Gmail Gadget for Google Desktop

Google Desktop's integration with Gmail has always been slow and unreliable: Google Desktop could fetch and index the messages from a Gmail account, but this could take days. The new Gmail gadget for Google Desktop doesn't add your messages to the index, but it's a small version of Gmail's interface that sits in the sidebar. You can read your mail, send replies, star messages, perform searches directly from the gadget.


Here are some potential uses for the gadget:
* check your inbox from a fast-loading simplified interface
* find the email address of a contact: compose a message and use Gmail's auto-complete feature to obtain the address
* the fastest way to search Gmail: click on the Search option or type "/" and then enter your query
* preview your message while still viewing the list of messages, a feature that's not available in the standard interface
* add multiple instances of the gadget for different Gmail accounts (the gadgets works with Google Apps accounts too).

The gadget can be installed from this page and it's worth mentioning that it doesn't support notifications yet.

Toolbar, Gears, Chrome

Launched in December 2000, Google Toolbar started as a way to add features that were missing from Internet Explorer. Users had to visit Google's homepage to perform a search and the toolbar improved the experience by adding a search box to the browser. In the next versions, the toolbar added query suggestions, a pop-up blocker, a spell checker and other features that later became part of most modern browsers.

In May 2007, Google launched a plug-in that made browsers more powerful by integrating advanced features like offline storage, local database, location services. Google Gears added invisible features that allowed web applications to become more responsive and to work even offline.

The trouble with Google Toolbar and Gears was that users had to install them separately, the browser integration wasn't very smooth and there were many other things that could improve web browsing, but can't be added using a plug-in. A better JavaScript engine, a more reliable browser that crashed less, a fast and simple interface - it's hard to make all these things happen without building a new browser. If Google Toolbar made it easier to search using Google, Chrome encourages to use the web more because the browser loads instantly, you can find web pages faster and you spend less time waiting for pages to load.

A press release from 2000 explained that "Google exists to provide the world's best Internet search experience. Google accomplishes this for millions of users daily by delivering a powerful, fast, and easy way to find the most relevant information available." Google changed the scope of the mission from improving the way you search the web to improving the way you experience the web. A better browser, along with a faster Internet connection, great web applications and an open environment that encourages innovation bring more Internet users and, as a consequence, more Google users.

Picasa Web Albums Translates Comments

Believe it or not, Picasa Web Albums is a big success outside US and, since the interface is available in 38 languages, many people post comments in their native languages. Click on a featured photo and you'll certainly see at least a comment written in Spanish, Italian, Chinese, French or other language.

Google's photo-sharing service started to use Google Translate API to automatically translate comments in your interface's language. The translation is displayed below the original comment.


Of course, the translation is not perfect and Google didn't do a good job at properly disclosing that it's an automatic translation (there's a "Powered by Google Translate" tooltip when you hover over the translation). This is yet another integration of Google Translate in Google's services, after translating Google Reader subscriptions and YouTube's search results. What other services would you like to integrate machine translation?

Google Friend Connect, Publicly Available

Google Friend Connect, the service that lets you add social features to a site without writing any code, is now available to everyone. Users don't need to setup a special account for a new site: they can log in using an existing account from Google, Yahoo, AOL or using an OpenID. They can also import a profile and the list of friends from a social network, but the only options are Google Talk, orkut and LinkedIn.

Google provides some basic gadgets that allow users to interact with a site: the members gadget that lists some of the people who joined the site, the wall gadget that lets you post general comments about the site and the review gadget, which associates the comments with an item from site (a blog post, a video). Friend Connect also supports OpenSocial gadgets, but there's no official directory of gadgets.

Google's new service is not yet a good way to build a community because it doesn't integrate with a site. You can only customize the appearance of a gadget, but you can't integrate your existing commenting system with Friend Connect or gain access to in-depth stats about your members.

You need to upload two files for RPC relay and canvas view, which is not always possible if you use a hosted blog service. Fortunately, Blogger already has the two files, so it's even easier to setup Friend Connect.

I added the members gadget and the wall, where you can post comments and links to YouTube videos:

Here's a short video that explains how to use Friend Connect:

Google's Tighter Cost Controls

Wall Street Journal has a very interesting article that explains many recent Google decisions: from closing Lively to monetizing Google Finance.

"For much of its 10-year history, Google spent money at a pace that was the marvel of Silicon Valley. It hired by the thousands and dished out generous perks, including three free meals a day, free doctors, ski trips and laundry facilities, and subsidized personal trainers. It let engineers spend 20% of their time pursuing pet projects."


