Google Sites to Launch in 2008


A recent presentation from Scott Johnston, a former JotSpot executive, revealed some of the future plans for Google Apps and other Google services.

A service based on JotSpot will replace Google Page Creator. "Scheduled to be launched sometime next year (2008), Google Sites will expand upon the Google Page Creator already offered within Apps. Based on JotSpot collaboration tools, Sites will allow business to set up intranets, project management tracking, customer extranets, and any number of custom sites based on multi-user collaboration." The service will also allow you to upload any file formats. You can already see a gallery of applications that use JotSpot.

As expected, most Google services will become Gears-enabled and will start to work even when you're offline. "Will users be able to edit docs, spreadsheets and presentation offline? Scott's answer was yes, and that the Google Gears plugin would handle the offline work. In addition, Google Gears support is in the works for Gmail and Google Calendar."

Another service that will become a part of Google Apps is GrandCentral, but the integration is not expected to be available very soon.

{ via TechCrunch }

Google to Bid for the 700MHz Spectrum

Google announced that it will bid in the FCC auction of wireless spectrum in the 700 MHz band. "We believe it's important to put our money where our principles are. Consumers deserve more competition and innovation than they have in today's wireless world. No matter which bidder ultimately prevails, the real winners of this auction are American consumers who likely will see more choices than ever before in how they access the Internet," said Eric Schmidt, Google's CEO.

Earlier this week, Verizon Wireless announced "that it will provide customers the option to use, on its nationwide wireless network, wireless devices, software and applications not offered by the company". This was one the four conditions formulated by Google in order to participate in the auction and one of the two conditions accepted by FCC. In September, Verizon Wireless filed a lawsuit "against the FCC's rules that would require the eventual winner of the spectrum offer open devices and applications".

Here's what Chris Sacca from Google has to say about this:
The state of neutrality for the wireless Net in the United States was woeful. We had inspiring entrepreneurs at Google building game-changing products and some users were not able to get their hands on those apps. It bummed me out. Thankfully, I wasn't the only person at Google who felt that way. Turns out, a lot of people at Google cared deeply about these issues. So we built a humbling team of like-minded folks to explore what we could do to make the wireless industry more open. (...) Our mission is ambitious, but clear: do what it takes to inspire or create a mobile ecosystem in the United States that will allow user choice to flourish and level the playing field for new applications and devices. (...)

In that light, I would be remiss if I didn't take a moment to recognize the sea change that occurred in the US wireless industry yesterday [November 27]. As the largest wireless carrier in the country, Verizon Wireless announced that they would soon allow customers the option of bringing their own device to and accessing their own applications on the Verizon network. (...) While Verizon by no means committed to the full openness principles for which Google has been advocating, and substantial risk remains in exactly how they choose to implement their ideas, I do think we need to recognize this as a very positive step forward. (...) There is a lot of work to do still, and the issues of openness and user choice in wireless are far from resolved. However, we have all come a very long way and it is clear that the good guys are building momentum.

Blogger Tests OpenID Support

Blogger in Draft (a pre-release version of Blogger) added the option to comment using an OpenID. According to Wikipedia, OpenID is a "decentralized single sign-on system. Using OpenID-enabled sites, web users do not need to remember traditional authentication tokens such as username and password. Instead, they only need to be previously registered on a website with an OpenID "identity provider" (IdP). Since OpenID is decentralized, any website can employ OpenID software as a way for users to sign in; OpenID solves the problem without relying on any centralized website to confirm digital identity."

OpenID is great because it allows you to use a single account to sign in to multiple sites without worrying about passwords. The system has been developed by Brad Fitzpatrick for LiveJournal (Brad now works at Google).

Some important companies and sites that provide OpenIDs: AOL, Orange, WordPress, Six Apart and others. If you have an account at any of these sites, you also have an OpenID. Unfortunately, very few important sites lets you authenticate using an OpenID.

To enable the OpenID integration in Blogger, you need to visit draft.blogger.com, edit the Settings for your blog, choose the Comments tab and select "Anyone" (allows anonymous comments) or "Registered users". I enabled OpenID for this blog, as you can notice if you try to post a comment.


Hopefully, this is a small step for a full integration with Google's authentication system.

Google Reader Improves Feed Management

Google Reader now shows a list of recommended feeds in the new Discover section. The list is generated by looking at the subscribed feeds from other people that have similar interests with you. I'm pretty satisfied with my recommendations, although I knew most of the blogs from that list.

