to announce the open availability of the Yahoo! Mail Web Service, web service for Yahoo! Mail (accessible via SOAP or JSON-RPC) that we previewed to Yahoo! Hack Day attendees. With the Yahoo! Mail Web Service, you can connect to the core mail platform to perform typical mailbox tasks for premium users such as list messages and folders, and compose and send messages (you can also build mail preview tools for free users with limited Web Service functionality). In other words, developers outside of Yahoo! can now build mail tools or applications on the same infrastructure we use to build the highly-scaled Yahoo! Mail service that serves nearly 250 million Yahoo! Mail users today.
Unfortunately, most of the applications that use the new API will be available only to Yahoo Mail Plus users. But the developers have a reason to be happy: if they build something exciting enough to convince users to pay for Yahoo Mail Plus, they'll get $10 for each user.
A simple example that works with any Yahoo Mail account is Flickr Association that displays Flikr images related to your messages.
Wednesday, March 28, 2007
Stylish New Design in Google Notebook
Google Notebook has a new UI that uses AJAX a lot (here's the old one, for reference). "After a long slog, our sexy new version of Google Notebook is out. There are still bugs and things missing, but I think this version is a lot more fun than the old one," says Kushal Dave on his blog.
You can see all your notebooks in the sidebar, ordered alphabetically or by modified date. It's easier to add notes: just click in the space between any existing notes. Google Notebook borrowed the layout of messages from Gmail and placed the editing buttons at the top of the page so you don't feel any disruptive interface change when you edit a note. You can now add comments to notebooks and remove the title and the URL of a clipped note. Google auto-saves each note, so you don't have to press a "Save" button.
If you add notes from Google Maps and publish the notebook, you'll have an option to see the places on a map.
The mini-notebook, available as an add-on/extension, has a similar look:
The option to search public notebooks has been removed (but you can use Google search to do that), Google Notebook looks faster because of the heavy AJAX usage, and the product graduated from Google Labs. Overall, a nice face-lifting, even though users were expecting to see other features like tags or file attachments.
{ Thanks, C. I. R. E. }
Google Beta - Imagine a New Search Engine
Google's logo in 1999
Forget about the layout of most search engines, forget about the top 10 results, forget about different interfaces for images, news, maps, videos. Imagine that Google starts from the beginning, puts the beta sign next to the logo and reinvents itself.
Soon you might be invited to try an experimental version of Google search. It may be SearchMash, but I'm sure it's much more than that.
How would you imagine a search engine if you tried to ignore everything you've seen before?
"Phrase in English: You're invited to try an experimental version of GOOGLE search.Translation Help: This is the promo for Google beta."
This is a screenshot from "Google in Your Language", a program in which you can translate Google's services in different languages. The messages show up in "Google in Your Language" before they're live at google.com, so they may indicate new features or products.
LG Phones to Preinstall Google Software
While the Google Phone rumor continues to persist, Google execs said they intend to focus on creating software for mobile phones and making sure the software reaches the users.
A new distribution partner is LG, the #5 mobile phone maker in the world. "LG handsets with Google products and services, such as Google Maps, Gmail and Blogger, will be shipped to North America, Europe and Asia starting in the second quarter of 2007, the companies said. LG (...) plans to release at least 10 new handset models with the Google products in 2007 and continue offering them for the next few years," according to Reuters.
Yahoo managed to pack the most popular services into Yahoo Go, a sleek application that wants to become a one-stop shop for browsing the web. It combines the new mobile search engine from Yahoo with mail, maps, news, finance, photo sharing. The software is or will be preinstalled in a lot of phones from Nokia and Samsung, but also in a small number of phones from Motorola and LG. It looks like Yahoo has a much better mobile strategy than Google.
Here's the situation in the PC bundle world:
A new distribution partner is LG, the #5 mobile phone maker in the world. "LG handsets with Google products and services, such as Google Maps, Gmail and Blogger, will be shipped to North America, Europe and Asia starting in the second quarter of 2007, the companies said. LG (...) plans to release at least 10 new handset models with the Google products in 2007 and continue offering them for the next few years," according to Reuters.
Yahoo managed to pack the most popular services into Yahoo Go, a sleek application that wants to become a one-stop shop for browsing the web. It combines the new mobile search engine from Yahoo with mail, maps, news, finance, photo sharing. The software is or will be preinstalled in a lot of phones from Nokia and Samsung, but also in a small number of phones from Motorola and LG. It looks like Yahoo has a much better mobile strategy than Google.
| Company | Share (Q4 2005) | Share (Q4 2006) | Partners |
| Nokia | 34.1 | 35.2 | Yahoo |
| Motorola | 18.2 | 21.9 | Yahoo and Google |
| Samsung | 11.1 | 10.7 | Yahoo and Google |
| Sony Ericsson | 6.6 | 8.7 | Google |
| LG | 6.6 | 5.7 | Yahoo and Google |
Here's the situation in the PC bundle world:
| Company | Share (Q4 2005) | Share (Q4 2006) | Partners |
| HP | 15 | 17.4 | Yahoo |
| Dell | 16.4 | 14.5 | |
| Lenovo | 7 | 7.1 | Microsoft |
| Acer | 5.5 | 6.6 | Yahoo |
| Toshiba | 3.3 | 3.7 | |
Yahoo Mail, with Unlimited Storage
Yahoo Blog announces that Yahoo Mail will have unlimited storage. They'll be rolling this out over a few months, starting from May.
