Google Sidebars

Firefox and Opera have a little-known feature: the sidebar. You can open any page in a persistent sidebar that sits in the left of your window. Because the sidebar is usually very small, not every web page is usable when added to the sidebar.

If the links from this page don't automatically create a sidebar, you'll have to bookmark them and select "Show in panel" (for Opera) or go to the Bookmark Manager, and enable "Load this bookmark in the sidebar" in the bookmark's properties.

1. Google Notebook - a simplified version of Google Notebook that lets you access your notes and easily add new notes. It's a good idea to use it if you don't want to install the extension.

2. Google Talk - the Flash gadget for Google Talk is a good replacement for the desktop client if you don't use more advanced features like voice chat or file sharing.

3. Google Search - this page was designed for Internet Explorer and it's useful if you want to see the list of search results in the sidebar.

4. Google Docs & Spreadsheets - the list of your files sorted by the last modified date. (If the sidebar doesn't show any document, replace 100 with a value smaller than the number of documents from your account. This is a bug.)

5. Google Calendar - it shows the calendar, your agenda and you can use it to quickly add events.

6. As most of these pages were actually created for Google gadgets, you may be wondering if it's possible to add any gadget to the sidebar. Some of the gadgets can be added by bookmarking this address:

http://gmodules.com/ig/ifr?url=[Gadget Source]

where [Gadget Source] is the URL of the gadget's source code, which can be found if you click on the little arrow from each gadget box and select "About this gadget".

Example: http://gmodules.com/ig/ifr?url=
http://www.counttonine.com/google-sudoku.xml (a Sudoku game).

Now that you have a lot of sidebars, you'll want a way to organize them. Opera lets you easily switch between panels and for Firefox there's an extension called All-in-One Sidebar that adds this functionality.

Blogger Adds Trendy Search and Other Widgets

If you liked the way Google implemented search in most of their official blogs, now you can get something similar without writing complicated code. Blogger blogs that migrated to layouts can include a search widget that shows results from the blog, its blogroll, the pages linked from the blog and the web. The feature uses the AJAX Search API and Google Custom Search, so the search results are loaded at the top of the current post, without reloading the page.

The widget is available at Blogger in Draft, the place where Blogger showcases experimental features.


The widget may show sponsored links, but you can't earn money from them. In fact, Google doesn't earn money from the ads either and includes them for free. "Ads in the AJAX Search API are basically an experiment still. We are trying to figure out if ads are useful in this model, and how do our customers want to use the ads and benefit from the ads? We don't know the answers yet. Yeah, Google is not benefiting from these ads, because advertisers are not being charged for them. The only guys that actually benefit, to be honest with you here, are the advertisers. They are basically getting free impressions," explained in an interview Mark Lucovsky.

Blogger also added a poll widget and enclosures for podcasts and videocasts. "Enclosure links let you turn your blog into a podcast. If you've uploaded your audio or video to the web, you can link to it as an enclosure so that your readers can subscribe and download it using iTunes or another podcatcher."

The Interoperability of Online Operating Systems

Microsoft plans to offer more services that let you manage and store data online. While most of them are still in early stages or they've been released without too much success, Microsoft promises to open them to developers and to create APIs that can be accessed from any device.

Brian Hall, general manager of Windows Live, made an interesting comparison between the early days of Windows and this new online "operating system". "A lot of what Windows was doing early on was memory management, storage, all of the things today we take for granted. The vast majority of developers (today), they are not thinking, 'how am I going to store this particular piece of data in memory?' It just happens. The same thing is going to happen in the mesh model."

While developers can contribute to the success of a service (like in the case of Google Maps), it's hard to believe that companies will create truly open apps. A service that stores your data online could let you edit a document using Zoho or upload a video to YouTube, the same you can add actions to a context menu in Windows. Your Gmail contacts could be available when you want to share a Flickr photo and Gmail could integrate with Meebo to be able to chat with people that use other IM networks. But companies want to drive traffic to their own products or to their partners.



In a Wired interview, Eric Schmidt (Google's CEO) said this new "operating system" has the advantage of being based on open protocols. "People call this an Internet operating system. And by this I don't mean Google, I mean the sum of this vision. And if you think about it as an Internet operating system, the Internet operating system will have to have all of the normal features of the older versions of operating systems. It will have to have security, it will have to have caching, it will have to have replication, and it will have to have performance." But how about working with other "operating systems"?

