YouTube tests a new homepage that is customizable and centered on your activities. Instead of displaying the same content for all YouTube users, the new homepage looks different, depending on your preferences and your activities. Here's what's new:
* recommended videos, a feature that relies on your previous activity: favorite videos, subscribed channels * latest from your subscriptions: 12 videos from 3 of your subscribed channels * friend activity: a list of videos uploaded, favorited or rated by your YouTube contacts. This information is displayed only if your contacts added it to their public profiles. * inbox: messages, friend invites, received videos. * statistics about your videos (total views, subscribers) and your activity (subscriptions, comments).
"The goal with all of this is to gauge people's interest in having a YouTube that's tailored to the individual. Ultimately, we want to get you one step closer to the videos you'll enjoy most every time you come to the site," explains YouTube.
If you want to see a music video, there's a good chance you'll find it on YouTube. The downside is that YouTube doesn't offer any music-related feature, so you can't find information about the artists, lyrics or concert dates.
A simple Greasemonkey script adds one of these missing feature: lyrics. The script creates a container titled "Lyrics" below the video's description and shows the lyrics when you expand the container. Obviously, the video must contain the artist's name and the song's title. If the script doesn't find the lyrics of a song, change the site that provides lyrics (lyrics.astraweb.com seems to be the best) or choose from one the alternative songs.
Book Search is the fourth Google service that integrates with the unified Google profiles. The list of favorite books includes a small widget with information from the Google profile.
If you find someone who has interesting books in his library, you can add him to a list of favorite libraries. Unfortunately, Google doesn't show when there are new books in your favorite libraries and doesn't make it easy to discover libraries that might interest you. Based on the books from your library, Google could recommend other similar books and a list of users with similar tastes. To make the library more personal, people should be able to annotate books and highlight interesting excerpts.
Google Docs updated the toolbar in the word processing and the presentation apps, removing some of the buttons (copy/cut/paste), adding buttons for saving, printing, spell checking and showing the font name and its size. The updated toolbar is closer to the one from Writely and from office suites like Microsoft Office.
There is no longer "Save", "Save & close" and "Discard changes" on the far right of your doc. We've removed "Save & close" and "Discard changes" and moved "Save" to the far left on the editor toolbar as an icon. The icon is a floppy disk. Writely does auto save, so it's not necessary to save manually.
Spell check is now located on the right side of your toolbar as an "abc" icon with a check mark through it. Also, when you're spell checking a doc and you want to stop, you can just simply click on the icon.
As you create your docs, you may use different text sizes, fonts and colors as well as different highlight colors throughout. You'll notice now that when navigating to different parts of your doc, you'll be shown exactly which text size, etc. that particular part of the doc is in, by referring to the different menus on the toolbar. This functionality allows you to easily identify the properties of the text within your doc.
It's strange to see Google removing the buttons for some of the most frequently used commands (copy/cut/paste). Due to some security restrictions, Firefox doesn't allow web sites to read your system's clipboard or to overwrite it, so you had to make an exception for Google Docs.
Hopefully, the new toolbar will be added to all the apps that use a rich text editor (Gmail, Google Spreadsheets etc.) to create a consistent user interface.
After more than a year since the JotSpot acquisition, Google finally launched a service that uses JotSpot's technology: Google Sites. The new service is a part of Google Apps and allows you to create web sites collaboratively. "People can work together on a Site to add file attachments, information from other Google applications (like Google Docs, Google Calendar, YouTube and Picasa), and new free-form content. Creating a site together is as easy as editing a document, and you always control who has access, whether it's just yourself, your team, or your whole organization," explains Google.
Google offers templates, a rich-text editor, 10GB of storage for each Google Apps account and integration with other Google services so you can embed gadgets, calendars, spreadsheets, presentations, photo slideshows and videos. You can invite people to collaborate or just view a site and you can also publish the site so that anyone can view it.
VentureBeat likes the new service. "Creating a new site with Google Sites is very easy. (...) You can start out by creating a front page for your site and from there decide whether to add more standard pages" or use one of the built-in templates: dashboard, blog, file cabinet, list.
Webware notices that Google doesn't offer too many features. "As is typical for Google productivity applications when they first launch, the functionality inside Sites is on the spare side, but the collaboration features are clear, easy to use, and well-chosen. This is a capable workgroup wiki, and even in this early stage its integration with the Docs and Apps suites makes it an excellent collaboration tool."
Here are three examples of Google Sites: a company intranet, a ski club site and a team project.
The video shows how easy is to create a simple site:
The new service is enabled by default for all the new Google Apps accounts, but administrators need to enable it explicitly for the existing accounts.