"Your recommendations list is automatically generated. It takes into account the feeds you're already subscribed to, as well as information from your Web History, including your location. Aggregated across many users, this information can indicate which feeds are popular among people with similar interests. For instance, if a lot of people subscribe to feeds about both peanut butter and jelly, and you only subscribe to feeds about peanut butter, Reader will recommend that you try some jelly."

To decide if you want to subscribe to the feed, you can look at the number of Google subscribers, the frequency of posts or preview it.


But the most important update is that you can now manage your feeds in the sidebar using drag and drop. This allows you to move a feed to a new folder, to change its position inside a folder or to change the order of folders, if you don't like the alphabetical order. For some reason, there's still no option to rename folders and tags.

Froogle Checkout

Google has recently replaced the link to Google Video from the homepage with a link to Product Search (formerly known as Froogle). This change is probably related to the increasing number of people that use Google to buy things in this season.


Product Search is also a great vehicle for Google Checkout, the payment service that still needs a lot of promotion. As you can see from the screenshot below, there's so much Google Checkout in Froogle, that you start wondering if the entire service is an ad.


Google Checkout also has special offers (savings, free shipping, frequent flyer miles) for consumers, in addition to more than a year of free processing for merchants.

Google indexes all the reviews from Google Checkout users and adds them to Product Search (e.g.: reviews for SnowandWater.com).

As the stores who use Google Checkout gain more and more visibility in search results and ads, Google hopes to pressure the rest of the merchants to accept Checkout. Users are trained to look after the Checkout badge because they'll buy things faster and more conveniently.

Even if Google appears to lose money in Checkout, the future could bring a bigger spending in AdWords and happier / more loyal users. To achieve this, Google added a link to an unpopular service to the homepage and cluttered search results and Product Search with Google Checkout badges.

Google's fast and frugal checkout makes Google more powerful because you trust it with information about your credit cards and the things you buy and because you finally allow Google to finish the process of obtaining search results with a genuine confirmation: an acquisition.

The New Version of Gmail Adds Group Chat

Having three interfaces for Google Talk (the gadget, Gmail and the desktop client) seems to be a challenge for Google because the new features aren't propagated at the same time in all the interfaces. To make the challenge even more interesting, Google added a new interface: an updated Gmail Chat that's only available in the new version of Gmail.

This updated Gmail Chat includes two features that were already available in the gadget: smileys and group chat. To invite a new contact to an existing chat, click on "Options" and select "Group Chat". The problem is that your contact must use either the gadget or the new version of Gmail. If he uses the desktop client, a message will inform him to open the gadget, but in the old version of Gmail Chat there's no indication that you invited him to chat.


{ via Googlified }

Google Experiments with Personalizing the Order of Search Results

There's a new search experiment at Google Labs, but this time not everyone's invited. The new experiment lets you personalize your search experience by directly influencing the order of search results.

Each search result has two buttons: "like it" and "don't like it". The first button moves the search result at the top of the page and you'll see it there every time you search for the same keywords (Google adds an orange marker so you can distinguish it from the algorithmic results). The "don't like it" button removes the search result, but only for the current query. There's also an option to add new pages that don't appear in the list of search results: "at the bottom of the search results you can give the address of a page that's relevant to your search. When you search for these same keyword(s) the page you've suggested will appear at the top with this orange marker."

All in all, you can add a list of favorites for the current query and remove the irrelevant pages. This is especially useful if you know you'll search again for the same keywords because the next time you do that the list of search results promoted at the top will certainly save you time. Google doesn't mention if your action influence the overall quality of search results, but it's likely that they only influence your search results. Google might combine the highlighted web pages to dynamically create custom search engines for specialized domains or use them to better personalize the search results.

Other similar experiments from the past included the option to add better search results, reorder the results and remove search results.



{ via Googlified and Google Discovery. The second screenshot is licensed as Creative Commons by jessamyn (some features are from the Customize Google extension). }

Google Maps for Mobile Shows Your Location

The latest version of Google Maps for mobile phones has a new feature called "my location". Instead of having to enter your location, Google Maps is able to find it. If your phone has GPS support the location detection should be very good, but even if there's no GPS, Google Maps can approximate your location. "The My Location feature takes information broadcast from mobile towers near you to approximate your current location on the map - it's not GPS, but it comes pretty close (approximately 1000m close, on average)." To find your location on the map, just press 0 and look for a blue dot.

Google says that this feature should work on most "Java, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, and Nokia/Symbian devices", but it doesn't work in Sony Ericsson K750i, so this claim is questionable.

