The Silent Companion

New York Times has an article titled Planet Google Wants You in which contemplates the ever-growing Google ubiquity. The ending is really beautiful:

Toni Carreiro, a Web designer in San Rafael, Calif., and a self-described Google addict, said that the elegant simplicity of Google's design is a blank slate upon which she can impose her own personality: It's not there to sell you on anything, just to help you, while other sites, she said, are full of blinking ads and clutter.

"They have all this animation going," she said. "I just want my stuff. That's what Google gives you — 'me.'"

Google is not the only company that says it cares about the users, but Google is afraid that people start to hate it, so it does everything to prevent that. Google's simplicity is just one way of being friendly. Another way is giving options and not forcing users to choose things they don't want to. And if they have to make a choice, Google tries to be honest (and sometimes pay for the honesty).

Google is a silent companion that listens to you and tries to help you only when you ask for it. Others do like Bonzi Buddy: try to sell you stuff, try to make themselves useful when you don't need them, ask silly questions and make you feel you owe them. And maybe that's why Tony identify herself with Google.

Integrate Google Reader into Gmail

The new version of Google Reader looks very similar to Gmail (also the new Google Groups), so you can't help wondering if the two products are about to merge. Mihai Parparita from Google Reader doesn't offer an answer (probably because there isn't an answer yet), but he created a Greasemonkey script that adds a new link in Gmail: Feeds. The unified interface is almost flawless as a design, but Google should improve Google Reader's loading time as it loads slower than Gmail. Another thing I'd like to see is adding Google Reader's in-place message opening to Gmail, so you can read the messages faster, as the snippet is often insufficient.

Greasemonkey stuff:
Install Greasemonkey in Firefox or Trixie in IE | Add the script

Interesting Advanced Search Operators

Live Search (MSN Search) has some interesting operators, not available in Google Search. These operators were introduced last year, but not many people heard about them.

* linkfromdomain restricts your search to sites that are linked from a certain domain. If you don't add keywords after this operator, you can find some of the pages / sites linked from all the pages available on that domain.

linkfromdomain:michellemalkin.com

* linkdomain shows only the pages that link to a page from a certain domain. The link operator from Google shows all the pages that link to the homepage of a site or to a certain page, but you can't see these aggregated results. Linkdomain operator is also available in Yahoo Search.

linkdomain:michellemalkin.com

* contains should be followed by a file extension and is used to restrict the search only to pages that contain links to at least a file that has that extension.

radiohead contains:ogg

* Yahoo has a slightly different operator called feature, useful to show pages that have embedded content. The operator can have one of these values: audio (the page embeds audio files), video (the page embeds video files), javascript (the page has JavaScript code), flash (the page has embedded Flash), frame (the page uses frames), acrobat, applet, activex, form, table.

u2 feature:flash [ Yahoo ]

* prefer lets you give more weight to a keyword.

ipod prefer:review

* loc is used to restrict a search to domains from a certain country.

bistro loc:fr

So if you didn't find a reason to try Live Search or Yahoo Search, these operators might be a good reason.

Yahoo Time Capsule

From October 10 until November 8, Yahoo users can contribute to an amazing project called Yahoo Time Capsule by submitting photos, writings, videos, audio that define your world today.

"The Time Capsule (...) is organized around ten themes, chosen to illuminate different corners of the human experience. The ten themes are: Love, Sorrow, Anger, Faith, Beauty, Fun, Past, Hope, Now, and You. Each theme harbors an open-ended question: What do you love? What makes you sad? What makes you angry? What do you believe in? What’s beautiful? What’s fun? What do you remember? What is your wish? Describe your world. Who are you? People respond to these questions in five simple ways – with words, pictures, videos, sounds, and drawings."

So if you have something special to share with the future, a message in a bottle, a prediction, a list of important things for you, send it to the time capsule. The site is almost an work of art, and if you don't send anything, exploring the site will make your day.

The man behind this project is Jonathan Harris, a very talented Internet artist.

Google Office Suite to Have an API

Although Google Docs & Spreadsheets is far from a finished product, Google already thinks about developers and intends to release an API that will increase the value of the tools.

"We definitely want to build out APIs, especially for the spreadsheets side, as spreadsheets are more data-oriented, but maybe also for he word processor. People will be able to do mashups with our tools for other things, and not be stuck behind our dev cycle for everything they want. If I've already got data somewhere you can't really rely on manual cut-and-paste to make it collaborative. Imaging pulling data from any application you've already got in use... you get that data over to the hosted app, make it collaborative, then bring it back... that's what we'd like to enable at some point," said Google product manager, Jonathan Rochelle.

The API could also enable users to synchronize data and use the information from other web applications.

Related:
Google launches Google Docs & Spreadsheets

Advanced Search in Google Video

If you want to refine you queries in Google Video without fiddling with special operators, you can use the advanced search. You have less features than for Google Search and they are slightly different. You can restrict the search to free videos, to certain genres, there are options for the duration of the video and the number of results.

All of these options were previously available, but you had to use undocumented operators like genre or is:free. I still don't understand why you can't sort the results by the number of views, or the number of comments and why you can't combine two or more labels in a query.

