orkut Mobile

orkut, Google's social network, added a lot of features in the past year to be more competitive and to become more popular outside Brazil and India. Google Trends shows that the interest for orkut is declining, but it's likely that some people no longer search for "orkut" since Google India and Google Brazil added the service to the navigational bar in December 2007. orkut has around 120 million users, up from 50 million users in April 2007, but Brazil (53.99% of orkut users) and India (16.91%) continue to be the countries where orkut is popular, followed by the US (15.13%).

orkut was one of the few Google services that didn't have a mobile interface, but now you can access orkut mobile at m.orkut.com. The simplified interface shows the most recent scraps, updates from your friends, a link to your profile and a search box for orkut users. The mobile interface lets you write scraps, get birthday reminders and respond to friend requests. You can also use shortcuts to access the most important sections of the page.


There's also a new version of orkut for low bandwidth that displays less pictures. orkut will automatically switch to this new version depending on your connection, but you can opt to use it in the settings.

{ Thank you, Darnell Clayton. }

Collaborate on To-Do Lists and Notes in iGoogle

iGoogle added a new feature that lets you share gadgets with your contacts and allow them to edit the content from your gadgets. For example, if you share the To-Do list gadget with your friends or co-workers, they'll receive an invitation to add the gadget to their iGoogle pages and every time someone makes a change it will be propagated to all the instances of your shared gadget.


For now, the list of collaborative gadgets includes: to-do lists, notebooks, crossword puzzles, birthday reminders, but we'll see more interesting ideas as gadget developers can easily add this new feature.

"It's now possible for multiple instances of a gadget - on the home pages of different users - to access the same user-preference data, the part of the gadget state that is hosted by iGoogle. (...) It's a simple sharing model - last write wins, and a reload is required to see changes made by others."

To share a gadget, click on the small arrow from the title bar and select "Share this gadget". For most gadgets, you can invite your contacts to use them and optionally send your settings, but collaborative gadgets have a different dialog:


{ via Google Blog }

Google Notebook Exposes More Exporting Options

Google Notebook updated the editing toolbar and to make it look more consistent with Google Docs. There are also new exporting options:

* you can export to HTML any notebook, not just public notebooks

* notebooks that include addresses can be visualized on a map and converted into a personalized map

* public notebooks already had feeds, but it's much easier to subscribe to the feeds by clicking on "export as RSS" in the Tools menu (ironically, Google uses the Atom format). This should be useful to track the changes in collaborative notebooks.


Google Notebook integrates with a lot of Google services: you can find a "Note this" option next to Google's search results, there's an option to import some text from public domain books in Google Book Search, Google Bookmarks are added to a special notebook, you can export a notebook into Google Docs to create a document or to save it as PDF, the latest version of Google Toolbar for IE integrates with Notebook, there's an iGoogle gadget and a cool integration with Blogger thanks to the hAtom microformat. Google Notebook is actually a web clipboard, a bridge between web applications and I expect to see options to identify structured content, bookmark videos, events, contact details, code snippets and more.

{ Thanks, AniMatrix. }

Create YouTube Playlists Dynamically

YouTube Fast Search is a cool web application that uses YouTube's API to create a way to both play videos and search for new videos at the same time. You can build a playlist from search results and add new videos to the playlist without interrupting it. The interface is similar to the one from MSN Video, but you can also edit the playlist and enlarge the video. Too bad that there's no option to save the playlist to your YouTube account or to import an existing playlist.


YouTube has the option to add videos from search results to a Quicklist and then play all the videos from the list, but you need to switch from the view mode to the search mode.

{ via Google Code }

Viewfinder - Integrate Photos in a 3D World Model

Viewfinder is an interesting technology that wants to bring photos to a software like Google Earth and display them as part of the satellite imagery.

"Geotagged photos, geographically indexed on a world map, either manually or via GPS, are an increasingly popular phenomenon. However, current implementations treat maps, and particularly 3D models, in fundamentally different modalities than photographs. The result is that photos tend to hover like playing cards, seemingly suspended over the world, remaining 2D objects in a 3D environment, and negating the transformative experience that we think should occur when combining images and a 3D world. (...) It's possible to place a photo in a 3D model in such a way that it appears seamlessly aligned with the model."

Google has already bought Panoramio, a Spanish photo sharing site that selected around 3 million geotagged photos to be added in a Google Earth layer. In October last year, Flickr had more than 42 million geotagged photos. All these photos could be used to compose a more accurate representation of the world. Combining this with projects such as Microsoft's PhotoSynth should result in new exciting ways to explore the world.