Windows Live's tagline is "your online world gets better when everything works simply and effortlessly together". But that "everything" is still limited to the services created by Microsoft.

Top 10 Google Words and Expressions

Urban Dictionary provides user-contributed definitions for a lot slang words and expressions. Here's a list of definitions for little-known Google-related words:


10. Google drift

To drift aimlessly between subjects of interest, by finding them accidentally on a web search for something else.

"I was looking for information on the Holocaust and I found a lot of neat sites with historical facts about Germany."
"Oh, so you were google drifting."


9. Google test

When your internet connection is being problematic, you do the google test. Basically, you try to visit www.google.com and if it fails, you know your connection is tango uniform.

Friend A: My internet connection is not really working...

Friend B: Did you google test it?

Friend A: Yeah, nothing.

Friend B: Call AOL(because only AOL sucks enough to have problems regularly?)


8. Googleless

The state of being without Google; Google server unavailable.

Google's servers had better not ever shut down - I don't think I could handle being Googleless.


7. Googleosophy

Investigation, discovery, and pursuit of all that rocks on the Internet. One who practices this art is a googler.

I'll research (fill in blank) on the net, I have a degree in Googleosophy.


6. Google Seppuku

You use a Japanese text input tool and enter random Japanese characters into a google image search.

Then you count how many pages until you find an image so disturbing that you wish you never played the game.

JESUS CHRIST!! What? Oh sorry. Not you. I was playing google seppuku and I lost. I lost big time.


5. Google Copy Paste

The act of extracting information from Google for the reason of telling it to someone.

Note: Usually written as GCP

Bob: Who's the president of blahblahland
*Bill searches google.com, copies answer into clipboard, then pastes it*
Bill: It's Mark Larryson
Bob: Thanks, how did you know that?
Bill: Google Copy Paste :D


4. Google bet

A bet made when one can determine who wins by a simple trip to an internet search engine providing instant gratification.

"Dude, Dan the Automator is NOT Del!"
"Yes he is"
"Google bet ya!"


3. Googlesmart

Any person who gets 99.9 percent of all info from their favorite search engine to look intelligent on talk/chat forums. Most people who are googlesmart tend to post on forums to look like a highly astounding person, but may not be.

Mechanic one: Man that GMracer350 sure knows his stuff about cars...
Mechanic two: Ha ha, that guy couldn't spin a wrench if he tried, he claims to know a lot, but without his computer, he's Googlesmart.


2. Googledom

The all-encompassing informational domain created by google.com's many websites and services

The introduction of Google Earth just made Googledom a bit larger.


1. The Google

George W. Bush's term for a popular internet search engine. It can be used to pull up maps and search for subjects of interest.

One of the things I've used on the Google is to pull up maps. It's very interesting to see — I've forgot the name of the program — but you get the satellite, and you can — like, I kinda like to look at the ranch. It reminds me of where I wanna be sometimes.

Redirect Your Blogger Feed to FeedBurner

If you have a blog and start to use FeedBurner to manage your feed, you have to change the autodiscovery link in your template and redirect the old feed to FeedBurner, so you don't have to tell your readers to subscribe to the new feed. Until today, there wasn't option to redirect the feed in Blogger, but now you can simply go to Settings > Site Feed > Post Feed Redirect URL and add the address of your FeedBurner feed.


Blogger offers several feeds for blog posts:

(1) blogname.blogspot.com/atom.xml - the old address for Blogger's ATOM feed
(2) blogname.blogspot.com/rss.xml - the address for Blogger's RSS feed
(3) blogname.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default - the full feed
(4) blogname.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/summary - the summary feed

... but Blogger only remembered about the first one. The other three don't redirect to the new feed, which is pretty strange, considering that the feed #3 is new Blogger's default feed.

FeedBurner's blog notes that "by redirecting your feed, you can get a true picture of how many subscribers you have. Some of you might even see a few more subscribers magically appear, though results will most certainly vary."

Even if Blogger mostly introduced this feature for FeedBurner, you can redirect your feed to any other address (for example, to a feed that mixes posts from all of your blogs).

Last week, FeedBurner started to offer its premium services for free and it's pretty clear that, unlike other Google acquisitions, FeedBurner really moves fast.

Useful Google Bookmarklets

I've always been a fan of bookmarklets, small pieces of JavaScript code saved as bookmarks in your browser. Often they provide features only available if you install a plug-in and they're pretty easy to backup.