But Google's revenue growth has slowed down, the stock is now at less than $300 and Google is not invulnerable to the economy crisis. That means Google must act more responsibly and start to find more safe bets. Google says that it wants to "prioritize our resources and focus more on our core search, ads and apps business." That's the official explanation for closing Lively and for ending the agreement with Yahoo for providing search ads.

"We have to behave as though we don't know" what's going to happen, says Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt. The company will curtail the "dark matter," he says, projects that "haven't really caught on" and "aren't really that exciting." He says the company is "not going to give" an engineer 20 people to work with on certain experimental projects anymore. "When the cycle comes back," he says, "we will be able to fund his brilliant vision."

Google will encourage less experimentation, we'll see fewer projects that aren't related to Google's main services and it's less likely than ever to see GDrive, the online storage service that requires a lot of resources. The top priorities seem to be display ads, mobile ads and Google Apps, projects that could increase Google's revenues.

It's disappointing to see that Google, an engineering-driven company that used to be focused on building great products that don't necessarily bring money, is now forced to changed its goals and become more profit-driven. Hopefully, this is not the end of Google as we know it.

Here are some interesting extract from the IPO letter sent by Google's founders to investors in 2004:

Our goal is to develop services that significantly improve the lives of as many people as possible. In pursuing this goal, we may do things that we believe have a positive impact on the world, even if the near term financial returns are not obvious. For example, we make our services as widely available as we can by supporting over 90 languages and by providing most services for free. (...) Many companies are under pressure to keep their earnings in line with analysts' forecasts. Therefore, they often accept smaller, predictable earnings rather than larger and less predictable returns. Sergey and I feel this is harmful, and we intend to steer in the opposite direction. (...) Our long term focus does have risks. Markets may have trouble evaluating long term value, thus potentially reducing the value of our company. Our long term focus may simply be the wrong business strategy. Competitors may be rewarded for short term tactics and grow stronger as a result.

Google has had adequate cash to fund our business and has generated additional cash through operations. This gives us the flexibility to weather costs, benefit from opportunities and optimize our long term earnings. For example, in our ads system we make many improvements that affect revenue in both directions. These are in areas like end user relevance and satisfaction, advertiser satisfaction, partner needs and targeting technology. We release improvements immediately rather than delaying them, even though delay might give "smoother" financial results. You have our commitment to execute quickly to achieve long term value rather than making the quarters more predictable. (...)

We will not shy away from high-risk, high-reward projects because of short term earnings pressure. Some of our past bets have gone extraordinarily well, and others have not. Because we recognize the pursuit of such projects as the key to our long term success, we will continue to seek them out. For example, we would fund projects that have a 10% chance of earning a billion dollars over the long term. Do not be surprised if we place smaller bets in areas that seem very speculative or even strange when compared to our current businesses.

Private Albums in Picasa Web

Picasa Web Albums added a new option that makes your albums truly private. If you edit an album's properties and select "Require sign-in to view", only the people you are explicitly sharing the album can see it.

"Select the 'Require sign-in to view' option to set the highest level of privacy for your album -- you specify who has permission to view it, and visitors must sign in to their Google Account to verify their identity. Anyone not included on the album's 'Shared with' access list will be unable to view the album," details the help page.


The access list is displayed in the album's sidebar and you can add or remove people from that list at any time. The only problem is that your friends need to have Google accounts to validate their identity and access the album.

Until now the only alternative to making the album public was to make it unlisted, but the album still had a web address that allowed anyone who knew it to view your album. If you try to view an album that has the new visibility option enabled, you'll get this error message:


Since you now have three levels of visibility and it's difficult to remember which albums are unlisted or private, Picasa Web Albums' homepage displays the access setting next to each album using an icon.


{ Thanks, Michael. }

YouTube Changes

There are many changes going on at YouTube and many of them aren't likely to improve user experience. Let's start with the search box that is displayed before playing a video in an embedded player. It was a great feature when it was displayed at the end of a video, but now you'll see it before playing the video and every time you pause it.

There's a parameter that can be added to your embedded videos if you don't want to display the search box: edit the code and add &showsearch=0 after http://www.youtube.com/v/VIDEOID&hl=en&fs=1.


YouTube updated the header and there's a new overlay that shows the duration of a video over the thumbnail. YouTube's blog says that the thumbnails will no longer be selected from the 25/50/75 points of the video's index, but they'll be selected algorithmically to minimize the impact of manipulative thumbnails.


Another change, which caused considerable uproar, is demoting videos that include suggestive content and profanity. "Videos that are considered sexually suggestive, or that contain profanity, will be algorithmically demoted on our 'Most Viewed,' 'Top Favorited,' and other browse pages. The classification of these types of videos is based on a number of factors, including video content and descriptions." Probably YouTube didn't like that the list of popular videos usually looked like this (NSFW). Users didn't understand YouTube's goal and they started to call the change "censorship".