Wouldn't be nice if you could save a Gmail conversation so you can read it offline? Using an email client to access Gmail using POP3 or IMAP is an option, although it's not trivial to recreate the thread and to download everything, including the attachments.
To download a Gmail conversation, you could use the print feature. In order to prevent Gmail from actually printing your messages, disable JavaScript after opening the conversation or disconnect your printer. Then click on "print all" in Gmail's right sidebar...
... and save the generated page as a complete web page. This will create a HTML file and a folder with images, but it won't save the attachments. You can now re-enable JavaScript in your browser to be able to use Gmail's AJAX interface.
If you want to save all the attachments from a conversation as an archive, you could save them one by one. Alternatively, go back to the conversation and click on "forward all". You'll create a new message that concatenates all the messages and the attachments from that conversation. Send the message to yourself and click on "Download all attachments" when you receive the message. To save space, delete the individual message you've sent to yourself after downloading the attachments (make sure you don't delete the entire conversation).
For those who use Opera's excellent mobile browsers Opera Mobile and Opera Mini, there's a good news: from next month, Google will replace Yahoo as the default search engine. "With 2008 poised to be the year the mobile Web goes mainstream, Google and Opera are extending this collaboration to give our users immediate access to the quality and convenience of Google's search results," comments Opera's CEO in a press release.
Last year, when Yahoo became the default search engine in Opera's mobile products, users complained that they couldn't set Google as the default search engine. The contract with Yahoo forced users to find workarounds like bookmarking Google. "I will never use Yahoo, and being forced to do so is exactly the kind of patronizing behavior that antagonizes all those users who seriously use their mobile devices to scour the web on the go," explained one Opera Mini user.
Emoticons are a simple way to disambiguate text messages and to add a human touch using a minimum amount of characters. While Gmail Chat supports many emoticons, the full lists of emoticons that can be used is much bigger. TKHere tried various combinations and found some undocumented emoticons in Gmail Chat:
In the screenshot above, you can see a diabolic creature (}:-)), a crab (V.v.V), a wince(>.<), a broken heart (</3), a kiss (:-x) and a mustache (:{).
Meanwhile, the Japanese Gmail started to support emojis, pictograms popularized by i-mode mobile phones. "These images can be used as placeholders or icons to identify a link or other elements in your page. There are emoji of common use such as airplane or a train and there are some that may indicate emotions, sun, moon phases and more," explains The Wireless FAQ.
Google Talk's gadget was a nice addition, but you couldn't use it to chat with unknown people or with the visitors of the site, like in Meebo Me. Now you can do that using the new chatback badges. You only need to add some code to your site and anyone could click on the generated badge to chat with you.
"A Google Talk chatback badge allows others to chat with you even if they haven't signed up for Google Talk or a Google Account. You can put the badge in your blog or website, and people who visit those pages can chat with you. The badge will display your online status (whether you're available to chat or not) and, optionally, your status message."
If someone clicks on the badge, a special version of the Google Talk gadget will open and he will be able to chat with you.
The conversations are private and only one-to-one, so other visitors won't be able to read them. For some strange reason, they're not even added in Gmail's chat section. Unfortunately, being constantly interrupted by other people is not very pleasant, so you can disable the link from your badge by setting your status to "busy" or by signing out of Google Talk.
Hal Varian argues in the latest post from Google's main blog that "if you look at Google's business, the competition is only a click away. Users can trivially switch search."
While it may seem easy to change your search engine, the reality is that it's difficult. Google is the default search engine in Firefox, Opera, Safari and it becomes the default search engine if you install any Google software and stick with the default options. Google is the default search engine in many people's minds and it's also a name synonymous with searching on the web. Google is the default homepage in Firefox and many people choose it because it loads fast. Google replaces the address bar and it's no longer a web site, it's part of the browser.
Because it's deceivingly simple, people don't treat Google as any other web site. Google is a core feature of their browsers and don't realize they could change it. Even when they find out that Google could be replaced with Yahoo, Live Search, Ask.com, people don't change it because they've already created a connection with Google, learned its tricks and accepted its flaws.
You first accept Google as a browser feature, start to rely on it for things that are important to you. When you learn about possible replacements, you'll start to judge them using Google as a standard and they'll mostly likely fail.
Google camouflaged into a browser feature, into a word, into the default gateway to to the web.
Believe it or not, YouTube has been inaccessible in any corner of the world for about an hour. Among other consequences, all the sites that embed YouTube videos will load much slower and you won't be able to play the videos. OpenDNS has an explanation for this: "Youtube.com is down right now because Pakistan Telecom has decided to (accidentally probably) hijack their IP address space which means that nobody in the world can reach Youtube." The Pakistani government blocked the access to YouTube "because of content deemed offensive to Islam".
If you know more about this, tell us in the comments.