Here's a small list of bookmarks related to Google's services. Most of them provide features from Google Toolbar. To save them, make sure bookmark toolbar is visible (go to View > Toolbar and check Bookmarks Toolbar, Links or Personal Bar, depending on your browser) and drag the link to the toolbar.



1. Subscribe to a feed using Google Reader: Subscribe. This is especially useful for browsers like Internet Explorer that don't have a proper way of handling feeds.



2. Translate a web page into English: Translate. This also works for text selections, but you have to choose the destination language. Other translation bookmarklets are available here.



3. Bookmark a page: Bookmark. If you don't want to install Google Toolbar, this a very good way to bookmark the current page at Google Bookmarks.



4. Add an event to Google Calendar: Add event. You can select some text from a web page or enter the description of an event after you click on the bookmarklet.



5. Map this. Select an address from a web page and instantly get the map.



6. Google Cache bookmarklet lets you view the cached version of the current page. This may be useful if a page doesn't load because of a server error.



7. Definitions lets you select a word or an expression from a web page and get the definition from Google.



8. Blog links shows all the blogs that link to the current page. Web links is the same bookmarklet adapted for links from the entire web.



9. Send text by SMS - this only works in the US and you must know the name of the mobile carrier.



10. Highlight the words from your Google query in the search results: Highlight. This extremely cool bookmarklet created by Dominique Hazaël-Massieux checks the referral, parse the query from the URL and highlights the words so you can easily find the relevant sections of the web page.

Google Maps Becomes a Geographical Data Platform

After launching My Maps, a way to manually create custom maps, Google Maps integrated mapplets, small gadgets that bring data from external sources and overlay it onto the map. The feature was launched in May as a developer preview and it's now live on Google Maps.

Like the overlays from Google Earth, mapplets use maps as a placeholder for geographical information. For example, you don't have to go to (the Google-owned) Panoramio's site to see photos from the entire world placed on the map, you can just select Panoramio from the My Maps tab and see the photos directly from Google Maps. Other interesting mapplets show data about earthquakes, weather, gas prices, real estate, concerts, movie showtimes, web cams, related Wikipedia articles or photos from Flickr. This way, all the Google Maps mashups could be accessible from a single interface. Google promised the developers they'll be able to monetize the mashups so they can still earn money even if people don't access their sites directly.

Even if Google Maps has a much smaller market share than Mapquest in the US, it's arguably the best platform for geomashups and Google could make it even more personal by letting you create custom maps collaboratively, placing your Gmail contacts on the map or delivering a personalized experience by selecting mapplets related to your interests. After all, Google has more users/resources than projects like Wikimapia.

A Windows Mobile Version of Google Talk

OctroTalk is an application for Windows Mobile smartphones and Pocket PCs that lets you chat and talk to your Google Talk contacts. The software uses Jabber transports to let you connect to other IM networks (Yahoo, MSN/Windows Live, AIM), but you can only chat with contacts from these networks. OctroTalk uses tabs so you can have multiple conversation at the same time, supports peer-to-peer file transfer and folder sharing.

There's also a desktop version of the program that allows the Smartphone client to transfer files remotely from your computer.

The software is free during its beta state and it's unclear if you'll have to pay to continue to use it when it comes out if beta. Oh, and you need to have Windows Mobile 5+.

There are many other ways to use Google Talk (including Java applications that work on most mobile phones), but Google should really provide a mobile Google Talk app or at least a non-Flash version of the gadget. And an update to the Windows client. And ports for Linux and Mac OS X.

Swivel - Draw Conclusions from Data

Swivel is a place where you can upload data, create nice graphs and try to draw wise conclusions from it. "Swivel's mission is to liberate the world's data and make it useful so new insights can be discovered and shared." I happen to know a company with a similar mission (Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful).

You can also correlate data from different sources and transform lifeless spreadsheets into interesting conclusions about the world. So you could try to find the number of Google employees over time and see if there's any correlation with Google's stock price, revenue or market share in search.

Swivel lets you use a list of existing tables or upload your own data as a CSV file (Google Spreadsheets has the option to export a sheet as a CSV file, like most spreadsheet apps).

It's important to make the distinction between correlation and causality. "A key thing to remember when working with correlations is never to assume a correlation means that a change in one variable causes a change in another. Sales of personal computers and athletic shoes have both risen strongly in the last several years and there is a high correlation between them, but you cannot assume that buying computers causes people to buy athletic shoes (or vice versa)."

