Google Video Contact Manager

Google Video has a new feature that lets you send a link to a video much more easily. Google Video already had a way to share videos, but you had to type emails and the autocomplete was barely usable.

Now you can see all your contacts or just the most contacted, you can search for a contact and even get a picture for contacts that use Gmail and lets you see it.

The new contact manager is not yet available from Google Video's interface, but you can see it if you go to a Google Video (like this one) and type:

javascript:handlePickerClick(0);void(0);

in the address bar. Now press enter and a new window will open. You need to be logged in with your Gmail account.

While the new feature is just a way to build a list of email addresses, it's part of a wider initiative that focuses on improving how you access and manage your contacts on Google properties.

The Affinity Between You and Your Gmail Contacts

Affinity could be defined as "a close connection marked by community of interests or similarity in nature or character" (WordNet). I've always complained that Gmail doesn't show statistics about your messages, your contacts, but I've just discovered a cool way to find out something more about your Gmail contacts.

If you open this XML file (you should be logged in), you'll discover a list of Gmail contacts sorted by affinity and a value for each contact. The value could be calculated by taking into account how often you write to each other or maybe even deeper knowledge of personal interests.

2006 Metrics

In case anyone is interested, here are some stats from Google Analytics for this blog:

Unique visitors: 1,345,000
Pageviews: 3,400,000

Top referrals:
google [search results]: 27.31%
digg.com: 16.17%
google [referral]: 14.62%
direct: 12.49%
slashdot.org: 2.14%

Top countries:
US: 46.62%
UK: 7.27%
Canada: 5.90%
India: 3.13%
Australia: 2.57%

Top browsers:
Firefox: 57.89%
IE: 32.67%
Opera: 4.01%
Safari: 3.29%
Mozilla: 1.09%

Top platforms:
Windows: 87.21%
Mac: 7.36%
Linux: 5.08%

Regarding the feed, here's a chart that shows the number of subscribers, courtesy of Feedburner:


Top feed readers*:
Netvibes
Firefox Live Bookmarks
Bloglines
NewsGator Online
Google Desktop

*The list doesn't include Google IG/Reader, My Yahoo, Windows Live.

Most of these numbers are meaningless, but they may show you some behind-the-scene details. Thank you for a great year.

How to Use Google Music Search

When you search for a singer or a music band at Google.com, you'll notice a box above search results that shows more information.

This feature is not new (in fact, it's been available for almost a year), but many people don't know that you can trigger Google Music Search by simply adding "music:" in front of your query. Google has a big database of artists, songs and albums and everything is searchable.

So how can you use it?

1. Let's say you know the name of a song, but you don't know the artist. Search for [music: name of the song] and Google will show you all the songs that have this name. You can also use quotes if you are sure about the name.

It's easy to find albums or artists if you don't remember the entire name (for example, a British singer named Lily).

2. Maybe you know the lyrics of a song and you want to find the song. You can enter the lyrics in the regular search and you may find it, but if the song is not very popular or if there are more songs that have similar lyrics, it's a much better idea to use Google Music Search. This way, you'll get unique songs as search results.

Compare this regular search with Google Music Search.

3. You can find information about songs: the duration, the album, the composers, different versions of a song (for example: Gnarls Barkley's Crazy).

4. Sort the albums of an artist by popularity (e.g.: Red Hot Chili Peppers) and read reviews.

So next time when you want all this information, just add music: in front of your Google search query.

Google Desktop Could Bring Google Data Offline

Last month I got a mail from someone who wanted an option to backup all your Google data or just a part of it.

Joe T. sent me an interesting idea: Google Desktop could download your data from Gmail (already does that partially and slowly), Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Notebook, etc. and make it searchable offline. This way you could use online apps to manage your documents and other data, but still have offline backups that are in sync.