"Algorithmically demoted... That's a nice way to make a video that is top favorited or most viewed not be in that category anymore for no apparent reasons. Angry parents and other narrow-minded people shouldn't get through with putting the pressure on youtube. Where's the freedom of saying or expressing what you want?," commented dirtbiker100890. "One of the main reasons I watch videos on youtube is because people have been able to say what ever they want, for the most part. If the youtube staff starts censoring everything then I won't have much of a reason to come here anymore," thinks GeneralCrazyIvan.

YouTube shouldn't demote a video because it includes suggestive content or profanity, but only if it uses misleading thumbnails or descriptions to artificially increase popularity. YouTube could include a preference that filters suggestive content and profanity, so the videos will be excluded from search results and the list of popular videos.

"Videos featuring sexually explicit content like real sex acts are not allowed. Other content like nudity and dramatized or implied sexual conduct may be considered sexually suggestive depending on whether or not it is intended or designed to arouse viewers," explains a help page.

From now on, videos that include suggestive content will be filtered from the lists of popular videos and they'll be age-restricted, so you'll have to confirm your age before viewing them.

Google Blog Search No Longer Indexes Feeds

Vanessa Fox reports that Google's blog search engine changed the way it indexes blog posts. Until now, Google Blog Search only indexed feeds, so the results weren't very good for sites that offered partial feeds. The site started to offer a more comprehensive search by indexing the entire content of the page, including comments, navigation links and blogrolls.

"We have changed the way we index blog posts to include the full content of the page. We've had occasional complaints about the use of the feed content, particularly the problem with partial feeds. The indexing change has improved the results for a lot of queries, both because we have the full content of the page and because we extract links that are missing from the feeds. The downside of this change is that we see more results that match only the blogroll and other parts of the page that are common to all of a blog's posts," explains Jeremy Hylton. He says that the algorithm will be improved to exclude "the content that isn't really part of the post" to make the results more useful.

Here's an example of a comment from a Google OS post indexed by Google Blog Search:


Tip: if you want to find recent blog posts, don't sort the results by date. Just select "last 12 hours" or "last day" from the sidebar. This way, you'll get relevant results and you'll minimize the number of splogs (spam blogs) in the list of search results.

On Google Chrome's Future Support for Extensions

When Google Chrome was launched, many people wondered why there's no support for Google Toolbar or for extensions that are available for Firefox. After fixing the glaring bugs reported by users, improving bookmark management, adding autocomplete and starting to work on Mac and Linux versions, the next step is to open the browser to developers.

Google published a document that details how extensions will work in Google Chrome. "Chromium can't be everything to all people. People use web browsers in a variety of environments and for a wide variety of jobs. Personal tastes and needs vary widely from one user to the next. The feature needs of one person often conflict directly with those of another. Further, one of the design goals of Chromium is to have a minimal light-weight user interface, which itself conflicts with adding lots of features."

The extension development should be similar to developing web pages, the browser should include support for silent autoupdate, extensions should not be able to crash the browser process and they should be run in sandboxed processes. An interesting side-effect would be that you won't have to restart the browser after installing an extension, like in Firefox.

Google lists some extensions that should work in Chrome: bookmarking tools like a toolbar for Delicious, content filtering extensions like Adblock (sic!), download managers like DownThemAll and other popular extensions that are available for Firefox.

"We should start by building the infrastructure for an extension system that can support different types of extensibility. The system should be able to support an open-ended list of APIs over time, such as toolbars, sidebars, content scripts (for Greasemonkey-like functionality), and content filtering (for parental filters, malware filters, or adblock-like functionality). Some APIs will require privileges that must be granted, such as access to the history database or access to mail.google.com."

In the end, we should see an extension gallery hosted by Google that will initially include a list of popular Firefox extensions. Chrome won't support XUL, so the extensions aren't going to be ported automatically. The latest Chromium buils already include an initial Greasemonkey implementation, so there's one less extension to build.

{ via Webware }

Find Similar Images Using Live Search

Microsoft's image search engine added another feature that uses image analysis: for each result, you can find similar images. The related images have nothing to do with are connected to the original query, so Live Search restricts the results to images similar to your selection.

"With Live Search, you can now use images, rather than additional keyword queries, to refine a search and discover more content," explains Live Search's blog.


The next obvious step would be to upload an image and find other similar images on the web. TinEye finds different versions of an image, but the scope of the results should be more encompassing.