Blogger extra five dynamic templates that transform blogs into interactive apps. Just add /view to the URL of a blog that offers full feeds (for example: googlesystem.blogspot.com/view) and you'll be clever to try the new views: flipcard, mosaic, sidebar, snapshot and timeline. Blogger's templates present features like infinite scrolling, progressive image loading, smart search, filtering posts by date, author or label. "These new views use the newest in web technology, including AJAX, HTML5 and CSS3," explains Google.
In the close to future, bloggers will be able to modify the templates and use them without having to alter the URL.
Google +1 is yet another effort to make Google more social. It's Google's description of the Facebook "likes", a simple feature that's very powerful because it's part of a social network.
Google will show +1 buttons next to all look for results and ads, while encouraging other sites to include the buttons. All +1's are public and they're tied to Google Profiles. The goal is to use this data to personalize look for results and ads by recommending sites +1'd by your friends. Google Social Search already does this, but there's no hold up for Facebook likes, so Google had to come up with a substitute.
"+1 is the digital shorthand for 'this is pretty cool.' To advocate something, all you have to do is click +1 on a webpage or ad you find useful. These +1's will then start appearing in Google's search results," explains Google.
This feature is gradually rolled out to Google.com, but you can try it by enabling the +1 search experiment.
One thing is clear: Google won't have to translate "+1" when it will restrict the service, but it will have a hard time translating "+1's", "+1'd" and other cryptic constructs. Google +1's URLs previously look weird (here's the homepage: http://www.google.com/+1).
Your +1's are scheduled in a profile tab, where you can manage them. There's also a page that lets you disable personalizing Google ads using +1's and other in order from your Google profile.
Google now has the most significant pieces of a social network (profiles, activity stream, likes, apps), but there's still no social network, no magic "glue" that connects the existing pieces. As Danny Sullivan explains, the "+1 social network" is made up of your Google Talk friends, the people from Gmail's "My contacts" group and the people you go behind in Google Reader and Google Buzz, but you'll soon be able to attach other services like Twitter and Flickr. It's actually a meta social network, an artificial service that won't have too numerous enthusiastic users, just like Friend Connect.
This is part of a usual series of posts on search experience updates that runs on Fridays. Look for the label "This week in search" and donate to to the series. - Ed.
Time is a valuable commodity for most of us. To save you more precious seconds as you search, we’ve introduced Google Instant in Places View and redesigned the Google Search app for iPhone for faster, easier searching—whether you’re on your way out or by now on the go.
Instant for Places View
As part of our continuing effort to give you the Instant experience everywhere on Google, this week we’ve enabled Instant in Places View so you can find where you want to go even more rapidly. To get to Places View, click “Places” in the left-hand panel; once you’re there, any search you perform will have place and map results that inform as you type. We’ll continue to expand immediate to all views, languages and domains over the next few months.
Google Search app for iPhone
The redesigned Google Search app for iPhone, previously known as Google Mobile App, improves the Google search experience on iOS mobile devices, giving you instinctive gesture controls. First, when browsing through search results or looking at a webpage, you can steal down to see the search bar to type in a new query or change your settings.
There’s also a new toolbar that makes it easier for you to filter your results—for example, if you only desire to see images or shopping results. You can open this toolbar by swiping from left to right.
Plus, now it’s easier to pick up penetrating where you left off. If you leave the app and come back later, you’ll be able to get back to precisely where you were by tapping on the lower part of the page. To use the Google Search app, download or inform it in the iTunes App Store.
Search in Cherokee
With conversion help from the Cherokee Nation staff and community members, we’ve additional Cherokee as an interface language on Google. You can set Cherokee as your defaulting from the Language Tools page (available to the right of the search box). We’ve also included an on-screen Cherokee keyboard—which you can contact by clicking the icon at the right side of the search box—for people who don’t have a physical Cherokee keyboard.
Google's immediate previews for video sites weren't very useful because most video sites use Flash and the software that generates thumbnails can't handle Flash. That's almost certainly one of the reasons why Google replaced the standard screenshots with short clips from the videos. By default, the sound is muted, but you can alter this setting. The feature is also obtainable at Google Video next to some search results.
"When it comes to videos, people want to spend less time penetrating and more time watching. That's why we added an improvement to Instant Previews—the ability to preview videos. Click once on the magnifying glass next to the title of any video search result in universal or video mode. For some videos, you'll now be able to play through a set of four short segments from the video to see if it’s what you’re looking for (video providers have to opt to make the previews available, so you won't find it for every video yet)," explains Google.