Google Maps Available for Palm Treo

Google launched the mobile version of Google Maps for Palm Treo. For the moment, it only works for Palm devices with Palm OS 5 and above offered by Cingular and Sprint in the US.

Google Maps for Treo supports all the features available in the other mobile versions: satellite imagery, driving directions, real-time trafic, local search.

"Since we first launched Google Maps for mobile devices, we've adapted it to more phones and languages and added features like traffic info. And as of today, the new Palm Treo version answers our top request from users. It's been months in the making, but I think you'll find it worth the wait. We think this is the fastest, slickest version yet, with draggable maps and translucent pop-up balloons that don't hide the map," explains the Google Blog.

Maps are one of the most useful mobile applications created by Google and could evolve into many directions, including a real-time travel guide.

Google Teacher Academy

Google wants to teach teachers how to use Google products. Google for Educators showcases some of the most important services and their uses in education. But the most important detail is a new program called Google Teacher Academy.

"The Google Teacher Academy is a pilot program designed to help K-12 educators get the most from innovative technologies. The Academy is a one-day experience at Google's Mountain View Headquarters where participants get hands-on experience with Google products and other technologies, receive instructional resources to share with colleagues, and share innovative instructional strategies with other local educators. Upon completion, Academy participants will become Google Certified Teachers."

Applications are due on October 22, 2006 and are available only for K-12 educators working in Northern California. As usually, the program is still an experiment.

Online Office Goes Mainstream

I heard the news about Google Docs & Spreadsheets on my favorite radio station. And the announcers seemed pretty enthusiastic about this. Their arguments were easy to digest: there is finally a real competition for Microsoft in the Office arena, you can edit your documents from anywhere and the tools are free.

Google has a big opportunity to take online office suites to the mainstream. Maybe they don't have the best features, but they are the most scalable. And this the winning point if you want to bring Office to the web.

Edit Captions in Picasa Web Albums

Picasa Web Albums lets you edit the captions of your uploaded photos. You can do that one photo at a time, or using a single page. Picasa Web Albums also dropped the "test" from its logo, but it wasn't yet replaced with beta.

And if you weren't yet aware of that, you can embed photos into your site by clicking on "Embed in blog/MySpace" link. Unfortunately, you'll embed only a thumbnail, but if you're smart enough you'll manage to customize the thumbnail. (Hint: replace s288 from the image URL with s576 or s followed by some multiple of 144.)

Google Loves Mac

Or so they say. The new Google Mac blog promises to be the place where you can "keep up with the latest about everything Google is doing to support Mac users". There's also a page that features all Google software available for Mac.

The mere fact that Google decided to start a blog for Mac means there will be a lot of things to announce in this area.

Google Docs & Spreadsheets

The obvious has happened. Writely and Google Spreadsheets have merged and the new products is named, not Google Office, but Google Docs & Spreadsheets. The strange name will probably be modified, as Google Docs & Spreadsheets & Presentations is just not a catchy name.

The good news for those who hated Writely's interface is that the unified interface is similar to Google Spreadsheets'.

Also now you can let collaborators invite other people. "The people whom you've invited can now add other collaborators to that spreadsheet. You can decide whether you want this capability turned on for each spreadsheet individually - the default for new spreadsheets is to allow collaborators to add other collaborators."

The next logical move would be to add a new web application for presentations and to integrate all these applications with Gmail, Google Calendar and Picasa Web, so they can share attachments, photos and documents. Some pieces of the puzzle are still missing, but Google can't deny they don't want to build Google Office.

Use Google Reader in Opera

If you want to use Google Reader in Opera, you'll notice the interface is not usable. This post will help you fix Google Reader.

Free Music Videos in Google Video

Google signed agreements with Sony BMG and Warner Music Group and will include a large collection of music videos in Google Video.

"Starting this month, users can watch thousands of videos from SONY BMG MUSIC ENTERTAINMENT on Google Video. In the coming months, users will also be able to access content from SONY BMG MUSIC ENTERTAINMENT artists through Google's partner websites in its AdSense network."

"Starting this month, users in the U.S. can watch any of the thousands of music videos, artist interviews, behind-the-scenes footage and other artist-related content from WMG on Google Video. In the coming months, users can also access audio-visual content from WMG through Google's partner websites in its AdSense network. In addition, Google will develop technology that, when implemented, will enable users to include certain content from companies such as Warner Music Group in the videos they create and upload to Google Video."

Music videos will be ad-supported or available for purchase. It's interesting to see what this means: "Google will develop technology that, when implemented, will enable users to include certain content from companies such as Warner Music Group". Maybe lip sync videos or video mashups will be covered by this agreement and will be legal.

Google to Acquire YouTube?

PC World reports that Google is about to acquire YouTube for $1.6 billion. Although this is just a rumour, sources close to YouTube say the deal is in the final stages.

It will be interesting to see how YouTube will change and if Google Video continues to exist after the deal.

In September, YouTube had a market share of 46 percent in the U.S., while Google Video had only 11 percent, so the deal will bring a lot of new users to Google and a revenue source to YouTube.

Update: Now it's official. "Google announced today that it has agreed to acquire YouTube, the consumer media company for people to watch and share original videos through a Web experience, for $1.65 billion in a stock-for-stock transaction. Following the acquisition, YouTube will operate independently to preserve its successful brand and passionate community."