Google Reader Will incorporate With Google+

A lot of people anticipate a redesigned Google Reader and the good news is that they won't be disappointed: a new interface will be obtainable next week. Google Reader is not dead, but the new interface couldn't be released faster because the sharing feature had to be included with Google+.

My favorite feature of Google Buzz was that it routinely imported all the shared items from Google Reader and permissible your followers to discuss them. Now that Google Buzz will be discontinued, this feature will be obtainable in Google+. Unfortunately, Google Reader will no longer have a standalone sharing feature, a divide list of followers and people you follow, a feed and a page for shared items. This is great if you are a Google+ user, since it simplifies sharing and makes Google Reader more reliable. If you don't want to use Google+, you'll still be capable to share posts by email or using the "send to" feature, but these workarounds aren't very helpful for sharing a large number of posts.

The takeaway is that Google+ is not a separate social service you can easily ignore, it's a service that will be used for sharing photo albums, documents, videos, for posting blog comments and it will be very hard to use Google without joining Google+ since, at some point, Google+ will be... Google itself.

"Many of Reader's social features will soon be obtainable via Google+, so in a week's time we'll be retiring things like friending, following and shared link blogs inside of Reader. We think the end result is better than what's available today, and you can sign up for Google+ right now to start prepping Reader-specific circles. We differentiate, however, that some of you may feel like the product is no longer for you," mentions Google's Alan Green. That's the reason why you'll be able to export your shared items, your starred and liked items, your list of friends from Reader's settings page.

Google Reader's sharing feature has forever been difficult to use and the addition with Google+ will finally give Reader the opportunity to shine and show why it's still a useful service. I'm sure that a lot of users will complain that they can't use the old sharing feature, just like many YouTube users complained when Google migrated YouTube to Google Accounts. There's a group of value in having separate services with their own accounts, sharing features and friends lists, but switching to unified accounts, unified profiles, consistent sharing features makes Google's services more helpful because they work together, they unite their strengths and become easier to use.

Google's New Search border Disables Many Shortcuts

With the newest redesign of the search results pages, Google made it more difficult to use most of the keyboard shortcuts that permitted you to quickly select a result or see a small preview.

Until now, you might type your query, press Enter to hide the list of suggestions and press Enter once again to go to the first result. If you didn't like the first result, you might press the down arrow to select the second result. Google also incorporated a keyboard shortcut for Instant Previews: the right arrow. None of these shortcuts are obtainable in the latest interface, at least not by default. Now you need to press Tab after performing a search to allow the old keyboard shortcuts.

Here's a search results page after typing a doubt (notice that there's no arrow next to the first result):

Here's what happens when you press Tab (you can use the up/down arrows, but the shortcut for Instant Previews no longer works

Google most likely disabled these features because not many people used them and a lot of users complained that the shortcuts made routing more difficult. Power users need to learn that Tab enables keyboard shortcuts, but having to allow the feature every time you use Google Search is annoying. After all, shortcuts were supposed to make your life easier and help you be more creative.

Google Instant shortcuts are still obtainable. You can continue to use the up/down arrows to select a different look for suggestion, the right arrow to visit the first result for the search suggestion, Tab to use Google's suggestion and continue to type your query, Esc to choose the query so you can quickly overwrite it.

New border for Google Instant Previews

Google tweaked the UI for Instant Previews and made the seek interface a lot cleaner. There's a new big icon for Instant Previews, but it's only displayed when you mouse over a snatch. Click the new icon or only hover over the gray bar and you'll see a much bigger screenshot. 

"Instant Previews have been about since last year, allowing you to click on the magnifying glass to the right of the result to see a visual overview of a page. Now these previews are no longer even a click away: if you move your mouse over a look for result, arrows will appear. Hover over them to see a visual sample of that result," explains Google.

Clicking the snippet no longer triggers an immediate Preview in the new interface. Unfortunately, the keyboard shortcut has been disabled, so you can longer get a glimpse of the page with the right arrow.

Google now repeats the title of the page and the URL then to the screenshot, while the links to the cached page and to other similar pages are incorporated in the new enlarged snippet. It's a bad news for those who regularly use the "cache" link, who now have to spend more time to find it.