Even if Google announced this feature a couple of weeks ago, it's still spotty, so it may not be obtainable for you. You can also try Bing's Video Search, which offers a similar feature that probably enthused Google.
Last week, the @Google Talks team uploaded its 1000th video to YouTube. If you’re not recognizable with this series, we host talks by authors and commentators at Google, and post videos of their readings and talks on a devoted YouTube channel.
Authors@Google began in the fall of 2005 when we noticed that some astonishing people were passing through the Google hallways. A few scrappy Googlers galvanized to create a more reliable pipeline of requests and a dignified program that kicked off with Malcolm Gladwell and James Surowiecki. As Google and our technology grew, so did the program. “Authors@Google” has blossomed into @Google Talks, a full-fledged speaker series, prolonged across distributed offices and found a home on YouTube, so that we can share these conversations outside of the Googleplex.
The @Google Talks series aims to detain the popular and intellectual zeitgeist, as well as ideas that deserve a deeper focus an expert can give in more than a five-minute soundbite. From the 2008 U.S. presidential candidates to Alice Walker to Michael Pollan to Raphael Saadiq, the program has grown to encompass not just authors, but musicians, innovators, notable women, chefs and more. The team that hosts these events is made up of devoted and passionate volunteers from all across the company.
Our most viral video was of Conan O'Brien, who stopped by during his "Legally forbidden from Being Funny on Television" tour for a hilarious hour involving bagpipes, Andy Richter and one lucky Googler who got to touch his hair. We've featured master and apprentice—from Thomas Keller of The French Laundry to Keller protege Corey Lee on the process of gap his new restaurant Benu—and varying viewpoints, exemplified by Christopher Hitchens on "God Is Not Great" and Tim Keller on "The Reason for God." And that’s just the beginning. Other popular visitors comprise Congressman Ron Paul, President Barack Obama, linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky, presentation designer Garr Reynolds, author Elizabeth Gilbert, Randall Munroe of XKCD and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
We’re excited for what lies ahead, and we hope you'll tune in and join us.
A recent Chromium build added a new alternative to the about:flags page: an experimental new tab page. The efficient new tab page is a work in progress and it's optimized for touch screens. Right now, it only includes the web apps you've before installed, which can be prearranged in multiple home screens.
"The idea with this touch NTP is to focus (for now) on apps, and make it easy
to position them into pages. You can swipe/drag to switch pages, and press
and hold to lift an app and rearrange it," explains Google.
I found an attractive comment in one of Google's JavaScript files: "Note that, while the creation portion of the touch NTP is intended to work just in the latest version of Chrome, this hack attempts to add some support for working in older browsers to enable testing and expression on existing tablet platforms. In particular, this code has been tested to work on Mobile Safari in iOS 4.2. The goal is that the need to support any other browser ought to not leak out of this file - and so we will hack global JS objects as essential here to present the delusion of running on the latest account of Chrome."
What began with auditions from approximately the world uploaded to YouTube, millions of video views, and hours of rehearsals, finally comes to life this Sunday, March 20. It has been an strange experience for the 101 winning musicians of the YouTube Symphony Orchestra, and in just a pair of days their joint experience will come to life at Sydney Opera House.
Here’s a preview of what’s to come:
The week-long YouTube Symphony Orchestra 2011 festival includes melodic collaboration between orchestra members and world-class mentors, outdoor performances, local Aussie experiences, band concerts and more. In just a few days, the creativity and technology that have motorized this journey will literally light up Sydney Opera House—with animated visuals on the interior and exterior projections on the iconic sails, all synchronized to the music of the YouTube Symphony Orchestra 2011’s performance.
You’re invited to skill this wonderful event, whether you’re inside Sydney Opera House, out around Sydney Harbour, or watching from your computer elsewhere in the world. The Grand Finale will be live-streamed on youtube.com/symphony beginning at 8:00pm Australian Eastern Standard time, and rebroadcast until the concert presentation is uploaded in full, so tune in on Sunday, March 20.
Google Docs enhanced the commenting system, by addition support for conversations.
"To start, we've enhanced the discussion flow by adding ownership and edit rights to personality comments. Each observation now has a timestamp and profile picture. Google Docs doesn't force you to delete comments. Instead, you can resolve comments to remove them from the visible text and view them later by clicking the deliberations button at the top of any document," mentions Google.
One of the most useful new features is the support for notifications, which works just like in Google Buzz. Reply to a comment and the author of that comment will get an email announcement. He'll be able to answer to your reply from the email interface, without having to visit Google Docs. Google also sends notifications if you're mentioned in a thread.
