Street View for Central Europe (Not from Google)

Until Google manages to gather Street View imagery for the entire world, there's a big opportunity for other companies to offer a similar service.

Norc is a street-view service created by the Romanian company eXtreme Soft Group, which covers cities from 5 European countries:

* Austria: Wien
* Czech Republic: Prague, Brno
* Poland: Warsaw, Krakow, Poznan, Wroclaw
* Slovakia: Bratislava, Trnava, Kosice, Banska-Bystrica, Zilina, Nitr
* Romania: Bucureşti, Ploieşti, Constanţa, Braşov, Cluj-Napoca, Timişoara, Iaşi, Sibiu, Piteşti, Târgovişte



Norc uses Google Maps API to let you find a location, but the search feature doesn't offer good results. Maximize the Street View window to better see the panoramic images and use the arrows to navigate.

If you know other services inspired by Google Street View that have a significant coverage, post their links in the comments.

{ Thank you, Vasile. }

Comparison of Google Talk's Official Clients

Google has way too many separate implementations of Google Talk and very few features are available in all clients:

Features / implementations	Google Talk	Gadget	Labs Edition	Gmail Chat	iGoogle and orkut	iPhone version
Requires installing software	Yes (Windows)	Flash plug-in	Yes (Windows)	No (some features require plug-ins)	No	No
Tabs	No	Yes	Yes	No	No	No
Themes	Yes	No	No	Yes	Yes	No
Gmail notifications	Yes	No	Yes	No	No	No
Calendar notifications	No	No	Yes	No	No	No
Invisible status	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Music track status	Yes	No	No	No	No	No
Text chat	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Multi-user chat	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	No
Features / implementations	Google Talk	Gadget	Labs Edition	Gmail Chat	iGoogle and orkut	iPhone version
Copy the text of a message	Yes	No	No	Yes	Yes	No
Saving messages to Gmail	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Audio chat	Yes	No	No	Yes	No	No
Voicemail	Yes	No	No	No	No	No
Video chat	No	No	No	Yes	No	No
Send SMS	No	No	No	Yes	No	No
AIM integration	No	No	No	Yes	No	No
File transfer	Yes	No	No	No	No	No
View photos (Flickr, Picasa Web)	No	Yes	Yes	No	No	No
Play videos (YouTube, Google Video)	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	No

You can also use any other client that supports Jabber, but most of the features above won't be available.

Video Preview in Gmail Chat

Gmail Chat added a feature that was initially released in the Google Talk gadget: playing videos from YouTube and Google Video without opening a new page. If you paste a link to a video from YouTube or Google Video in a conversation, Google shows a clickable thumbnail that can trigger an inline video player.


If you tried the audio/video chat plug-in for Gmail and it didn't work well, there's a chance that the latest updates solved your issues: incompatibility with Creative camera drivers, errors when sending and receiving video for CPUs without the SSE2 extensions, lack of support for many USB cameras on a Mac OSX.

{ via Gmail Blog }

Downloading Files from an Archive

One of the most interesting features available in Free Download Manager, an open source software for Windows, is that you can preview ZIP archives and select the files you want to download. This can be useful if you only need a README file from a big archive or if some of the files are unnecessary.

iGoogle Theme Creator

One week ago, Google Blog announced an official tool for building themes for iGoogle. "Now, you too can capture memories and images on your iGoogle homepage by building a custom theme. We've just released our new tool for creating iGoogle themes. It's an easy way for iGoogle users to spruce up their personalized homepage without needing to know how to use XML, etc. All you need is an image, and we'll provide the rest."

The idea is great as people will always like to see a personal photo on their homepage. As usually, iGoogle managed to make another mistake: the theme creator page has been down until today.

Now that it's finally available, you can see the tool is very basic and it only lets you upload an image, choose a header text color and a theme color. It's very difficult to crop a photo so that a certain region is visible, the color palette doesn't include too many options, you can't find the themes you've created to apply them to other pages and you need to accept a license agreement after creating a new theme.


If you need more control, try the two advanced editor previously mentioned or create your own XML files using iGoogle's API.

{ via Blogoscoped }

Google and Niche Services

Google continues to end projects, the most recent one being AdWords for Print. The blog post that explains the decision shows the big picture at Google:

"In the last few months, we've been taking a long, hard look at all the things we are doing to ensure we are investing our resources in the projects that will have the biggest impact for our users and partners. While we hoped that Print Ads would create a new revenue stream for newspapers and produce more relevant advertising for consumers, the product has not created the impact that we — or our partners — wanted. (...) As we grow, it is important that we focus on products that can benefit the most people and solve the most important problems. By moving resources away from projects that aren't having the impact we want, we can refocus our efforts on those that will delight millions of users."