The only action that's still displayed is the Google +1 button, but you require to log in to see it. Probably Google wanted to highlight the button, which is now located next to the URL.

Here's the old border:

Google Wallet

Google originate an interesting way to launch the Google Wallet app for Android: as an over-the-air update for Sprint Nexus S 4G phones. Google Wallet makes use of the NFC chip from Nexus S phones and allows you to create credit card payments at physical stores using your Android smartphone.

"Google Wallet enables you to pay with your Citi MasterCard credit card and the Google Prepaid Card, which can be funded with any of your accessible plastic credit cards. As a thanks to early adopters, we're adding a $10 free bonus to the Google Prepaid Card if you set it up in Google Wallet before the end of the year," informs Google. The Google Prepaid Card is powered by MasterCard and Money Network and it's a provisional solution until you can add credit cards from other companies. Google says that the submission could add support for Visa, Discover and American Express cards in the future.

Google Wallet is more than a contactless payment explanation: it's a virtual wallet that could store information about your credit cards, coupons, loyalty cards, gift cards, tickets and much more. It's also a great chance for Google to integrate Google Offers and make it easier to use by allowing consumers to pay, redeem offers and earn allegiance points in a single step using their mobile phone. Google says that it doesn't have access to the list of products you buy, but this feature could be additional in the future.

While Google Wallet seems to be a suitable solution, many people might not use it because of privacy or security reasons. Google says that the payment credentials are stored in a separate chip called Secure Element and only official programs can begin transitions. Google Wallet users need to enter the PIN to confirm a payment, so someone who finds an Android phone can't use the app because he doesn't know the code.

Google's vision is to generate "an open commerce ecosystem" that will support many payment instruments, APIs that allow adding loyalty points, transferring offers, receipts and more. Google Wallet is Google Checkout's extension to offline payments and it's a big opportunity for Google to generate a successful payment system. PayPal will soon offer a similar service and Apple's iPhone 5 could contain a NFC chip, so Google Wallet will have a few competition.

Google Goggles Makes Your Phone's Camera Smarter

Google Goggles is an request that's sometimes useful, but it's not good enough to use it every time you want to find something about an object. The Android app has a new characteristic that integrates it with the Camera app, uploads all the photos you're taking to Google's servers and shows notifications in the status bar if Goggles found something useful. It may sound spooky, but it makes your phone's camera smarter.

"With this new opt-in feature in Goggles, you can just photograph an image using your phone's camera, and Goggles will work in the background to examine your image. If your photo contains items that Goggles can distinguish, the app will notify you," explains Google. The feature is disabled by default, but you can facilitate it from the settings page by choosing "Search from Camera".

It's almost certainly a good idea to only enable this option when you're on vacation or when you're planning to photograph barcodes for products you want to buy. It's also helpful if you're in a bookstore and you want to "bookmark" some books.

Google Mobile's help center informs that "each Goggles query consumes about 100 KB of data" and you can limit the amount of data that's inspired by selecting "Search on WiFi networks only" under "Mobile Connection".

"Search from Camera" is one of the features that won't be obtainable in the Google app for iPhone because iOS' background APIs aren't that powerful. If you have an Android device, install Google Goggles 1.6 from the Android Market.

New boundary for Google Docs Apps

Reliability is great, but not when it makes an application more hard to use. Google Docs tests new interfaces for the document editor and Google Spreadsheets. enthused by Google+, the new interfaces remove all the colors from the icons and other UI elements, remove the Google Docs logo, add new scrollbars and a "Collaborate" menu that includes all the features from the "Share" drop-down.

The new grayscale buttons from the toolbar make it more hard to find the right feature. They are less intuitive, harder to differentiate and look like disabled buttons. Compare the two versions of the "paint format" button (the fifth button):

Unlike the new interfaces for Gmail and Google Calendar, the efficient Google Docs apps don't use too much white space. You can toggle to the new interfaces by clicking "Try now" in a small message that announces the changes when you release a Google Docs document or spreadsheet. To go back to the old UI, choose "Use the standard look" from the "Help" menu. 

Lists in Google Snippets

I've mentioned two weeks ago that Google ongoing to label pages that take in search results. For some of these pages, Google's snippets now use lists, so you can differentiate between separate items. These snippets are twice as big as the ordinary snippets (4 lines vs 2 lines) and they take in useful information like prices or dates.