"It's a free service, yes, and as such we are subject to the limitations of Google's whimsy to implement features, whether vital (POP3 download access) or fanciful (assigning pictures to Contact entries). It's no small undertaking, but I'm starting to feel that an ability to bring my data offline, even just as a backup storage base, falls into the good idea-to-vital range."

This may come in handy especially when you read news about Gmail users who lost their emails. Even if Google is not responsible for this, and a Firefox vulnerability caused everything, an easy way to download your data* would have saved the day.

* Note that you can use POP3 to download your Gmail messages. This doesn't include contacts, labels, threads. The feature also has limitations and quirks.

View Image Search Results in a Slideshow

This site shows image search results from Google, Yahoo and Windows Live in a slideshow. It scales the images to fit the window, lets you pause it and if you click on an image, you'll get to the original page that contained the image or a link to the image.

Type the name of a painter, a beautiful place or object and enjoy.

Blogs Are the Real News Message Boards

Yahoo decided to take down message boards from Yahoo News. The reason? "Message boards allowed a small number of vocal users to dominate the discussion." Or, as a Slashdot comment says...

Imagine, if you will, Michael Richards, high on drugs, screaming "NIGGER NIGGER NIGGER I HATE NIGGERS" over and over again for hours and hours. Add to that an evangelic Christian screaming "FIND CHRIST" at the top of his lungs, once every 45 minutes precisely. Finally, imagine an overweight 40-year old divorced mother crying and saying "why is everybody so mean". This is what the Yahoo boards were like.

Earlier this year, Yahoo removed blog search from Yahoo News. In a reverse direction, Google integrated blog search into Google News, added a link on the homepage, and now Google Blog Search has more visits than Technorati.

While there are still many spam blogs, search engines should focus on detecting them and not decide to ignore blogs. The real news discussion is not in news articles, it's in blogs, comments and forums. Blogs are permanently connected, interactive and more honest. Newspapers and traditional news sites realized that and now a lot of news come from blogs.

I think Google shouldn't stop at adding a link to blog search in Google News. They should try to connect news articles with blog posts and add more interactivity. The great thing about blogs is that they make you feel a part of the news as it happens.

Script for Google Reader Search

I wrote earlier how you can add search to Google Reader. In case you wanted a Greasemonkey script that actually adds a search box in Google Reader, here it is:

Google Reader Custom Search

First you need to have Greasemonkey for Firefox. After installing the script (a simple click on the link), you need to go to Tools / Greasemonkey / Manage scripts, find Google Reader Custom Search in the list and click Edit.

You'll see some instructions in the text file. Basically, you need to search for "test" using your custom search engine, copy the URL, remove "&q=test" from the address and put the result in SearchURL variable. You'll get something like:

var SearchURL="http://www.google.com/custom?cx=...";

Update: This also works in Opera 9. Press F12, select "Edit site preferences", click on "Scripting" and copy the path from "User Javascript files". Save
the script there and edit the file using Notepad like described above.

Update 2: John Marshall wrote a better script that shows the search results inside Google Reader.

Update 3 (Sept. 2007): Google Reader added search.

Google, Moving to Offline Advertising

Business Week writes an interesting article about the latest update of Yahoo Search Marketing (a service similar to Google AdWords). We find out that Google makes between 19 and 21 cents for each search, while Yahoo earns around 10-11 cents per search. Yahoo hopes to improve its performances with this update code-named Panama, that delivers better targeted advertising.

While Yahoo tries to catch up with Google in search advertising, Google is eager to move offline. The experiments with print ads have exceeded the expectations. The service is targeted at small advertisers that usually don't pay for ads in newspapers. "Advertisers would go online and bid on the excess ad inventory of daily newspapers, giving them a much-needed revenue boost. (...) Google is selling only small display ads -- not color or full-page ads, which bring in the most money. In some cases, Google bundles a few small ads into one larger space. There is no indication to the reader that Google helped place the ad."

