Google Talk and AIM to Become Interoperable

When you log in to your AIM account in Gmail, you get a message from AOL that links to this page.

In the next few days, Google and AOL are working together to change the way you connect to AIM buddies within Gmail. After this change, Gmail and AIM users can talk directly to each other without having to log into both services (you will no longer be able to log into AIM within Gmail's "Chat" section).

It's nice to know that AIM and Gmail Chat (Google Talk) will finally become interoperable and the Gmail integration will no longer be necessary. Back in 2005, Google and AOL announced that "Google Talk users and AIM users will be able to communicate with one another" and two years later Gmail Chat integrated with AIM, but they didn't become interoperable.

{ Thanks, Josh. }

Google Tests a New Search Interface

Many users noticed a new interface for Google's search results pages that tries to better separate results. There's a lot of space between the results, but that's not useful when you try to find the best answer for your query.


Huffington Post notices that "the new design looks less cluttered. Rows of text are spaced farther apart and text colors are more muted than previous versions." TechCrunch calls the new interface "ugly" and less useful because "it actually gives you much less information on the screen. This will require users to do more scrolling and paging through results to find what they're looking for."

Links are no longer underlined and one of the experiments uses dotted lines to separate results.


Fortunately. the new interface is still an experiment.

{ Thanks, John, Silviu, James, Ken, Steve and Josh. }

Google's New Snippets for News Sites

After changing the snippets for Twitter accounts, Google now displays the latest headlines in the snippets for news sites. Search for [washington post], [nytimes], [le monde], [gazzetta dello sport] and you'll find the latest news from the snippets.


Probably the best way to try the new feature is to search for [news] and check the new snippets.


It's likely that the headlines are obtained from Google News, but not all the sites included in Google News have the new snippets.

Google Chrome's Emotional Ad

Google Chrome's ads have always been great, but this one is probably the only Google ad that could make you cry. It's a story about a father that emails his daughter photos and videos with her happy moments as she grows up. He uses Google services like Gmail, Picasa Web and YouTube, but the ad is not only about Chrome or Google: "the web is what you make of it".

Following the footsteps of Apple's FaceTime ads and Google's Search Stories, "Dear Sophie" could strike a chord with Google users and show how profound is Google's impact on your life.

A More Obvious Sign Out Link

When Google launched the new compact menus in the navigation bar, many users wondered why it's so difficult to sign out. The "sign out" link was buried in one of the menus and it wasn't obvious how to find it. Now the link is also displayed next to the Account menu, where users expected to see it.


Even if it's not used that frequently, the familiar "sign out" link is displayed by most web applications and hiding it or burying it in a menu could frustrate users. Facebook is one of the services that places the "logout" link in a menu, so it's not impossible to convince users to accept this change.

Google Chrome Tests Multiple Profiles

As previously promised, Google started to test multiple profiles for Google Chrome. It's a Chrome OS feature that's now available in Chrome's Canary builds and Chromium. Just enter about:flags in the address bar, enable "Multiple profiles" and click "Relaunch browser" at the bottom of the page.


The new feature associates each window with a profile and lets you sync some of the settings with a Google account. Until now, you could create new profiles manually, but you had to use special shortcuts for each profile (Chrome has briefly added support for multiple profiles in the interface back in 2009, but it was quickly dropped). This feature is now available in the interface, even though it's more limited and you can only identify profiles using Google accounts.

"The multiple profiles feature will allow the user to associate a profile with a specific set of browser windows, rather than with an entire running instance of Chrome. Allowing different windows to run as different Chrome identities means that a user can have different open windows associated with different Google accounts, and correspondingly different sets of preferences, apps, bookmarks, and so on -- all those elements which are bound to a specific user's identity. Having multiple profiles in the Chrome browser also makes it easy to browse with separate identities without having to log in as separate users at the operating system level," explains a Google Chrome design document.