{ via BoingBoing }

Update: More about Viewfinder in this Google techtalk.

User Interface Updates at YouTube

YouTube updated the design of its video watch pages by adding tabs for actions and showing statistics in a new container. The "Favorite" tab is the only one connected to an immediate action and it should be removed, while the favorite videos could be generated based on ratings. Hunter Walk, product manager at YouTube, says that the sharing options "are now contextual to the logged in user, so for example, if you use Digg a lot but not Facebook, Digg will be elevated to a persistent top-level display instead of Facebook".

The search results page has also been updated and the option to sort results by popularity is back. To restrict your search to one or more categories or to a certain language, check the new advanced search.

YouTube's personalized homepage lets you reorder the sections so you can place the featured videos at the top, but it's still less usable than the classic YouTube homepage.

Yahoo Tests Google's Search Ads

{ Image licensed as Creative Commons by Patrick Woodward. }

In what may be the beginning of a new partnership, Yahoo announced that it will display Google ads next to its search results in a limited experiment. "The test will apply only to traffic from yahoo.com in the U.S. and will not include Yahoo!'s extended network of affiliate or premium publisher partners. The test is expected to last up to two weeks and will be limited to no more than 3% of Yahoo! search queries."

Yahoo explores new ways to defend itself against Microsoft's assault. "While there has been some limited interaction between management of our two companies, there has been no meaningful negotiation to conclude an agreement. We understand that you have been meeting to consider and assess your alternatives, including alternative transactions with others in the industry, but we've seen no indication that you have authorized Yahoo! management to negotiate with Microsoft." - an extract from a letter sent by Microsoft to Yahoo's Board last week.

While switching to Google's search ads means admitting the defeat, Yahoo could use this strategy temporarily. Yahoo has a lot of interesting projects in the mobile space, in search and communication, so the future looks better without Microsoft, a company with a different culture.

"If this test — potentially within the three-week window Microsoft set up to launch a proxy fight — pans out and Yahoo also manages to come through with a first-quarter report on Apr. 22 that looks stronger than the current low expectations of analysts, suddenly Yahoo will have some leverage it didn't have before. If the quarter tanks, though, advantage goes back to Microsoft," anticipates Business Week.

Update: Some interesting new developments. WSJ reports that "Yahoo Inc. and Time Warner Inc.'s AOL are closing in on a deal to combine their Internet operations". Google already provides search ads for AOL, so Yahoo's test with Google ads is just "a way for Google to test how well Yahoo monetizes", to quote Danny Sullivan.

Backup Your iGoogle Page

iGoogle, previously known as Google's personalized homepage, offers two options to backup your gadgets and feeds at the bottom of the settings page.


There's an option to backup the iGoogle page on Google's servers. While this may seem pointless, it's useful to backup your page before adding gadgets that might create problems.

The second option is to download an XML file that includes all the tabs, layouts and themes, the feeds, gadgets and their settings. The XML file can be imported in any iGoogle page, so this is a good way to migrate the page to a different Google account. You can also download the XML file to change the settings in a text editor and then upload the new version.


{ via Blogoscoped Forum }

Export Google Presentations to PowerPoint

Google Presentations (or Presently) finally added a feature that prevented most people from using it: exporting the presentations to a format that could be imported in Microsoft Office or OpenOffice. Now you can save your presentations as PPT and open them in your favorite desktop applications when you're offline or send them to other people. You can still export the presentations as PDF, a great format for printing.


Here's the list of formats supported by the three Google Docs applications:

	Writely (documents)	Trix (spreadsheets)	Presently (presentations)
Microsoft Office formats	import, export	import, export	import, export
OpenDocument	import, export	import, export	---
PDF	export	export	export
RTF	import, export	---	---
HTML	import, export	export	---
TXT	import, export	import, export	export

Some other features that should be available soon in Presently: inserting tables, adding YouTube videos and viewing presentations offline.

Advanced Search and Custom Views in Google Docs

Google Docs added an option to perform advanced searches. You can now restrict your search to the file's name or its content, select the sharing type, search only inside a folder or only for files modified in the past week. The interface is not very intuitive and it's very similar to Gmail's advanced search. Fortunately, you can save the search and create a new view that's accessible from the sidebar or from the small drop-down placed next to the search box.

The saved searches are actually custom views that could help you find documents faster. Create custom views for published documents, documents that are shared with you, starred spreadsheets or for documents last opened in the past 7 days.



Custom views could be a great addition to Gmail, while Google Docs lacks the powerful operators from Gmail. The list view from Google Docs looks more and more like a file explorer and should be used for any kind of files, not just for documents, spreadsheets and presentations.