Google does the same thing in radio, helped by dMarc, a company acquired this year. "Until recently, Fred Yazdizadeh, owner of the Simi Valley, Calif., company, said radio air time was too expensive and the process of creating an audio message had been too daunting to consider. But under a new program being tested by Google, Yazdizadeh's ad was affordable and easy to manage. And, more important, it generated calls from potential customers living in the areas where the ad was broadcast," reports Washington Post. Unlike text ads, effective radio campaigns need a good voice and a script, so advertisers may use voice-over marketplaces.

A popular video site was one of the requirements for implementing video ads. Google Video didn't grow fast enough, so Google had to buy YouTube. For the moment, Google Video shows short ads at the end of some videos whose producers have a revenue-sharing deal with Google. But these video ads are a rehearsal for TV advertising, an interesting market where Google could bring contextual, relevant ads. The deal with BSkyB, a satellite broadcaster, is a start.

Screenshots of Gmail's Mail Fetcher

Gmail added a new feature that lets you fetch mail from up to 5 POP3 accounts, but the feature is not yet enabled in all Gmail accounts. Here's what you'll see:

You'll find the mail fetcher in Settings / Accounts.



You can add up to 5 accounts.



It's a good idea to not leave a copy on the original server, if your POP3 account has a small storage. You can label all the messages and archive them without manually creating a filter. Gmail will also offer to let you send mail from the new address.





After adding the account, Gmail will fetch your mail every 3-4 minutes and show you a small status and a log of the last 5 actions.




Gmail's spam filter will put some order in your POP3 mail, although the filter is not perfect.



Overall, Gmail's mail fetcher is fast and doesn't need too much tweaking to make it work. You'll be able to get your old mail to Gmail and use Gmail as a universal account. Unfortunately, there are some bugs (I deleted an account, but I still received mails), so this feature will be delayed a little bit more.

{ Thank you, Tony. }

Note: the feature was tested using a real POP3 account.

Airbag, Google Crash Reporter

Airbag is an open source tool from Google that can be used to identify why a program you're developing crashes. "If developers could get reliable and automatic reports when their programs crash, they'd be able to figure out which ones happen most frequently, and more importantly, be able to fix them. Writing a system to handle crash reports is a lot of work though, and writing a crash reporter that works across a variety of hardware configurations and operating systems is even harder," explained Airbag's developers.

Fortunately, that's exactly what Google's software aims to be. Airbag currently works in Windows, Mac and will be soon available for Linux, but you have to know how to work with Subversion to get the source. The system has client libraries that generate crash reports and a server library that receives these reports. "The server-side process library in turn reads the crash dumps and transforms them into information that is useful for debugging. The build tools are able to make sense of native debugging information, turning the data into a format that is understandable by the processor," is happy to inform us Sean Michael Kerner.

It's very interesting to note that Airbag has already a major supporter in Mozilla, that will add it in the next version of Firefox. "We don't have a formal roadmap, but we do have an informal mission statement, which is to provide a set of crash reporting libraries that can be integrated into a large project, namely, Firefox," said Mark Mentovai, who works for this project at Google.

Google Myths

I've heard many inaccurate things about Google this year, and most of them are spread by word of mouth. Maybe Google should do a better job at explaining things that may seem trivial to computer experts, but difficult understand for other people.

1. Google Desktop indexes your files and uploads the index to Google's servers. (Michael Arrington)

No. Google stores the index on your computer. If you enable a feature called "search across computers", Google will securely send copies of your indexed files to Google servers. The feature is disabled by default.

2. Gmail indexes your emails and makes them available for everyone. (Darbacour)

No. Google indexes your messages so you can search them. This feature is now available in other webmail applications (Yahoo Mail, Windows Live Mail). Google doesn't make your messages or the indexes public.