Sometimes Google is confused and shows comparable snippets for blogs, especially if homepages look like look for results pages.

Google's snippets typically include one or more excerpts from the page that include some of your keywords and are estranged by ellipses.

Music Rich Snippets in Google Search

Last week, Google announced a new taste of rich snippets, this time for music pages. At that time, I couldn't see the new snippets, but now they ought to be obtainable for everyone.

"With this new feature, site owners can mark up their pages using the newly shaped music markup spec on schema.org, and search results for that site may start displaying song information in the snatch so that users know that there are songs or samples there for them to listen to. Several early partners have implemented the music markup on their sites, counting MySpace, Rhapsody and Reverb Nation," explained Google.

The new rich snippets comprise links to music pages that could be establish by visiting the search result, but it's faster to bypass the search result and start to play a song. It's important to talk about that the songs aren't played on Google's results pages, so you still need to go to a different page. You'll only see the music rich snippets when your inquiry includes the name of an artist, a song or an album.

Google also shows rich snippets for events, profile pages, recipes, videos, reviews and products. "With rich snippets, webmasters with sites containing structured content—such as review sites or business listings—can label their satisfied to make it clear that each labeled piece of text represents a certain type of data: for example, a restaurant name, an address, or a rating."

At some point, Google will make structured data searchable and it will be a lot easier to purify results. Recipe search previously lets you do that and it's pretty useful.

A convenience survey for blind users

These days, we rely on the Internet to keep us knowledgeable and in touch, yet our experience of the web is filtered through the tools we use to access it. The devices and technologies we choose, and our decisions about when we improve those tools, can affect how we interrelate with the web and with whom we are able to communicate.

In July, I attended the yearly conference held by the American Council of the Blind (ACB). I was struck by something I heard from people there: their experience using the web was very dissimilar from mine not because they were blind, but because the technology and web tools obtainable to them were unlike the ones available to me, as a sighted person. While the Internet provides many benefits to modern society, it has also created a exclusive set of challenges for blind and low-vision users who rely on assistive technologies to use the web. We’re committed to making Google’s products more accessible, and we believe the best way to understand the convenience needs of our users is to listen to them.

This week, we’re announcing a review that will help us better understand computer usage and assistive technology patterns in the blind community. Over the past three months, we’ve worked intimately with the ACB to develop a survey that would give us a greater understanding of how people choose and learn about the assistive technologies they use. This survey will help us design products and tools that interact more efficiently with assistive technologies currently available to the blind community, as well as improve our aptitude to educate users about new features in our own assistive technologies, such as ChromeVox and TalkBack.

The survey will be obtainable through mid-September on the ACB's website and by phone. We encourage anyone with a visual impairment who relies on assistive technologies to participate; your input will help us offer products that can enhanced suit your needs. For details, visit www.acb.org/googlesurvey.

Undocumented Shortcut for Caps Lock in Chrome OS

One of the most significant changes Google made when designing the keyboard for Chrome OS notebooks was replacing the Caps Lock key with a search key. Although the search key is not very useful since it only opens a new tab, the Caps Lock key made a lot of comments, forum threads and emails unreadable.

If you actually need to use the Caps Lock key, there's a way to change the search key into a Caps Lock key in the settings. Unfortunately, this is time consuming, particularly if you constantly switch between the search key and the Caps Lock key. There's a better way: press both Shift keys at the same time to enable or disable Caps Lock. It's an undocumented shortcut that works in the newest versions of Chrome OS.

New Google Movies One Box

Google's One Box for movie show times has a new border that offers information about more movies. It's much easier to evaluate movies and you can click "show more movies" to get bigger the One Box. Google links to the Google Movies site, which shows short snippets from reviews, trailers, small photos, but also links to IMDb.

In other associated news, François Beaufort spotted that the Google.com sprite, which includes all the images that are used in the search results pages, added 4 icons for flight search, music search and movie search. Back in March, Tech Crunch noticed that the music search characteristic no longer worked. "The music search attribute introduced in 2009 is at present unavailable while we make some updates to the user experience," explained Google. 