To get the new version (2.0), go to http://google.com/gmm on your mobile device. It's still in beta, so don't expect it to be flawless.



Update:
At this time, My Location (beta) is available for these devices:

* BlackBerry devices
* Some recent Motorola devices
* Some recent Sony Ericsson devices
* Many Windows Mobile devices
* Nokia Series 60 3rd Edition devices

If you have a Java-enabled (J2ME) device, BlackBerry or Windows Mobile device, you can easily check whether or not My Location (beta) is available. Just to go "Help" > "About" from the application. If the box contains "myl: N/A," it means your device isn't reporting a cell.

Edit Maps Collaboratively

Google Maps has finally added the missing piece from personalized maps: collaboration. If you create a map in the "My Maps" section, you can now invite people to collaborate or allow anyone to edit the map like in a wiki.

"The My Maps feature of Google Maps lets people create maps to share their hobbies and expertise with the world. For example, a surfing enthusiast could map out their favorite surf spots or a surfing club could plot all the best beaches in Southern California. Now imagine if all the surfers around the globe worked together, leveraging their combined knowledge to create a single map of the best surf spots worldwide, applying the power of wiki-style collaboration to cartography," suggests Google Lat-Long blog.

And if you don't feel like creating a new map from scratches, you can now import it from a KML or GeoRSS file. To find one, search in Google Maps and select the "community maps" option at the bottom of the standard search results.



Then you can invite collaborators and send them a message. The dialog is very similar to the one from Google Docs, except that you can transform a map into a wiki. This would've been very useful for the San Diego Fire Map "that tracked the spread of the fire and included information on evacuation alerts and evacuation center locations", but it's also an interesting way to share your knowledge with other people.



As an example of collaborative map, here's a map where you can add a placemark for your location and maybe something about you. Just click on "Edit", find your location on the map, right-click and choose "Add a placemark".

New Terrain Layer in Google Maps

There's a new tab in Google Maps: "terrain". The view combines street maps with visual information about terrains. Elevation data is not limited to geographic features like mountains, but it's also displayed for buildings.

The satellite view adds data from the hybrid view (street names, city names, roads), but you have the option to hide it.



{ Thanks, Rodney. }

Will GDrive Ever Launch?


This is probably the year of Google's most important product launches. Even if they're much rarer than last year, they are strategically important (personalization, universal search, machine translation, the mobile platform, social gadgets).

Wall Street Journal reports that Google plans to launch a service for storing files. Of course, we all know about GDrive, an internal Google project, and Google's goal to store store 100% of user's data. "With infinite storage, we can house all user files, including: emails, web history, pictures, bookmarks, etc and make it accessible from anywhere (any device, any platform, etc)," mentioned Google in some leaked annotations from a presentation.

But WSJ's article could mean that GDrive's launch is close. "Google is preparing a service that would let users store on its computers essentially all of the files they might keep on their personal-computer hard drives -- such as word-processing documents, digital music, video clips and images, say people familiar with the matter. The service could let users access their files via the Internet from different computers and mobile devices when they sign on with a password, and share them online with friends. It could be released as early as a few months from now, one of the people said."

The article doesn't mention the amount of free storage that will be offered, but Google will probably use the same strategy from Gmail and Picasa Web: some free storage that should be enough for most users and paid storage for everyone else.

"Google is hoping to distinguish itself from existing online storage services partly by simplifying the process for transferring and opening files. Along with a Web-based interface, Google is trying to let users upload and access files directly from their PC desktops and have the file storage behave for consumers more like another hard drive that is handy at all times, say the people familiar with the matter."

The idea of mapping the online storage as an external drive is not new and you can already do this with tools like Gmail Drive or services like .Mac or Box.net. But Google really needs an application for uploading more files at once to Google Docs or Gmail, so the GDrive uploader could be useful to add files to a shared area, directly accessible from all Google services. Now it's difficult to upload files because there are so many different Google services that let you upload different kinds of files (documents, photos, videos etc.)

"Google is hoping the new storage service will help tie together some of its other services through a single search box, says one of the people familiar with the matter. So a user might be able to conduct a single search by keywords to find his own privately stored files, regardless of whether they're accessed through Picasa, Docs or a software program running on the user's computer."

Hopefully GDrive will bring enough free storage (AOL's Xdrive offers 5 GB for free), a simple way to transfer and synchronize files, integration with Gmail, Google Docs and other Google services. If Google actually decides to launch GDrive.

{ Thanks, Jaime. }

Update: thanks to those who read the WSJ article more carefully, I changed the message of this post from "GDrive will certainly launch soon" to "GDrive could launch in a few months, but it's not very sure".