Google App Engine: Write Your Own Google Apps

Google's applications could be useful and interesting, but they are just a small fraction from all the applications you may need. That's probably the reason why Google decided to open its infrastructure to third-party applications and released Google App Engine.

Google App Engine gives you access to the same building blocks that Google uses for its own applications, making it easier to build an application that runs reliably, even under heavy load and with large amounts of data. The development environment includes the following features:

* Dynamic webserving, with full support of common web technologies
* Persistent storage (powered by Bigtable and GFS with queries, sorting, and transactions)
* Automatic scaling and load balancing
* Google APIs for authenticating users and sending email
* Fully featured local development environment

For now, there are a lot of limitations: only the first 10,000 users who register at http://appengine.google.com/ will be able to test the new service, you need to write your applications in Python (more languages will come) and the quotas are enough only for small to medium projects. "During this preview period, applications are limited to 500MB of storage, 200M megacycles of CPU per day, and 10GB bandwidth per day. We expect most applications will be able to serve around 5 million pageviews per month. In the future, these limited quotas will remain free, and developers will be able to purchase additional resources as needed." The limitations are reasonable if you think this is only a preview release and Google wants to get feedback from developers before the official launch.


The applications can be run locally using a SDK provided by Google or uploaded to a subdomain of appspot.com or to your own site. There's already a gallery of applications that includes a chat room for teams, a movie quote site, a Python shell and more.


Google previously released Mashup Editor, "an AJAX development framework and a set of tools that enable developers to quickly and easily create simple web applications and mashups", but the new App Engine lets you build more complex applications. Kevin Gibbs explained more about Google's intentions at Google App Engine Campfire One.

Google App Engine provides an infrastructure for running web apps. By that, I mean that we're focused, specifically on web applications: making them easy to run, easy to deploy, and easy to scale. App Engine is different than a lot of other things out there: App Engine is not a grid computing solution-- we don't run arbitrary compute jobs. We also don't give you a raw virtual machine. Instead, we provide a way for you to package up your code, specify how you want it to run in response to requests, and then we run and serve it for you. You don't reserve resources, or machines, or RAM or a number of CPUs, or anything like that. It's a fluid system, that runs your code in response to load and demand. (...)

App Engine is a complete system. We provide ways to run your code, serve your static content, a database, request and application logs, methods to push new releases of your code, and more. Ultimately, we are trying to provide a simpler alternative to the traditional LAMP stack. (...) Finally, the other key part of App Engine is that we're providing you access to Google's infrastructure. The APIs and systems we are providing to you are built off of the same distributed, scalable infrastructure we use to power Google's other applications, like Google Accounts, GFS, and Bigtable. We're giving you access to those powerful building blocks, and giving you the ability to write real code and real apps that make use of them.

Usually, if you lower the entry barriers for a system, people will use it more often and the probability of building something great increases. Google wants to reduce the complexities of creating web applications and give developers the opportunity to spend more time writing code and less time building the infrastructure and scaling the application. The same way Amazon Web Services reduced the costs of running a start-up, Google App Engine could accelerate innovation by letting developers focus on what's important.


Google App Engine - http://appengine.google.com
Documentation - http://code.google.com/appengine
Featured applications - http://appgallery.appspot.com

Google Earth Brings You the News

Google Earth added a very interesting layer that shows news from the New York Times that mention a certain place. Search for an address and you should see some small New York Times logos that hide previews from recent news articles.

Google LatLong Blog mentions that the layer is updated every 15 minutes, so it's probably the most up-to-date layer from Google Earth. "The New York Times offers geo-coded news, and Google Earth offers the platform for reading that news in a 3D browser. This is the first time we've endeavored to show news updated in real time, and we're very excited to work with this first-class publication to bring you the latest and greatest news."

It would be a great idea to port this layer to Google Maps and show the latest news from every place of the world.

Track the Olympic Torch Relay

"An ongoing tradition from 766 B.C. has been to ignite the torch at the ancient site in Olympia, Greece. From March 24th until the start of August, the Torch Relay will travel across Greece, into Beijing, and then around the world through cities, oceans, and even the world’s highest mountain, Mt. Qomolangma (Mt. Everest). The relay's purpose is to spread the Olympic spirit as well as the message of peace and friendship, and also ignite the passion of the people around the world."

