URLs for iPhone-Optimized Google Sites

Google's interfaces optimized for iPhone, Android and WebKit-based browsers look extremely well and they have more features than the standard mobile versions. For example, Google's homepage shows suggestions and has customizable navigation links, iGoogle shows all your feeds and gadgets and Google Talk lets you chat with your contacts. If you want to try them from your computer or from a mobile phone that has a modern browser, here are the direct links (some of the pages won't work very well):

* Google homepage (the unified interface codenamed "Grand Prix") - http://www.google.com/m/gp
* Google Apps homepage - http://www.google.com/m/a/YOUR_DOMAIN
* iGoogle - http://www.google.com/ig/i
* Gmail - https://mail.google.com/mail/s/ (new version), http://mail.google.com/mail/x/gdlakb-/gp/ (old version)
* Google Calendar - http://www.google.com/calendar/gp
* Google Reader - http://www.google.com/reader/i/
* Google Docs - http://docs.google.com/m?iphone=true
* Google Talk - http://talkgadget.google.com/talkgadget/m
* Google News - http://news.google.com/news/i

iPhone-optimized Google Reader in Firefox

Google Voice Search for iPhone

In 2002, Google Labs introduced a service that allowed you to search Google with a simple phone call. Unfortunately, the service wasn't very useful because the results were displayed on your computer and Google discontinued it.


Six years later, Google Mobile App for iPhone introduces the same feature, but this time the search results are displayed in the same application. Google built a sophisticated platform for text-to-speech and speech recognition using data from GOOG-411 and we can already some of its applications in Mobile Google Apps, YouTube and in this updated iPhone app.


It's quite weird to say how to download the app: since Apple doesn't offer user-friendly permalinks, you'll have to visit the iPhone App Store and search for "Google Mobile App". This iPhone app is just a sneak-peak into the future of mobile search, which will become more intuitive and easier to use.

"In the next 10 years, we will see radical advances in modes of search: mobile devices offering us easier search, Internet capabilities deployed in more devices, and different ways of entering and expressing your queries by voice, natural language, picture, or song, just to name a few. It's clear that while keyword-based searching is incredibly powerful, it's also incredibly limiting. These new modes will be one of the most sweeping changes in search," anticipates Marissa Mayer. She even envisions a "wearable device that does searches in the background based on the words it picks up from conversations" to illustrate how search will become a part of our life.

More YouTube Ads

Two years after being acquired by Google, YouTube still hasn't figured out how to monetize the site. "We believe the best products are coming out this year. And they're new products. They're not announced. They're not just putting in-line ads in the things that people are trying. But we have a number — and, of course, Google is an innovative place," said Eric Schmidt in August.

One of the new products replicates Google's search ads and adjusts them to a video site. "Sponsored Videos is a self-serve advertising platform that will allow you to promote your video to the audience you are interested in reaching in an easy, effective, democratic, and affordable way. Then, when people use YouTube to search for videos, YouTube will display the most relevant, compelling videos alongside the search results," explains YouTube Blog. Any company or YouTube user from the US can promote his channel or one his videos next to the search results.

Since YouTube controls the search results and hosts the videos, it can provide more measurable results. YouTube can track if the user watched the entire video, if he subscribed to the channel or clicked on the link to the advertiser's homepage.


Another part of YouTube's monetization strategy is expanding the in-video ads to embeddable players. "To date, YouTube has only run ads against partner videos on YouTube itself, and with people viewing millions of embedded YouTube videos every day, this meant that partners were not generating revenue from their views outside YouTube.com. But now, YouTube partners will be able to capitalize on their popularity across the internet and generate revenue from their content no matter where their video lives," informs AdSense Blog. Until now, many YouTube partners disabled the option to embed videos because they couldn't make money from this distribution channel. This change will only affect 4% of the videos uploaded to YouTube, but the percentage of views is much more significant.


The text ads displayed at the bottom of the video can be minimized, but they could cover an important part of a video (for example: annotations, captions) and they're distracting. Most of them link to web pages, but there are some ads that open a new video inside the player.

Google needs to make YouTube profitable and it's nice to see that the ads are often relevant, they don't interrupt videos and they don't make you wait.

Will There Ever Be a Google OS?

Here's Andrew Morton's answer to this question. As you probably know, Andrew Morton is a lead developer of the Linux kernel and a Google employee since 2006.

The resources required to develop and test kernel/base apps/windowing system are quite massive. Particularly the "test" part - the Linux developers and distros are completely dependent upon hundreds of thousands of end users to test our code on the millions of different hardware combinations out there.

The only other organisation which has the sheer resources to develop an OS for general PC hardware is microsoft plus their thousands of ISVs and IHVs.