3. Google doesn't delete my Gmail messages.

In order to keep your email safe, Google needs to have multiple backups of your data. "You may organize or delete your messages through your Gmail account. (...) Residual copies of deleted messages and accounts may take up to 60 days to be deleted from our active servers and may remain in our offline backup systems." (Gmail Privacy Policy)

4. Google doesn't improve search anymore to increase its earnings from ads.

You may not perceive too many changes in Google search, but Google tweaks its algorithms often to improve search results quality, removes spam sites and tries to add more fresh results. On the visible side, Google added search refinements, more direct answers, malware warnings and address recognition.

5. Search results should be ranked by people, not by algorithms.

Google uses the links from other pages the determine the importance of a page, and those links were placed by humans. Google also monitors user's clicks to determine if the search results are relevant.

6. Google is spyware.

"Spyware is software that reports on your activities or gathers personal information about you and sends it via the Internet to third parties without your knowledge or consent." If you use software like Google Toolbar or Google Desktop, some features may send personal information to Google, but most of them are either turned off by default or require your explicit approval. Google also uses cookies to save your preferences and records queries, clicks, usage patterns to deliver better results. The problem is not that they record it, it's what they do with it. And Google tries to protect it from third parties (like US Government).

7. Google Earth shows real-time images.

No, what you see "are photographs taken by satellites and aircraft sometime in the last three years".

8. Google is the best search engine that will ever be built.

Google is far from a search engine that "understands exactly what you mean and gives you back exactly what you want". But its goal is to reach that state. (Google's philosophy)

9. Google favors Wikipedia, Technorati, blogs.

Well, not exactly. These sites happen to have many backlinks, and oftentimes quality links. I know many people that link to Wikipedia to show an explanation for a concept or an acronym, link to Technorati to tag their blog posts or link to blogs because they are infectious.

10. Google will take over the world.

Those who control information, control the world. Hopefully Google will be a benevolent dictator (guess what? I linked to Wikipedia).

Make Google Services Opera-Friendly

Although Opera is a modern browser that respects web standards, many developers don't have time to test their sites in Opera and prefer to block it. There are a number of Google services that return "incompatible browser" errors or deliver a trimmed-down version in Opera, even though the site would load just fine without the hardcoded browser checks (also known as browser sniffing). Google knows the service doesn't work perfectly in Opera and other browsers, so it does this to prevent user complaints:

User: "Google, my browser crashed when loading Google Calendar."

Google: "What browser do you use?"

User: "Opera 9."

Google: "Sorry. It's an unsupported browser."


Here are some problems:

1. If you go to Google Docs & Spreadsheets, you get this, an error that recommends adding "&browserok=true" to the end of the URL. There's also a funny disclaimer: "Please note that it is a violation of intergalactic law to use this parameter under false pretenses, so don't let us catch you at it. And, it won't work very well -- really."

2. Google Calendar shows a message box that offers two options: Ok, this browser is unsupported or Cancel, go to Google Calendar and hope for the best.

3. Picasa Web Albums shows a non-JavaScript version for viewing photos. Among other things, you can't use shortcuts or zoom in the photo.

To fix these problems, you may try to mask the browser as Firefox, but think about this paradox:

"This site doesn't work in Opera because Opera has a small market share. To fix this, you can mask as Firefox. Now Opera has an even smaller market share."

A better idea is to try a script that does a little more by solving other small glitches:

* Make sure you have Opera 9 (Help / About).

* Find where to save it. Press F12, select "Edit site preferences", click on "Scripting" tab and copy the path of the folder from "User JavaScript files".

* Then save the script to that location.

You can read an interesting discussion at Opera Forums. Note that the script is constantly updated and other services that don't currently work in Opera (like Google Page Creator) might be added.

Google's Kangaroo Doodle

These holidays, Google showed us that kangaroos have a lot in common with humans. Google's glow can be a part of daily life and it can be a great gift. For those who appreciate it.

You can find the Christmas Kangaroo [not-safe-for-work video], who brings gifts for all the boys and girls in Australia, the Olympic Summer Game Kangaroo, that masters too many sports to count, or the famous Skippy.