The Torch Relay can be followed using Google Maps and Google Earth. Google uses this opportunity to show that maps are valuable to track events and see the big picture, but it would've been nice to also see photos, videos and news related to this event. It's so easy to mix content from different sites and create something valuable like the iGoogle page for the Rugby World Cup or the page for Australia's Federal Election. The pages could also be used to attract more content: YouTube video responses, contributions on personalized maps, blog posts.

List of Web Applications That Use Google Gears

After naming Google Gears the most innovative product of 2007, PC World is disappointed that very few important applications use Google's technology. Gears is still an early product, but most of the news articles that mention it talk about making web applications available offline, even if Google Gears is much more than that. An important point from PC World's article is that Google doesn't show a list of applications that use Gears before installing the plug-in, so users don't have too many reasons to try it. Here's a list of some important applications that use Google Gears:

* Google Reader
- feed reader from Google
- the Gears integration was added in May 2007
- it lets you read the most recent 2000 posts offline, without having access to images and enclosures. You can also star posts or tag them.

* Remember the Milk
- task management application
- the second application Gears-enabled, six days after Google Reader
- most of the functionality is available offline. "Not only can you access your lists, but you can add new tasks and notes, edit existing tasks (complete, postpone, prioritise, tag, and change due dates to your heart's content), use your own personal tasks search engine, create new Smart Lists, and more."

* Zoho Writer
- online word processor
- supports Gears since August 2007, with an important update in November and Windows Mobile support since March 2008
- a number of recent documents can be viewed and edited offline

* PassPack
- online password manager
- launch date: September 2007
- "With the Offline Version, you can download your data from your PassPack account, then access and manage it whenever you wish. This is not a read only version, you are free to make changes and save them locally. To synchronize your online and offline accounts, use the backup and restore functions."

* MindMeister
- online mind mapping
- launch date: November 2007
- "The MindMeister Offline Mode allows users to work on their mind maps even when they're offline, i.e. not connected to the Internet. All changes will be saved locally and synchronized back into your MindMeister account the next time you go online," explains a help page.

* Buxfer
- personal finance manager
- the Gears support was added in January 2008 and was extended to Windows Mobile in March
- the application has the option to store the authentication information offline. "You will have the convenience of not needing to login into your financial institution repeatedly, as well as the peace of mind that your private information is secure and completely under your control!"

* Autodesk Labs Project Draw
- create diagrams online
- launch date: January 2008
- the application can run in the offline mode and synch files later when you reconnect

* Google Docs
- online word processor
- experimental launch for a small percent of users - March 2008
- you can view and edit documents offline

* Picasa Web Albums Mobile
- photo sharing service
- offline support for Windows Mobile 6 touchscreen devices, April 2008
- you can view photo albums offline

* Paymo
- time tracker
- Gears-enabled from April 2008
- Google Gears added the "ability to work offline and sync the data with the Paymo server once an internet connection is available"

* MySpace
- social network
- the Gears integration was launched on May 29
- Google Gears allows users to search and sort their messages locally as MySpace considered it was "time consuming and cost-prohibitive to add indexes on the server".

* Wordpress.com
- hosted blogging service
- Gears enabled from July 2008
- "On WordPress.com it is used to store all images and other web page components from the admin area to the user's PC, speeding up access and reducing unnecessary web traffic. The speed increase is most noticeable when Internet is slow or on high latency and makes everybody's blogging experience more enjoyable."

Upload Files from Your Mobile Phone Using Opera Mini

Opera Mini, one of the most popular mobile browser, has released a new version which brings a lot of useful features.

Now it's faster to go to previously visited web pages because you don't have to type the full address: Opera Mini's auto-complete shows a list of suggestions when you type the first characters, like most desktop browsers. The new address bar can also be accessed while visiting a web page and it can be used to search the web. Opera Mini added an option to search inside a page so you don't waste precious time trying to find a certain section in the current page.

If Gmail's mobile application doesn't let you add attachments, Opera Mini 4.1 is there to help. You can now upload photos, videos and documents from your mobile phone to Gmail, Flickr or any other site. When you clicked on a link to a file that couldn't be handled by Opera Mini, the browser wasn't able to download it to your phone. Now you can download files and save web pages to view them offline. To use this features, your Java installation needs to include JSR-75, "an optional package which allows Opera Mini to access the file system on your phone".

Opera also tests some signed versions of the browser that let you change the permission settings so you are not constantly harassed by dialogs that ask your permission before reading from the memory or connecting to the Internet. Opera Mini's blog has more details about the signed versions.

The software is still in beta, but it should work on any mobile phone that supports Java applications. Opera Mini only has 152 KB because most of the processing is done on Opera's servers, which convert web pages into a simplified format that can be displayed by the application.