That's the reason why Google closes or stops investing in small projects that couldn't attract a big audience. Google Answers, Google Notebook, Browser Sync, Lively, Hello weren't very popular and Google decided to close them. Some of them were open sourced and migrated to Google App Engine, while others became start-ups. This is a big opportunity for start-ups: create services that aren't likely to go mainstream in the near future.

iGoogle Redirects iPhone Users to the Standard Mobile Interface

iGoogle continues to make mistakes. After testing the new version of iGoogle without providing an option to end the experiment, after ignoring most of the complaints regarding the new interface, Google decided to redirect iPhone users to the standard mobile interface, instead of sending them to the iPhone-optimized interface. Apparently, G1 users were also affected by this strange decision.

"We've decided to direct iPhone users to the standard mobile iGoogle page. We've found that people hit iGoogle from lots of different phones -- we want to ensure you'll all see the same version. Most or all of your existing content should translate over to the standard mobile version. The only exception would be any gadgets that aren't compatible with most mobile browsers," explains a Google engineer.

The problem was that the iPhone-optimized interface included all the gadgets from the desktop version and the tabs, it was sleek and easy to use on a touch screen, while the standard mobile version only shows feeds and a small number of gadgets. Degrading user experience and taking away a lovely interface is not the best way to encourage people to use iGoogle.

iGoogle's forum has a long thread with complaints and some users suggest to change the user-agent in Safari because the iPhone interface is still available for other browsers. Here's one of the few polite messages from the thread:

"I have to admit I am quite surprised by the unofficial news that you have removed your previously excellent iGoogle adaptation for iPhone. I can understand that in times of consolidating services in order to increase your internal efficiency you need to keep down the number of platforms. But removing the iPhone support without properly notifying your users in advance and explaining the reasons why you do this is perhaps not the smartest move if you want to keep loyal customers and brand value. And especially since you yourself have found that iPhone users are very active web users compared to the other mobile platforms."

Longer Google Snippets

"Snippet = A short description of or excerpt from a website which appears in Google search results. Snippets are created automatically based on the site's content or the content of pages that link to the site." (Google Search glossary)

In some cases, Google shows longer snippets for search results if the pages provide simple answers for your query. Google previously tested a sidebar that allowed you to increase the size of the snippets and highlight extracted facts like dates and locations, but the tests probably showed that people didn't use the advanced options and that it's a better idea to automatically increase the length of a snippet if there's a high density of information related to your query.

Search Engine Roundtable suspects that "the longer your search query, the longer the snippet might get", but this is not always the case. Google tries to be smart and not overwhelm users with irrelevant information, that's why snippets are usually concise.


Here's how Larry Page described snippets in 1998, when the feature has been launched: "We recently added some new features to Google. The most significant is a summary for each result that highlights where your query matched. This makes for a much more informative summary than most search engines provide. You can actually see where your query matched without having to download each page."

Related:
Find facts from snippets
From search results to content creation

Text Ads in Google Image Search

After months of experimentation, Google choose to show text ads above image search results. It's not clear if the ads are actually useful for those who visit Google Image Search to find images, but Google mentioned last year that the volume of commercial queries has increased significantly.

"Whenever we make changes like these, we carefully evaluate users' reactions to ensure we're holding true to our basic principles: that ads by Google should always be relevant and useful. Of course, these experiments benefit Google because they generate revenue from new sources — but by ensuring that we show the right ads at the right time to the right people, we'll add value for users too," explained a Google blog post from November.


In 2006, Google estimated that it could earn $80-200 million a year by including text ads in Image Search. Google decided not to monetize Image Search because the experiments showed that people used the service less. I wonder if the experiments from 2008 showed different results.

It's worth mentioning that the only other important image search engine that shows ads is Ask.com Image Search.

Google Preferred Sites

Preferred Sites is a new experimental feature for Google Search that lets you personalize the results by adding a list of sites you want to appear more often when you search. Based on your search history, Google suggests some frequently-visited sites, but you can add any other site.

The help page explains more: "The preferred sites feature lets you set your Google Web Search preferences so that your search results match your unique tastes and needs. Fill in the sites you rely on the most, and results from your preferred sites will show up more often when they're relevant to your search query."

Some use cases for the feature: adding sites you trust for finding a certain kind of information (movie reviews, sports results), adding more obscure sites that aren't likely to appear in the top results (local news sites) and a partial replacement for bookmarks.

The feature is an experimental feature that can be found in Google's preferences page if you are logged in and you were selected to test it.


Here's what happens when I add GSM Arena and search for [Nokia 6080]: the result from GSM Arena is marked as "My preferred site", but there's no significant ranking change even though Google mentions that "your Preferred Sites were used to improve search results".


After adding IMDB and New York Times, the results for [how to lose friends and alienate people] were changed dramatically: two pages from nytimes.com were promoted to the top 3 results, but they weren't in the first 30 results for a regular search.

Preferred Sites is an extension of Google SearchWiki, the feature that allowed you to make per-query changes. If the feature goes live to everyone, people will be able to pick a list of authoritative sites and influence all search results.