Unfortunately, deliberations are only available for new documents. Google says that the explanation is that the new feature includes "a number of important improvements".
Last year, Google replaced SearchWiki with starred consequences. You only had to click on a star to bookmark a search result and to rapidly find it later.
Unfortunately, this feature is no longer available and you have to find other ways to bookmark hunt results: bookmarklets, Google Toolbar and other extensions.
A Google employee established this change. "The Star feature no longer exists on Google. The Star function continues to exist throughout google.com/bookmarks though. Anything you formerly starred will show up when you visit bookmarks."
Starred results and SearchWiki were really useful for refinding web pages, but most likely not many people used them. These features were a lot more helpful than Instant Preview, which is still available.
Internet Explorer 9 will be free later today and one of the many new skin is the inhabitant support for videos. Unfortunately for Google, Microsoft determined to only support H.264 videos by default, so you can't watch WebM videos without installing added software.
To solve this problem, Google urbanized a WebM plugin for IE9. "They said elephants couldn't ride flying dolphins. They said that one of the world's most accepted browsers couldn't play WebM video in HTML5. They were wrong," mentions Google half-jokingly.
The plugin only works on Windows 7 and Windows Vista, the two operating systems supported by IE9. Google suggests to search for WebM videos on YouTube, but I'm not sure if the plugin was really essential since YouTube's HTML5 player also works with H.264 videos.
Last month, Microsoft unconfined a plugin for watching H.264 videos in Google Chrome that will be useful when Google drops support for the accepted codec.
While the majority Chrome users have been upgraded to Chrome 10, Google is fitting the bugs from Chrome 11 and working on Chrome 12. A recent Chromium build made a significant change: Gears is no longer incorporated in Google Chrome.
Gears is a browser plugin free by Google back in 2007, The initial goal was to add hold up for offline web apps, but the plugin added many other HTML5 features at a time when HTML5 wasn't a main concern for most browsers. Google discontinued Gears last year to center on "bringing all of the Gears capabilities into web standards like HTML5" and to apply them in Google Chrome. Features like geolocation, notifications, web workers, application caches are previously available in Google Chrome, so it's almost certainly the right time to stop bundling the Gears plugin.
"With all this now available in HTML5, it's lastly time to say goodbye to Gears. There will be no new Gears releases, and newer browsers such as Firefox 4 and Internet Explorer 9 will not be supported. We will also be removing Gears from Chrome in Chrome 12," informs Google.
What's astonishing is that important services like Gmail and Google Calendar still use Gears to work offline. Other services like Google Docs and Google Reader dropped offline support last year. Google promised that they will use HTML5 features implemented in browsers like Chrome or Firefox, but that hasn't materialized yet.
Google tests a new feature that shows the estimated number of words next to certain search results. The word count is usually displayed for articles, but only for a small numeral of results. You'll almost certainly think twice before clicking on a hunt result that has 50,000 words, unless you're looking for an in-depth account.
Maybe Google will also add an higher search feature that lets you limit the search results to short articles or long documents. A summarization characteristic would also be helpful.
Gmail Labs has a new characteristic for organizing your messages: Smart Labels. Many people create filters that label messages from mailing lists, newsletters, so Google decided to use false intelligence algorithms to classify messages. Right now, there are only three smart labels: bulk (for newsletters), notifications (for confirmation messages, alerts) and forums (for mailing lists). By default, all the messages labeled as "bulk" are routinely archived, but you can change this setting.
"Smart Labels play nice with other labels and filters too. On the Filters tab under Settings, you'll find that these filters can be edited just like any others. From there, you can also edit your obtainable filters to avoid having them Smart Labeled or change whether mail in a Smart Label skips your inbox," explains Google.
In fact, when you create a filter, Google shows an extra option: category. You can choose from: bulk, forums, notifications, personal, promotions. The first three categories already have matching smart labels and all the messages classified as "promotions" are labeled "bulk". The "personal" group includes the rest of your messages.
Google's classification algorithms aren't perfect, so you may find messages that don't belong to one of three categories, but they're labeled as "notifications" or "bulk". Use the "labels" drop-down to remove the labels that are wrongly added and help Google improve its algorithms.
The latest design revive of the Google Docs homepage extra many useful features, but also made some contentious changes. Google decided to hide helpful information like the last modified date and the list of collaborators from the list view because it was obtainable in the sidebar.
If you missed the old boundary, you can now switch to the particulars view and see some additional in sequence next to the filename.
There's also a little icon that lets you for the moment hide the sidebar. For some reason, Google Docs doesn't enduringly hide the sidebar when you click on the arrows.