We love Lucy

Lucille Ball may have been born 100 years ago today, but her jokes are timeless. Having grown up with the comedic genius of “I Love Lucy,” it’s hard to consider that Lucy, Desi, Fred, and Ethel wrapped up the early series in 1957. Lucy’s creativity, absurdity, and ever-changing facial expressions (especially when she was scarfing down candy, stomping on grapes or touting a new energy drink) have brought joy and laughter to generations of listeners.

We’re extremely happy to celebrate her birthday with a doodle to highlight her brilliant career as an actress and businesswoman. Through the old-timey TV live on the google.com homepage all day on August 6th, you can flip the six channels for a extraordinary Lucy broadcast.

Happy birthday, Lucy — we still love you!

No More separate Google Dictionary

Google Dictionary is no longer obtainable as a standalone service at google.com/dictionary. You can still find it in Google Web Search and Google Translate. For example, you can look for [define keyword] and click "more" or search for [keyword] and click "Dictionary" in the look for options sidebar.

Google Docs Tests New Interface

Google Docs has a new boundary inspired by Google+ and you can try it here. The interface is cleaner and there's a bunch of white space. You'll also find the familiar red buttons, the gray buttons, the new scrollbars and the label less search button.

The new boundary looks better, but there's a lot of white space that could be used to show more information about the files. The details view is no longer obtainable from the interface, but you can enable it in the old UI and the setting is preserved.

Goodbye, Google Friends!

Google Friends is Google's monthly newsletter that incorporated the latest announcements and product releases. 13 years after the first newsletter issue, Google announced that Google Friends will be retired.

It's hard to consider, but this monthly missive is now 13 years old. We hope you've enjoyed reading it over time, and required you to know that we are retiring it in its current form.

As you may know, the Google Friends Newsletter was shaped by Larry Page in April 1998, when Google was still on Stanford servers. In the early days, the Friends notes offered newsy details like "We are gearing up to do another crawl. We should start within a few weeks" and tips on tweaking your search queries.

Obviously a lot has happened since then, counting changes in how we communicate updates to all of you. So this will be our last Google Friends Newsletter. We in progress the Official Google Blog in 2004 and joined Twitter in 2009, and we've seen dramatic growth on those channels. Meanwhile, the number of subscribers to this newsletter has remained flat, so we've completed that this format is no longer the best way for us to get the word out about new Google products and services.

Google Friends started as an eGroups mailing list, then it became a Yahoo Group and was later enthused to Google Groups. "We used the company eGroups to mass-mail our Google Friends newsletter to users, because Larry's brother, Carl, was one of eGroups founders. Larry had done the pattern for the original eGroups server himself, and for a while the company's computational heart has lived under his desk. The same week we announced our deal with Yahoo, Yahoo announced they were buying eGroups for $428 million (Yahoo has been very kind to the Page family)," remembers the former Google marketing director Douglas Edwards.

The early issues of the newsletter take in a geek-friendly changelog of Google's search engine. You'll find about the long-gone operator flink: (forward links), the PageRank bar displayed next to each search result and Google's plans to "have a much bigger index than our current 24 million pages".

"After combining our web server and search engine for better performance, we have been experiencing intermittent problems with our system being down for short amounts of time fairly regularly. If you have trouble getting to the system, try back in a minute or two, and it should be back up." (July 1998)

This is a paragraph you'll never find in a Google blog post, Twitter message or a recent Google Friends issue.

Updated Code for Google +1 Buttons

As reported last month, the code for Google +1 buttons could be enhanced so that the buttons load faster and stop blocking other resources. Google updated the code and recommends publishers to produce a new code.

"We're introducing a new asynchronous snippet, allowing you to make the +1 skill even faster. The async snippet allows your web page to carry on loading while your browser downloads the +1 JavaScript. By loading these elements in parallel, we're ensuring the HTTP request to get the +1 button JavaScript doesn't lead to an augment in your page load time," explains Google.

Google also optimized the existing code so that the button renders up to 3 times faster. Even if you don't modernize the code, you'll still benefit from these changes.

The code generator is easy to use and I've noticed that a lot of sites extra a +1 button next to Facebook's "Like" button. It's unfortunate that Google didn't optimize the code when it was released.