I'll let you work out the rest :)

In other news, Chromium Blog announced that Google runs "more than 9100 individual tests, typically 30-40 times every weekday" for Google Chrome. Not to mention that millions of people test each version of Google Chrome on different software/hardware configurations.

{ Photo by Google. }

Voice and Video Chat in Gmail

As anticipated in the post about Gmail SMS, video chat is the next big that will be added to Gmail. Justin Uberti says that video chat will be added today, along with voice chat.

"We've tried to make this an easy-to-use, seamless experience, with high-quality audio and video. And we've built this product using Internet standards, such as XMPP, RTP, and the newly-standardized H.264/SVC video codec."

To try the new features go to http://mail.google.com/videochat and install the required plug-in (it works in Windows XP/Vista, Intel-based Mac, using IE, Firefox, Chrome, Safari 3+). After restarting the browser, open Gmail, select a contact from the chat section and see if there's an option named "Video & more". If you can't find this option, your friend didn't install the plug-in yet.


Instead of developing new versions of the Google Talk desktop application, Google decided to focus on its most popular communication channel and add the missing features. Too bad that you need to install yet another plug-in...

Contact Forms in Google Profiles

If you enable "Allow people to contact me through my profile (without showing my email address)" in your Google Profile, people who find your profile can contact you. Google provides a contact form that sends all the messages to your main email address. "We've set some limits on how often messages can be sent and received, and you can disable the feature at any time by editing your profile and deselecting the checkbox," explains Google.


At the bottom of the email, Google shows an explanation:

"This message was sent to you from your Google profile. The sender does not have your email address. If you no longer wish to receive messages from your Google profile, you may edit your settings at http://www.google.com/s2/profiles/me/editprofile".

{ via GoogleWatchBlog }

Translate Feeds in Google Reader

Just because you don't speak a certain language doesn't mean you shouldn't read interesting articles written in that language. After increasing the number of supported language pairs and providing an API, Google Translate is rapidly integrated in many Google services. YouTube started to translate search results and closed captions, Google Talk provides translation bots, Google lets you search content in other languages and now you can subscribe to feeds in foreign languages using Google Reader.

After subscribing to a feed in Google Reader, click on "Feed settings" and select "Translate into my language". Google detects the feed's language and it translates the content into Google Reader's interface language (you can be changed it from the settings page).


Some Google-related sites in other languages than English:
Zorgloob (French)
Google Watch Blog (German)
OJObuscador (Spanish)
Google Discovery (Portuguese)
underGoogle (Portuguese)

When Google's machine translations improves, the next step could be translating content into your language without having to select an option. In the meantime, you can expect to find Google Translate integration in Gmail, Google Docs and other Google services.

{ via Google Reader Blog }

Google Pack, a Reward for Google's Partners?

When Google launched Google Pack in January 2006, Larry Page said that software companies don't have to pay Google to be included in the bundle. In addition to including most of its software, Google added an anti-virus and an anti-spyware software from Symantec, Firefox with Google Toolbar (Google and Mozilla have a search deal), Adobe Reader (Google and Adobe have a distribution deal), Skype (eBay and Google have an ad deal), RealPlayer (Google and RealNetworks have distribution deals), StarOffice (Sun and Google had a distribution agreement).

"Every program included in the Google Pack is free, has earned a reputation for excellence, and was evaluated to ensure it meets Google's Software Principles. Google respects users' rights to control their own computers and does not include software that is spyware, generates pop-ups, or that is difficult to uninstall," mentioned Google in a press release.

After removing Trillian and Ad-Aware, last week Google removed StarOffice from Google Pack and one of the possible explanations is that Sun signed an agreement with Microsoft to bundle MSN Toolbar with Java downloads. "With the vast array of Java software-based Web applications that are downloaded every month, this deal will expose Live Search to millions more Internet users and drive increased volume for our search advertisers," said Yusuf Mehdi from Microsoft.

A Google representative told eWeek: "We are constantly evaluating which products to include in Google Pack to make it more valuable to users. At this time the agreement to distribute StarOffice through Google Pack has expired, and we have decided with Sun not to renew the agreement."

If Google wants to offer a valuable software package for its users, maybe it's time to stop including software just because it's developed by partners. There are plenty of better alternatives to Norton Anti-Virus, RealPlayer, StarOffice and some of them are free or even open-source.

Filter File Types from Google Video's Results

Google Video added a new option to the advanced search page: you can now filter videos that weren't uploaded to video sharing sites. If the search results include many videos that have one of these formats: ASF, AVI, FLV, M4V, MPV, MP4, MPG or WMV, you can exclude them by unchecking the corresponding box.

Unfortunately, Google Video doesn't provide an option to restrict the results to one or more of these formats, like you can do at Yahoo Video Search.