Rule-Based iGoogle Themes

While iGoogle already offers 11 themes to customize the homepage, there's no option to create your own theme. Custom iGoogle Skins is an inline gadget that lets you choose between more than 70 user-created themes (some of them are illustrated in this gallery) or create a custom theme.

An interesting new feature from the latest version of the gadget adds rules for displaying themes: you can choose to show a theme only when it rains, on a certain day of the week or if your IP matches a certain value. Google's themes are already rule-based, but you can't switch between them automatically. For example, this gadget lets you have different themes for a tab if you load iGoogle at home or at work (assuming the IP addresses are static).

Some interesting personalization rules for the feature could include changing the theme depending on your mood, your Google Talk status, your Google Calendar agenda the tab's title or the latest news.


Note: you'll have to add the gadget to every tab you want to have a custom theme.

{ Thanks, Greg. }

Add Keyword Suggestions to Google's Search Pages


If you like Google Suggest, the feature that auto-completes your queries based on Google's aggregated data, you can now add it to the standard search pages by joining the keyword suggestions experiment, one of the five experiments from the search section of Google Labs.
As you type into the search box, Google Suggest guesses what you're typing and offers suggestions in real time. This is similar to Google's "Did you mean?" feature that offers alternative spellings for your query after you search, except that it works in real time. For example, if you type "bass," Google Suggest might offer a list of refinements that include "bass fishing" or "bass guitar." Similarly, if you type in only part of a word, like "prog," Google Suggest might offer you refinements like "programming," "programming languages," "progesterone," or "progressive." You can choose one by scrolling up or down the list with the arrow keys or mouse.

Google Suggest is also available by adding &complete=1 to a Google search URL (e.g.: [Google]), in Firefox's search box and in Google Toolbar. Some Asian versions of Google show keyword suggestions by default: China, Korea, India.

This year both Ask.com and Yahoo introduced these suggestions as a built-in component of the search experience, hoping to guide users when typing a query. Yahoo's search assistant shows up as an extension of the search box if you type some letters from a word and then stop for a couple of seconds. Even if you can disable it, many people found it annoying and unnecessary. "Get rid of any of the so-called assistants. They take up space on the screen, slow down processes and insult everyone's [intelligence]." is just an example of negative feedback.


Sometimes search suggestions save you time and help you enter difficult words like deoxyribonucleic, in other cases the suggested query contains the answer to your question. But are they useful and good enough to bring them to Google's search pages?

Google's Base Products

An interesting article from last week talked about Google's growing interest for creating platforms and containers. "Hoping to become the platform for developers and users to create original content, [Google's Derek] Callow said that Google is now creating base products that would allow users and developers to build applications on top of these web platforms."


An example of base product is iGoogle that lets you add mini-web application to a web page. Google made it easy for developers to build gadgets, but it didn't manage to enable users to build their own gadgets. iGoogle Gadget Creator is a very basic tool and should be transformed into a powerful wizard that lets you add content from the web.

Another great base product is Google Maps, which provides a great framework for integrating geographical content. Developers used Google Maps API to create a lot of mash-ups and Google wanted to add these mash-ups back to Google Maps. Mapplets and personalized maps were the products that made this possible. Unlike iGoogle, it's much easier to bring your favorite content to Google Maps and this platform will generate a lot of interesting things when Google will transform personalized maps into wikis, by enabling collaborative editing.

I think we'll see many web pages created on top of Google's base products as they become great ways to gather and organize information. Here's a great story from Jess Lee, product manager at Google Maps:

On Tuesday [October 23], we saw a huge increase in traffic on Google Maps. The traffic spike was so large that our servers thought they were being DoS attacked. It turned out that the additional traffic was due to hundreds of thousands of people constantly refreshing maps about the terrible wildfires in Southern California. Several news outlets and individuals had used the My Maps feature to create maps that tracked the spread of the fire and included information on evacuation alerts and evacuation center locations. (...) What's truly amazing and surprising to me about all of this is that the most authoritative source of information on the wildfire was produced by a tiny broadcasting station like KPBS and that this information was disseminated online using consumer-facing tools like My Maps and Twitter. I would have expected a government agency or a large traditional media outlet like CNN to have been the primary source of fire maps, but a lot of them just linked to the KPBS map in their articles. In fact, Calfires.com (the official fire website maintained by the governor's office) simply embedded the KPBS map on their homepage using Google Maps' embed feature.

And here's the KPBS map.

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