Google Toolbar for Firefox Has Been Discontinued

Another Google product bites the dust. This time it's a well-liked add-on: Google Toolbar for Firefox. Many users were surprised to see that Google hasn't rationalized the toolbar for Firefox 5, even though it wasn't a difficult task. After enabling the Add-on Compatibility Reporter, most of the features worked well in Firefox 5.

It turns out that Google no longer wants to modernize Google Toolbar for Firefox, but it doesn't admit that the product has been discontinued.

"Google Toolbar for Firefox is well-matched with Firefox version 4 or older. If you use Firefox version 5 or newer, you won't be talented to use Google Toolbar."

Google suggests a long list of add-ons that might replace Google Toolbar's features, but the suggestions are too generic. For example, Google links to the hunt results for [bookmarks sync] or [language translate] in the Firefox add-ons gallery.

A Google blog post offers an explanation: "many features that were once obtainable by Google Toolbar for Firefox are now already built right into the browser" and thanks the loyal users. That's also true for the IE toolbar, but there are many useful features that aren't built-in in the browser: auto-translation (a built-in Chrome feature), Google Bookmarks integration, using Google Docs to open documents, smart spell-checking using an online service, highlighting search terms, suggestions for navigation errors (another built-in Chrome feature), custom buttons and gadgets.

You almost certainly remember that Google Toolbar for Firefox was released in 2005, five years after the Internet Explorer version. At that time, Firefox users who wanted to put in a Google Toolbar with PageRank support could try an unofficial extension called Googlebar. Maybe that addition will be resurrected, now that Google Toolbar for Firefox is no longer available. Releasing some of the source code under an open-source license would be helpful.

For now, Google Toolbar still works in the latest Firefox releases if you put in the Add-on Compatibility Reporter first and restart the browser. Here's Google Toolbar in Firefox 7 Alpha 2 (Aurora):

A New Look for Google Translate

Google Translate is the newest Google service with a new plan based on Google+. Since Google Translate's interface is simple, there aren't many changes: a new grey header, updated buttons and drop-downs.

"We're working on a project to bring you a new and enhanced Google experience, and over the next few months, you'll carry on to see more updates to our look and feel. The way people use and experience the web is developing, and our goal is to give you a more seamless and reliable online experience—one that works no matter which Google product you're using or what device you're using it on," explained Google last month.

After launching a new border for Google Search, Google created two themes that preview Gmail's new design and ongoing to test Google Calendar's new UI and Blogger's new UI. Up next: Google Docs, Google Sites, Picasa Web Albums, Google Reader and almost certainly other services.

Google Music Lyrics

Google Music Lyrics is a Grease monkey script that adds a lyrics panel to Google Music. It only facility in Firefox and there's a single lyrics provider: SongLyrics.com.

The lyrics are cached so that they're displayed right away the next time you play the same song. You can also edit the lyrics and the changes are saved using HTML5 local storage. To hide the panel, click the title.

Chris Hendry, who urbanized the script, plans to add other lyrics providers, allow users to import and export lyrics and to make the script work in Google Chrome.

Find latest Images in Google Image Search

Google Image Search extra a filter that lets you restrict the results to the pages created in the past week. Just click "past week" in the left sidebar and you'll see a list of latest images that include labels like "20 hours ago" or "5 days ago" to show how recent they are. Google's image search engine shows the same labels even if you don't limit the results to recent images.

The interface doesn't let you modify the date range, but you can edit the URL and replace "qdr:w" with "qdr:h" (past hour), "qdr:h20" (past 20 hours), "qdr:d" (past 24 hours), "qdr:d2" (past 2 days), "qdr:w2" (past 2 weeks), "qdr:m" (past month), "qdr:y" (past year). Another trick you can try is to type your query in Google Web Search, use the date filters from the sidebar and then click "Images" in the upright menu. Custom date ranges don't work in Image Search yet.

Here are some examples: Beijing photos from the past year, wedding photos from the past month, Android-related images from the past 2 weeks, Tour de France photos from the past week. It's significant to keep in mind that the photos may not be so recent, but they're incorporated in recent articles, blog posts and other Web pages.

The nice thing about the "recent images" filter is that you can unite it with other advanced filters. You can sort the images by subject and limit the results to recent images, find images that have a certain size or a predominant color and they were uploaded in the past year, find new Creative Commons images or generate a list of current images from a site.