Google's Twitter Accounts

Google has recently launched a Twitter account to share byte-sized news and updates. Twitter, a startup founded by two former Googlers, started to become very popular and it's regarded as the next evolution of blogging.


Here are some other official Twitter accounts for Google services and products:

* YouTube, which has more than 14,000 followers

* Blogger, which answers many questions from users

* Google Reader, which share useful tricks for using the feed reader more effectively

* Google Apps, a feed that shares articles about the evolution of Google's software-as-a-service business

* App Engine - a not-so-frequently updated list of Google App Engine news.

In other news, you can follow the latest headlines from this blog at twitter.com/googleos, where I'll also post news and tips not included in the blog. Send your tips, questions and suggestions to @googleos.

Better Interface for Uploading Gmail Attachments

Gmail improved substantially the interface for uploading attachments: now you can select multiple attachments at once and there's a progress bar that displays the status of your uploads. It's much easier to upload multiple files from a folder, although you still need to use a third-party extension to attach files using drag-and-drop (the extension is not compatible with Gmail's new Flash uploader, so you need to disable it from Gmail's settings page).



While the new features are very useful, there's a strange bug that creates individual messages for each uploaded attachment and sends them to the "Trash". I started to compose a message to test the new feature, then I uploaded some photos and clicked on "Discard". Here's what I found in the "Trash" folder:


If you don't like the new Flash uploader, it can be disabled from the Settings page by selecting "Basic attachment features - Attach one file at a time and don't show progress bars".

{ Thanks, Sean. }

User Photos Enhance Google Street View

Google Street View has a new option to show photos uploaded to the Google-owned Panoramio. "Now you can browse user-contributed photos that have been precisely-matched to Street View images. Gorgeous photos from Panoramio allow you to see some of the world's most famous landmarks at an even closer level," explains Google.

Whenever you visit in Street View a location that has user-contributed photos, you can click on one of the photos for a different perspective. You'll find many Panoramio photos for popular places like Tour Eiffel, Duomo di Milano or Times Square.




{ Thanks, Kevin. }

Google Shared Stuff to Be Discontinued

Google Shared Stuff, the social bookmarking service that has never been officially launched, will no longer be available after the end of March.

Google Shared Stuff was only used to share videos at Google Video and Knol articles, but it was buggy and underdeveloped. Shared Stuff combined different ways to share pages with other people: by email, using social sites like del.icio.us or by adding them to a public page.


As usually, Google's suggestions for replacing the discontinued services are hilarious:

"If you want another way to share videos, you can use the "Share" link below each YouTube video. You can also create a public Google Site if you want to share websites and links with friends."

A more appropriate replacement is Google Reader's sharing bookmarklet, that lets you share content from any web page. There's also AddToAny, which combines multiple sharing options in a crowded page. Many other social sites offer sharing bookmarklets: Facebook, FriendFeed, del.icio.us.

{ Thanks, Jamie. }

Google Toolbar 6 with Quick Search Box

Google Toolbar 6 for Internet Explorer, released in beta today, doesn't have too many new features: the integration with Google Notebook has been removed, the "new tab" page from Google Chrome is displayed when you open a new tab and there's a completely unrelated application bundled with the toolbar. Quick Search Box is already available for iPhone and Mac and now it's part of Google Toolbar 6.


The new application can be launched by clicking on the Google logo on the taskbar or by using the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+Space. It combines a program launcher with a search box and it shows suggestions, web addresses and results for simple calculations.

"Sometimes, multi-tasking on the computer can be a maddening process if you have to constantly switch between different programs and files. Try using the Quick Search Box: it lets you easily search both your computer and the Web from a slick-looking search box that comes up only when you need it," explains Google.

Quick Search Box is similar to the homonymous feature from Google Desktop, which only shows results from your computer. It borrows the mix of search suggestions and navigation predictions from Chrome's Omnibox, while opening web pages in your default browser.

Google should have released Quick Search Box as a separate application or in a future version of Google Desktop. As it looks now, Quick Search Box doesn't offer enough functionality to replace Windows Vista's search box or application launchers like Launchy, the new feature will certainly confuse Google Desktop users and it's not very clear what's the connection with Google Toolbar.

Gmail Is Down. What to Do?

The web interface is one of the ways to access Gmail and you can choose from many flavors of web-based Gmail. If the standard web interface doesn't load, it's a good idea to try the more secure SSL interface at https://mail.google.com or the basic HTML mode at http://mail.google.com/mail/h.

Gmail also offers other ways to read your email: you can use POP3 or IMAP in almost any email client for desktop or mobile phones. If you use Windows, you already have Outlook Express or Windows Mail, but you can install a better application like Thunderbird. Before opening a mail client and entering Gmail's settings, it's important to enable POP and IMAP from this page (Gmail settings/ Forwarding and POP, IMAP). POP and IMAP access is disabled by default and it can only be enabled from the web interface.

Gmail's web interface was down for more than 2 hours today. "If you've tried to access your Gmail account today, you are probably aware by now that we're having some problems. Shortly after 9:30am GMT our monitoring systems alerted us that Gmail consumer and businesses accounts worldwide could not get access to their email." The only way to access your mail was using a mail client, but the POP/IMAP access had to be already enabled from Gmail's settings page.

What can we learn from today's outage? It's important to know that there are alternate ways to access Gmail and you should enable POP and IMAP, even if you don't intend to use them regularly.