The Australian Animal Zodiac says that the keywords for Kangaroo are: "Abundance, Family, Never-ending, Fire, Universal Love and Universal Law. (...) Kangaroo has a natural nurturing tendency supporting and fostering and encouraging its young. Kangaroo has a strong sense of family togetherness. (...) The crystal of Kangaroo is Diamond and it reminds you of the purity of the Diamond. Diamond being the symbol of pure love and commitment to Mother Earth and Mankind."

Note: sorry for feeding the kangaroo.

2007: Google Talk Phone Calls, Offline Google Docs

Google launched many applications in the last 2 years, but most of them had too few features (Google Talk) or they were under-promoted (Google Docs & Spreadsheets).

In 2007, things will change. David Girouard, VP and General Manager at Google Enterprise, told Internetnews.com that Google Talk will include many new features and will become a true VoIP client. "Girouard said that Google Talk, which currently allows users to make VoIP calls among themselves, will be beefed up to integrate with traditional phone systems as well as VoIP offerings from other vendors."

Google's social network could also receive an upgrade. Google "may use the fruits of its acquisitions of Web 2.0 companies such as wiki-builder Jotspot and social-networking site orkut to build the framework for a collaboration platform".

Products like Google Docs & Spreadsheets are sometimes faced with the problem of Internet access. Google wants to fix that, at least for enterprise users, by giving them access to their data when they're offline. In 2007, Google will add new features to Google Docs & Spreadsheets and will try to make it a real option for consumers and small businesses. "This year has been about getting our toe in the water. [Next year] will be about taking a lot more steps forward."

Customize Google News Mobile

The mobile version of Google News, easily accessible at news.google.com on your mobile phone, can be customized. You can choose the sections that are interesting to you and their order. Another new feature is custom sections: you can see the news that talk about your favorite topics.

All these features were already available in the regular Google News, but Google doesn't preserve your settings in the mobile version. You don't spend too much time reading news on your phone, so it's a good idea to select only the sections that matter to you.

{ Via Steve Rubel. }

How to Add Search to Google Reader

Search is one of the most requested features for Google Reader. Until this feature is implemented, there's a simple workaround: you can use Google Co-op to create a search engine restricted only to the sites you're subscribed to. Here's how to do this:

1. Go to this page that shows your list of subscriptions (in OPML format) and save it to your desktop.

2. Create a search engine at Google Co-op. Enter a name, a description, a bogus keyword (like "blogs"), a bogus site in the list of sites to search (like "www.example.com"). Click "Next" and then "Finish".

3. Now click on "control panel" next to the search engine you've just created. Select "Advanced" and upload the file downloaded from Google Reader in the annotations section.

4. (Optional) To access your search engine, you have more options:

* Integrate it into Google Reader using a Greasemonkey script

* Go to "Code" section and copy some code you can add to your site or add a gadget to Google Personalized Homepage.

* Go to "Preview" section and bookmark the homepage of your search engine.

* You can also go to the homepage of your custom search engine, right-click on the search box and add the search engine to your browser (for example: if you have Google Toolbar, right-click and select "Generate custom search"; if you use Opera, select "Create search").

You can use this to search the sites from any OPML file (most feed readers have an option to export the subscribed feeds to OPML). Of course, if you add or remove feeds, you need to reupload the OPML to Google Co-op to keep the search engine in sync.

Update (Sept. 2007): Google Reader added search.

Google Santa Tracker

If you want to make a nice surprise to your child or if you want to be children again, go to Google Earth site and download a small KML file that will let you track Santa in real time. Keep your computer open and connect it to your big-screen TV. Make sure you turn on the "Terrain" layer in the sidebar.

"Oh! You better watch out,
You better not cry,
You better not pout,
I'm telling you why:

Santa Claus is coming to town!"

Encrypted Message

The earth holds a message for you. You just need to look a little bit closer. If you're paying attention, you'll discover many hidden messages. Look beyond the names and find their true meaning. You'll be more powerful and you'll know it.