Google Buys Postini to Expand Enterprise Offering

After the launch of Google Apps Premier Edition, more than 100,000 companies switched to Google's hosted services, but large companies couldn't use it "due to issues of security and corporate compliance". To provide better services for these companies, Google bought Postini, "the global leader in on-demand solutions that deliver on the promise of communication security and compliance". Postini is also a variation of postino, the Italian word for postman. Like Google Apps, Postini doesn't require you to install special software or hardware, as all the data is hosted and processed on their servers. "Postini invented the software as a service approach to providing communications security and compliance, and holds two fundamental patents in the space, with more patents pending."

Postini lets you recover messages, set policies for individual users or groups (block all the messages that contain a certain a keyword), archive and delete messages according to company's policy. "When an email message is sent, it passes through Postini's datacenters and a copy is saved while the original continues on its way. All of this happens within milliseconds, so there is no delay to your messages. When you configure rules for your users we can also check for violations and, if necessary, block the message or take other actions that you define."

Postini has already been a Google Enterprise Partner for Google Apps and it serves 35,000 business clients. The press release notes that Google paid $625 million in cash.

The Pressure of Google NDA

Peter Harkins met some of his friends who are now Google employees, but their conversations couldn't flow naturally because Googlers had to think if they are about to disclose some confidential information from Google. As you probably know, Google employees sign a non-disclosure agreement (NDA), which could be similar to this NDA you have to sign if you visit Googleplex.

"Google employees get distracted by mentally rereading their NDA and figuring out what they can say, can't say, and can't say that they can't say. It just gets worse if you keep talking and extrapolating (that is to say, holding a conversation) because you're giving them O(n² interrelations + m potential suggestions from them) more topics to analyze. I've never quite managed to crash them, but I imagine it's entirely possible given the NP nature of conversations," jokes Peter.

The confidential information includes: "(a) trade secrets; (b) financial information, including pricing; (c) technical information, including research, development, procedures, algorithms, data, designs, and know-how; (d) business information, including operations, planning, marketing interests, and products; (e) the terms of any agreement and the discussions, negotiations and proposals related to any agreement; and (f) information acquired during any facilities tours." Maybe Google should offer a Googler-only mobile app that monitors a conversation and alerts you when you start to discuss sensitive topics.

Improving Google's Social Network

Google already has a social network (orkut), but it's only popular in Brazil and India, it doesn't have a Googley interface and it had a lot of security problems in the past. That's why last year Google sponsored a project at the Carnegie Mellon University's Human-Computer Interaction Institute whose initial goal was to "rethink and reinvent online social networking".


"Directed to help improve the online community orkut, the project's scope was not to simply redesign the interface. Our team considered how online social networking could bring greater value to users, especially for ages above twenty. After initial brainstorming and research, we chose to focus on the effects of a new model for online social networking: a unified social network that, as a service, provides social data to many other applications."

The network, titled Socialstream, is able to "draw content from a variety of sources. Socialstream would be based on a unified social network (USN), a single network that provides social data to other sites as a service. A service model allows many social networks to be linked together, letting them share both content and the nature of the relationships of the people who use them."

This core feature will allow you to have accounts on more social networks, but centralize the information about your contacts in a single place. This also assumes that other social networks have an API and don't act like walled gardens, which is not the case right now. Socialstream used data from blogging and photo-sharing sites like Blogger, Flickr and Picasa Web Albums.

"Socialstream emphasizes improving social connections by making it more efficient to communicate with, share with, and view the social content of all the people in a user's online social network. Socialstream provides a compelling user experience because it aggregates content across many different networks so a user has a single location to discover new content and communicate. The goal of Socialstream is to present social information in a way that ties it to the person who posted the information, and not the site from which it came."

Like with any feed reader, you'll be informed when there's new data for a contact. The site also includes a Google Talk-like sidebar with all your contacts. "The contact list is a structured method of viewing updates, so if a user is interested in a particular person they can navigate directly."

When you create new content, you can post it to Socialstream or to any other participating social network. "Socialstream lowers barriers to sharing with different levels of sharing. Posts can be marked as favorites, and users can read their friends' favorites as a way to keep up with them. 'Post about' supports the idea of post conversations and trackbacks. Posts can also be sent directly to a contact or commented on."


It will be interesting to see if this project ever becomes orkut 2.0, a unified social network that makes it easy for people to keep in touch, no matter if they use Blogger, Wordpress, LiveJournal, Twitter, Flickr, Picasa Web, YouTube, MySpace, Friendster, Facebook, Bebo or other social network.