This is the latest in our series of YouTube highlights. Every couple of weeks, we bring you regular updates on new product features, interesting programs to watch, and tips you can use to grow your audience on YouTube. Just look for the label “YouTube Highlights” and subscribe to the series. – Ed.
In past weeks, we’ve featured two more YouTube interviews with leaders through the World View program and seen more footage come in from across the Middle East as unrest there continues.
David Cameron and John Boehner on YouTube
In YouTube World View’s second interview, YouTube and Al Jazeera English sat down with British Prime Minister David Cameron. Ten thousand people submitted questions, and in the interview, the Prime Minister shared his thoughts on what should be done in Libya, and talked about increased taxes for banks in the U.K. and Britain’s role in Afghanistan.
And as the budget debate rages on the U.S. Capitol Hill, we asked viewers from across the U.S. and around the world to submit questions to Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH). The final interview will be posted to YouTube on Friday, March 4.
We’ll have another interview in the coming weeks—check YouTube World View for more details soon.
Join us on YouTube for Carnaval in Brazil
An estimated 100 million people travel to Brazil each year to experience Carnaval, the iconic celebration on the streets of Salvador, Bahia. This year, you can join the festivities on the Carnaval YouTube channel via computer or mobile phone. Watch live feeds of Salvador’s multi-day street fest from Thursday, March 3 through Tuesday, March 8. If you’re lucky enough to be there in person, find out how to buy a pass to Google’s street-side camarote (cabin) at the celebration at www.youtube.com/carnaval.
February’s “On The Rise” winner
After tens of thousands of votes, D-trix from theDOMINICshow has been named February’s “On The Rise” contest winner. He beat out tornado chasers, graphic artists and pop stars for the honor. When D-trix isn’t spoofing Justin Bieber, he’s dancing or teaching people how to rap. Congratulations!
Making YouTube seven times faster
To help you better enjoy all the great content that’s uploaded to YouTube every minute, we recently increased speed for uploads and playback. Google’s cloud computing capabilities help us process videos in chunks on different machines—making our video-processing seven times faster than in 2008.
Ad Blitz winner
Super Bowl ads are always a big draw of the game. This year, we added Super Bowl spots to the Ad Blitz gallery so you could vote for your favorites. More than 2.7 million votes were cast, and 3.5 million views took place on mobile devices. This year’s winner, Chrysler, was featured on the YouTube masthead for the Saturday following the game.
This week’s trends on YouTube
Here are a few recent highlights from YouTube Trends:
* Britney Spears built up anticipation for her latest music video.
* Dramatic footage poured in from across the Middle East: Libya, Iran, Algeria and Yemen.
* A funny moment from "Family Feud" got "passed around."
We’ll have another update for you in a couple of weeks. Until then, visit us at the YouTube Blog.
The new Google Profiles border lets you upload multiple profile photos and button between them with a simple click. Visitors can see all the photos you've uploaded, so you must be cautious when you replace a profile photo. It's not enough to click "change photo" and upload the latest image: you should also click on the image and delete the preceding profile photo.
Profile photos are stored in a Picasa Web album, just like the photos from the Scrapbook section. The main dissimilarity is that profile photos can be cropped or shortened in Picnik.
If you previously have a Google Profile, it's a superior idea to upload a new profile photo. The new border uses bigger photos, so your old avatar looks pixelated.
Google Profiles has a new user interface that emphasizes the profile photo, includes a lot of new sections and uses encrypted relations. You can now click on a part of your profile to edit it, add "10 words that explain you best", bragging rights, association information, structured in sequence about your education and employment, a scrapbook with your favorite photos. Another modify is that you can now hide the Google Buzz tab from your profile.
The new Google Profiles is closer to a social networking feature, but it's just one part of the puzzle.
Picasa Web's homepage has been redesigned to highlight the photos recently uploaded by the people you're following. The homepage no longer displays all your albums, so you'll only be able to see the most fresh 8 albums.
"This new design centers around photos that are attractive to you. We wanted to give you faster access to the newest photos from your family and friends along with some great photos from the gifted Picasa community. When you log in to Picasa Web Albums, you will not only see your own albums, but albums that have been common with you, the latest public albums from people you follow, and featured photos from the Picasa community right on your home page," explains Google's Ping Chen.
While "recent activity" has always been a section on the homepage, now you can no ignore it. YouTube's homepage has lately switched to a feed view, a stream of actions popularized by Facebook.
If you don't like the new homepage, bookmark this URL: https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/myphotos or click "My Photos" when visiting the homepage.