The official explanation is that the cost of storage dropped and users send more attachments. "We have been closely monitoring average usage. We are comfortable that our users are far under 1 gig(abyte), on average. What we see are an increasing number of rich media files as consumers send more photos."
They even offer a history of Yahoo Mail, in terms of storage, but here's the real timeline:
1997
October 8: Yahoo acquires Rocketmail and transforms it into Yahoo Mail. Storage size: 3 MB, that will soon become 4 MB.
2004
April 1: Gmail launches with 1 GB of free storage (invitation-only)
June 15: Yahoo Mail upgrades to 100 MB. Yahoo buys OddPost next month to make the first important UI transformation.
2005
April 1: Gmail doubles the storage: 2 GB. They also launch the Infinity+1 storage plan: each day the storage increases with a small quota (that dropped from 3.456 MB at that time to 0.33 MB now).
Late April: Yahoo Mail has 1 GB.
Of course that very few people have gigabyte-sized mailboxes and this is more like a marketing gimmick, but Yahoo's announcement marks the first time since Gmail launch when Yahoo Mail makes the first move and is about to become better than the competition. We'll have to wait and see if Sergey Brin changes his mind and amends the plan that Google "will start selling additional storage capacity to e-mail users with extraordinary needs".
Meanwhile, Gmail had serious performance problems at least three times this month, mostly for Google Apps users. "All three incidents this month have affected an undetermined subset of Google Apps users, including those on the Premier version of the suite, who pay a fee that grants them a service-level commitment from Google of 99.99 percent uptime."
{ Thank you, Nimish. }
The official explanation is that the cost of storage dropped and users send more attachments. "We have been closely monitoring average usage. We are comfortable that our users are far under 1 gig(abyte), on average. What we see are an increasing number of rich media files as consumers send more photos."
They even offer a history of Yahoo Mail, in terms of storage, but here's the real timeline:
1997
October 8: Yahoo acquires Rocketmail and transforms it into Yahoo Mail. Storage size: 3 MB, that will soon become 4 MB.
2004
April 1: Gmail launches with 1 GB of free storage (invitation-only)
June 15: Yahoo Mail upgrades to 100 MB. Yahoo buys OddPost next month to make the first important UI transformation.
2005
April 1: Gmail doubles the storage: 2 GB. They also launch the Infinity+1 storage plan: each day the storage increases with a small quota (that dropped from 3.456 MB at that time to 0.33 MB now).
Late April: Yahoo Mail has 1 GB.
Of course that very few people have gigabyte-sized mailboxes and this is more like a marketing gimmick, but Yahoo's announcement marks the first time since Gmail launch when Yahoo Mail makes the first move and is about to become better than the competition. We'll have to wait and see if Sergey Brin changes his mind and amends the plan that Google "will start selling additional storage capacity to e-mail users with extraordinary needs".
Meanwhile, Gmail had serious performance problems at least three times this month, mostly for Google Apps users. "All three incidents this month have affected an undetermined subset of Google Apps users, including those on the Premier version of the suite, who pay a fee that grants them a service-level commitment from Google of 99.99 percent uptime."
{ Thank you, Nimish. }
Tuesday, March 27, 2007
Google Screensaver
Google Screensaver is a Windows screensaver that displays photos from different locations:
The screensaver acts like a slideshow so you can move to the next/previous photo using the mouse. The title and the author of a photo is always visible and you can go to the source of the photo by clicking to one of the links from the bottom of the window.
You can configure the visual effects (collage, wipe, pan and zoom, cross fade) and how often the photos change.
The screensaver is a part of Google Pack, but if you get it from this page you can install only the screensaver. Then you can uninstall Google Updater and keep the screensaver.
Update. You can download Google Screensaver without installing Google Pack (this link may change in the future):
gpdl.google.com/installers/ci_ss/en/2.2007.0412.1728/gpscrsav.msi (4.5 MB).
Update 2. Here's a more recent version of the screensaver: http://dl.google.com/packdata/ci_ss/3.1.0.7112/en/setup.msi.
- Your computer. You select a list of folders that contain photos and Google Screensaver monitors the JPEGs from these folders.
- Picasa Web Albums. If you use Google's photo sharing site, you can view pictures from the most recently modified albums and from your contacts. It's probably the most interesting feature of Picasa Web Albums: you can monitor all the photos uploaded to your contacts' albums.
- Web feeds. You can find them in photo sharing sites like Flickr, Picasa Web Albums or at this page. Some nice feeds: Flickr (Vista wallpapers, nature, architecture, landscape, Google food), Yahoo search (autumn, Dali, sunset) . To add a new source, right-click a link to a feed in IE and Firefox and select "Add to Google Photos Screensaver".
The screensaver acts like a slideshow so you can move to the next/previous photo using the mouse. The title and the author of a photo is always visible and you can go to the source of the photo by clicking to one of the links from the bottom of the window.
You can configure the visual effects (collage, wipe, pan and zoom, cross fade) and how often the photos change.
The screensaver is a part of Google Pack, but if you get it from this page you can install only the screensaver. Then you can uninstall Google Updater and keep the screensaver.
Update. You can download Google Screensaver without installing Google Pack (this link may change in the future):
gpdl.google.com/installers/ci_ss/en/2.2007.0412.1728/gpscrsav.msi (4.5 MB).
Update 2. Here's a more recent version of the screensaver: http://dl.google.com/packdata/ci_ss/3.1.0.7112/en/setup.msi.
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